For six days, people in Ferguson, Missouri, and across the country have been asking for the name of the police officer who shot Michael Brown—an incident that ended with Brown lying dead on the street and with the officer quickly departing the town’s Canfield Green apartment complex. The official reason for not releasing the name was protection from death threats. This morning, the Ferguson Police Department released the officer’s name—and raised even more questions. On Saturday, August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was shot by Officer Darren Wilson, a six-year veteran of the police force, who, according to the police chief, Thomas Jackson, has no record of being disciplined by the department. We also learned that Wilson was in the area responding to a report of an earlier robbery at a convenience store—suggesting that Wilson may have believed that Brown fit the description of the suspect. A few hours later, however, at a second press conference, the police acknowledged that Wilson had not thought of Brown as a suspect in that case at all. “The initial contact between the officer and Mr. Brown was not related to the robbery,” Jackson said. “They”—Brown and a friend—“were walking down the street, blocking traffic, that was it.”*
The narrative surrounding Ferguson has moved on two tracks since we first saw images of a young man, unknown to most of us, lying in the street. We have shuffled through his pictures; seen his grief-stricken mother and solemn stepfather discussing the child they raised; heard his friends describe him as a gentle giant. The graffiti memorials in the neighborhood where he died refer to him as Mike, or Big Mike. In the span of these six days, he has evolved, in the public mind, from just a case into a human being.
At the same time, the unnamed officer has become a study in negative space. The decision to withhold his identity rendered him a tabula rasa_—_defined. During the past few days, when I’ve asked people in the city what steps they wanted the police department to take, most shared an answer: release the name of the officer. The stated rationale for secrecy looks to them like a conceit to cloak official collusion. Even if sincere, the opacity of the overlapping police bureaucracies led people to examine the incident through the lens of their own experiences, even more than they already were doing. I spoke to one protester Thursday, who explained to me that he had come out because his cousin had been killed by a Ferguson police officer years ago, in circumstances that seemed as improbable and suspicious as those surrounding Brown’s death.
Wilson’s name was released in conjunction with a set of images, disturbing ones, that seem to show Brown, or someone who looks like him, towering over and striking a smaller man in a convenience store; he and another young man take a box of Swisher Sweets cigars, and leave without paying. The parameters of this story have already spread far beyond what happened between Brown and Wilson that afternoon.
The scant outlines that were disclosed this morning—we will certainly learn more soon—come after a night during which the tone of the protests was radically different. Earlier in the week, there had been a foreboding antagonism, culminating in the chaotic confrontations between police and protesters on Wednesday night. Brown’s death was the initial prompt for the gatherings, but, because of the character of the police response, it had become just one of multiple concerns that this incident brought to the surface. The military-grade armored vehicles, the assault rifles carried by the officers, the no-fly zone issued for the area—these might have sounded like elements of a libertarian suspense novel had we not seen them on display.
But, on an even more fundamental level, what is happening in Ferguson has been an object lesson about the importance of accountability and transparency. Confidentiality amid an active investigation is one thing; a policy of public obfuscation is another. The account of a 911 call about the robbery came after days of legal requests filed under Missouri’s Sunshine Law, and makes the department’s refusal to disclose even the most basic details of the case even more inscrutable. Information might have dispersed more crowds than armored vehicles did. The arrests and tear-gassing of journalists on Wednesday night only highlighted a theme that’s been on display in every aspect of this case since it began: a feeble sense of public accountability on the part of local law enforcement. On Wednesday, when I asked the St. Louis County police chief, Jon Belmar, about reports that residents had been ordered off their own front porches and others had been tear-gassed in their back yards, he chuckled before replying, “Well, we were, too. It depends on which direction the wind is blowing.”
The release of the images that possibly show Brown assaulting a man makes these issues more important, not less. The possibility that the eighteen-year-old struggled or just panicked when Wilson stopped him might become less inexplicable. That Brown appeared to have been involved in a robbery, even that he was a large man who might, conceivably, have resisted arrest, do not abjure the possibility of excessive force in the confrontation at Canfield Green; there is no death penalty for stealing cigars. Brown was shot thirty-five feet from Wilson, and the question of whether Brown’s back was to Wilson when the officer fired the gun—that is, if he was running away, and therefore not a threat—is just as pressing, as is the question of whether his hands were in the air, as witnesses claim, when the final volley of shots came. One of the pieces of information the police has delayed releasing is just how many bullets hit him. We also need to know why this information has been so hard to come by. The answers have not come quickly or completely—and not very willingly. What people who gathered in Ferguson have sought, even more resolutely than the police officer’s name, is, simply, respect.
The gatherings on Thursday night, even before the new information was released, were largely free of violence. The composition of the crowds hadn’t changed and the anger wasn’t less; the difference, the variable that mattered, was the policing. The governor had come out, pulled back the display of force, and put another commander in charge—one who walked over to where people were gathered, and listened to them. After dark, the mood on the streets of Ferguson, where, twenty-four hours earlier, it had seemed that almost anything could happen, was defined by a tone of sombre commemoration, and even a certain sense of having succeeded. When I asked Derecka Purnell, who grew up in and around Ferguson, what accounted for the difference, she said, “It’s simple. Tonight we actually have rights.”
_*Update, 4:15 P.M.: This post was revised to reflect what was said at Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson’s second press conference. _
