Nothing that happened in Ferguson, Missouri, on the fourth night since Michael Brown died at the hands of a police officer there, dispelled the notion that this is a place where law enforcement is capable of gross overreaction. Just after sundown on Wednesday, local and state officers filled West Florissant Avenue, the main thoroughfare, with massive clouds of tear gas. They lobbed flash grenades at protesters who were gathered there to demand answers, and, at times, just propelled them down the street. That they ordered the crowd to disperse was not noteworthy. That the order was followed by successive waves of gas, hours after the protests ended, became an object lesson in the issues that brought people into the streets in the first place. Two journalists, Wesley Lowery, of the Washington Post, and Ryan Reilly, of the Huffington Post, and a St. Louis Alderman, Antonio French, were arrested. (The journalists were let go without charges; the alderman, as his wife told reporters, was released after being charged with unlawful assembly.) What transpired in the streets appeared to be a kind of municipal version of shock and awe; the first wave of flash grenades and tear gas had played as a prelude to the appearance of an unusually large armored vehicle, carrying a military-style rifle mounted on a tripod. The message of all of this was something beyond the mere maintenance of law and order: it’s difficult to imagine how armored officers with what looked like a mobile military sniper’s nest could quell the anxieties of a community outraged by allegations regarding the excessive use of force. It revealed itself as a raw matter of public intimidation.
Whatever happened to Michael Brown in the moments before he died has become secondary to what the response to his death has revealed. The name of the officer who shot him remains unknown. Even the number of times that Brown was shot has not been disclosed, despite the completion of a preliminary autopsy. Jon Belmar, the St. Louis County Chief of Police, justified withholding the officer’s name by citing a deluge of threats against the department and noting that he has not been charged with a crime. In the same press conference, Belmar released the name of a nineteen-year-old young man who was shot in the head by a police officer during the previous night, who Belmar said brandished a firearm during a protest. The young man remains in critical condition, but, if he survives, he will be charged with felony assault of a police officer. Belmar stated that he saw no reason to doubt the officer’s version of the events.
Two days earlier, the police department had pledged to investigate Brown’s death while simultaneously stating that the shooting was the result of a struggle in which Brown allegedly went for an officer’s weapon. They had, at that point, not interviewed the witnesses who claimed that Michael Brown was shot down while running away or attempting to surrender. Inside of a week, two black teen-agers have been shot by police and, in both instances, the bureaucratic default setting has favored law enforcement, fuelling a perception that the department is either inept or beholden to a certain nonchalance about the possibility of police brutality.
I watched the events that led up to the eruption of tear gas with Etefia Umana, an activist who is chairman of the board of an organization called Better Family Life, and who lives about fifteen hundred feet from the spot where Brown was shot. Umana explained to me that the durable anger in Ferguson is fuelled by the enigma of the officer’s identity and the perceived possibility that, should the department fail to bring charges against him, his name may never be known. Umana, who is forty-three years old, has worked on grassroots development projects in the area for the past twenty-six years, but even he has been surprised by the depth of the anger about Brown’s death. “There’s not a tradition of unrest in St. Louis,” he said to me. “Even in the sixties, when the rest of the country was exploding, you didn’t have that kind of thing here. And if there was some kind of problem it almost never lasted more than a day.” Neither the police nor many of the residents expected the fury to remain undimmed over the past four days. When I spoke to Umana and Malik Ahmed, the C.E.O. of Better Family Life, they acknowledged that the anonymity of the officer may have something to do with the death threats, but said that it also would make it easier for the department to avoid scrutiny until an official narrative has been crafted. “Nobody out here believes that young man actually went for the officer’s gun,” Ahmed told me.
The people who live in Canfield Green, the apartment complex where Brown was shot while on his way to visit his grandmother, not only witnessed his death but were subjected to an undignified wake: his prone figure sprawled on the street for four hours in the unforgiving August sun, with blood on the asphalt—an indignity in sharp contrast with the quick departure of the officer from the scene. “This was brazen,” Umana said to me. “It was done out in the open.” Better Family Life arranged for a bus with volunteer social workers and psychologists to be stationed near the spot to help community members cope with the trauma.
The police rejected the idea of a curfew during a press conference on Wednesday afternoon, but suggested that protests should be finished before sundown. Unofficially, people believed that protests would be forcibly shut down after dark. Sporadic looting on Sunday night had left even some of the residents edgy about what might happen if protests went unchecked late into the evening. Wesley Bell, a black law professor who this summer ran unsuccessfully for a county council seat representing Ferguson, told me, “the narrative changed after they began looting,” making some people sympathetic to highly aggressive policing. Bell and LaRhonda Williams, who works in Ferguson, didn’t believe that the violence was a product of the town’s own residents. “The people who are doing this are not even from here,” Williams told me. Ahmed took a different view. “The civic leaders and the middle class are pushing this not-in-my-backyard narrative,” he said. “This is homegrown. The clock is ticking and the time is late. This situation has been thirty years in the making.” Better Family Life’s largest program is an annual warrant amnesty that attracts between three and four thousand people who come out for a chance to have arrest warrants suspended and court fees renegotiated. The program is a window into the intertwined economic and law-enforcement issues underlying the protests. Fees for minor infractions become their own, escalating, violations. “We have people who have warrants because of traffic tickets and are effectively imprisoned in their homes,” he said. “They can’t go outside because they’ll be arrested. In some cases people actually have jobs but decide the threat of arrest makes it not worth trying to commute outside their neighborhood.” (This phenomenon, increasingly common, is one that Sarah Stillman has written about for The New Yorker.)
High among the redundancies on display in Ferguson is that Tracy Martin, whose son Trayvon was killed by a neighborhood-watch volunteer two years ago, agreed three weeks ago to participate in an annual Peace Fest event scheduled for Sunday. Martin, who is from the area, will be appearing in an atmosphere radically different from the one that was anticipated. Two years ago, national protests raged as people counted the number of days that had lapsed with no arrest in the killing of Trayvon Martin. In a parking lot just outside the neighborhood of the protests in Ferguson I passed a car with the words “WHO SHOT MIKE BROWN? 72 HOURS” painted on the side.
Late in the afternoon on Wednesday, the armored vehicles rolled into place just beyond the charred shell of the QuikTrip gas station that was burned on the first night of protests. Police, some outfitted in riot gear, others in military fatigues, barricaded the streets. At least one of them draped a black bandana over his face; others covered their badges. Two hundred feet away, a local church group blared gospel music from a sound truck, hoping to quell tensions. Half a dozen students performed a dance routine punctuated by calls for justice in the Brown case. Near the front, a handful of young men jeered the police officers. One woman with an infant in a stroller walked up to the police barricade and screamed her contempt. A few people held signs comparing Ferguson to Gaza.
Umana, who is visually impaired and can’t navigate the streets at night, stood just off to the left of the front line. “They’re going to set it off out here just as soon as the sun sets,” he told me. His seventy-one-year-old mother stood nearby despite his periodic pleas for her to return to their home.
At 8:22 P.M., the police began demanding that the crowd stay twenty-five feet away from them and their vehicles. A voice in the crowd shouted, “Michael Brown was thirty-five feet away when you killed him!” I stood near a cluster of journalists, but less than two hours after Lowery and Reilly had been arrested, nothing suggested that the police there would make distinctions between the people protesting and those who were covering it. Officers demanded that we move farther back, as well. People began chanting “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” Ten minutes later, the sound of breaking glass was heard and the police demanded that the crowd disperse. Only seconds after that I saw a half-dozen canisters launch into the air and the streets were bathed in the strobe lights of flash grenades.
The crowd scattered into the surrounding subdivisions as a haze of white smoke drifted outward through the neighborhood. Some, choked by the fumes, covered their eyes and coughed by the side of road. Umana grabbed my arm and we ran into a nearby park. The protest dispersed immediately; still, the streets were tear-gassed for the next two hours.
The area just north of the protest borders a quiet middle-class neighborhood of precisely trimmed lawns and towering oaks, the type of community that, under other circumstances, would be pointed to as evidence of black social mobility. On this night, a thick haze drifted through the area, a chemical fog rolling in. Because the main streets cut a semicircle through the neighborhood and intersect with West Florissant in two places, the cloud on the main street effectively barricaded the entire development. Police stopped anyone but residents from entering, but the tear-gas also prevented the people who were already there from getting out. Umana invited me into his home; outside, clusters of protesters and journalists wandered the side streets, hemmed in for hours. One homeowner walked out of his house to find a spent flash grenade on his lawn. An armored truck rolled down the street, a flume of tear gas issuing from the back.
The day began with questions about why a young man was killed just days before he was due to begin college. It ended as a referendum on the militarization of American police forces. There is a feedback loop of recrimination playing in the streets of Ferguson. With the thinnest of rationales, the police here responded to community anger in the self-justifying language of force, under circumstances that call for a more humane tongue.
