Rubbing Salt in Our Wounds
BY BILLIE MANDELBAUM
On the evening of November 24, I gathered together with students and community members outside the St. Louis County Prosecutor’s Office to await Prosecutor Robert McCulloch’s announcement of the Missouri’s grand jury decision on whether or not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. When McCulloch’s press conference began, we huddled alongside one another, listening on strangers’ smartphones to the prosecutor’s ambling statement. After nine minutes and twenty-seven seconds, McCulloch finally announced that the grand jury had “determined that no probable cause exists to file any charges against Officer Wilson.” Following those words, a collective sigh of anguish could be heard as people shut down their phones and stood in a state of paralysis. One man broke away from the crowd and started to egg the hulking prosecutor’s office before being swiftly apprehended by five police officers. National Guardsmen and riot police lined up along the outside of the building looked on.
The decision not to indict Wilson seemed inevitable. With conflicting accounts about what happened during Wilson and Brown’s fatal August encounter in Ferguson, and a judicial system biased against African Americans, most expected that Wilson would walk free, and that justice would not be served. Yet, despite this inevitability, the grand jury decision was no less sad, angering, or disappointing. The injustice served as a painful reminder of how deep the wounds of racism run in American society, and how the political institutions and public servants we’ve vested with the authority to bring about equality have once again failed.
In his tempered remarks following the grand jury decision, President Obama called for calm saying, “First and foremost, we are a nation built on the rule of law. And so we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make.” But, what happens when the nation’s legal system fails to treat people, regardless of their race, in an equal and unprejudiced manner? According to a recent USA Today report, African Americans are arrested at a rate three times greater than that for other races. And while blacks make up 12 percent of the US population, African Americans constitute nearly 40 percent of the American prison population. Our nation may be built on the rule of law, but we can’t expect the law to be handed down in an equal manner when the country is imbued with a history of racism that continues to pervade society.
The second part of Obama’s statement was also troubling. The decision did not have to be one for the grand jury to make—McCulloch never had to call a grand jury investigation. Since August, McCulloch’s personal objectivity and prosecutorial tactics have been questioned. As a New York Times’ editorial aptly put it, McCulloch handled “this sensitive investigation in the worst possible way.”
Many rightly speculated that McCulloch had a personal bias going into the case. When the prosecutor was 12 years old, his father, a white police officer, was shot and killed by an African American man. Despite petitions that called for McCulloch to recuse himself and appoint a special prosecutor to handle the case, he refused and said he wouldn’t walk away from “the duties and responsibilities entrusted to me by the people of the community.” However, from McCulloch’s handling of the grand jury proceedings, to the way in which he delivered the decision, it’s clear that McCulloch failed to fulfill his responsibilities as the county’s “top lawman.” Legal experts have criticized McCulloch’s unconventional approach to the grand jury and his decision to present the case’s evidence to jurors with seemingly little direction. Moreover, McCulloch’s choice to delay the release of the grand jury’s decision until late in the evening was irresponsible. The nighttime release made it appear that he was in some way attempting to exacerbate tensions between the police and protestors so that attention would be given to the evening’s violence, rather than his own failure to uphold justice.
In the legal community, grand juries are thought of as a prosecutor’s tool—rarely does a grand jury not return an indictment. But, from the way McCulloch has treated the case since August, it seems more than likely he didn’t want an indictment. In an attempt to save face and shirk responsibility, McCulloch called a grand jury to create an illusion of fairness and due process. While Darren Wilson may have been acquitted in a criminal case, Michael Brown and his family deserved some semblance of fairness and to have the case heard in a trial setting. In his role as a prosecutor, McCulloch failed and his ability to game the legal system is beyond troubling.
While McCulloch failed to protect the rule of law by bringing about a fair trial, Darren Wilson did not uphold his own oath “to protect and serve” as a law enforcement official. In his grand jury testimony, Wilson claimed to have felt threatened by Brown who, according to Wilson, charged at the officer like a “demon.” When a physical struggle ensued between the two, Wilson said he “felt like a 5-year-old holding on to Hulk Hogan.” While we will never know exactly what went through Wilson’s head before he fired six times at Brown, the way in which Wilson, who himself is 6’4”, characterized Brown played into a long-running narrative of black criminality and the trope of the “angry black man.” With such language, it’s hard not to think that the way in which Wilson handled his altercation with Brown was racially motivated.
Following the non-indictment, protestors continue to fill streets across the nation. In the midst of these direct action movements, many have called for a time of healing. However, to ask for healing is to deny the legitimacy of the anger, sadness, and pain of those who have taken to the street. The protests don’t just represent what happened in Ferguson, but rather the racism and racial injustice that continues to mar American society. There will be no healing if this uncomfortable truth is not acknowledged. I realize that as a white, upper-middle class female, I write from a place of privilege and that I will never understand what it’s like to be black in America. I do, however, know that I am a product of our society and therefore hold implicit racial biases. While as upsetting and uncomfortable as this is to admit, it seems like a necessary first step in comprehending the tension that is currently embroiling the country. As the intrepid protestors who have been sprayed with mace and beaten by police can attest to, change does not come easily—it is a fraught process full of struggle.