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Police Shootings in Ferguson Bear Mark of Holder, Sharpton
If civil rights activism is now the art of establishing guilt for self-defense (by whites) and innocence for assault (by blacks), Ferguson, Missouri is the primary testing grounds. The reaction by the Obama administration and its unofficial race relations liaison, Al Sharpton, to the wounding by gunfire in the wee hours last Thursday of two St. Louis-area cops at a Ferguson demonstration underscores how ingrained this view has become. Police Saturday night arrested Jeffrey Williams, a 20-year-old black male who admitted to firing the shots but claimed he was aiming at someone else. Civil rights activists, predictably, are condemning Williams while denouncing “racist” police. The Department of Justice, which helped create this situation, has responded similarly. The outcome could be a nationwide law enforcement disaster.
Ferguson, a north side St. Louis suburb of about 20,000 residents, two-thirds of them black, for months has been a nationwide flash point. As I have chronicled in lengthy NLPC articles (here, here and here), and in a new book, Sharpton: A Demagogue’s Rise, the aggressive allegations of racial motivation behind the police shooting death last summer of a violent 18-year-old local black, Michael Brown, amounts to abuse of our legal system traveling under the banner of “justice.” This politically-driven campaign has ulterior motives that extend well beyond Ferguson’s boundaries: 1) the subjection of state and local law enforcement agencies across the nation to affirmative action quotas when making traffic stops, arrests, convictions and sentencing; and 2) the removal of public officials who object. A misguided new study by the Justice Department may raise the chances for success. It already has triggered the resignations of Ferguson City Manager John Shaw, Police Chief Thomas Jackson, and Municipal Judge Ronald Brockmeyer.
To recap: Around noon last August 9, a white Ferguson police officer, Darren Wilson, a six-year veteran of the force, while slowly cruising through a residential neighborhood, encountered a pair of black youths walking in the middle of the street. Wilson got out of his vehicle and told the pair to move to the sidewalk. It was a reasonable directive. Jaywalking can be dangerous to pedestrian and motorist alike. And Officer Wilson’s words and tone revealed nothing in the way of a racial motive. There is no reason to believe he would have behaved any differently had the pair been white. Michael Brown, a veritable food giant at 6’4,” 292 lbs., rather than comply, decided to test his luck. Brown quickly approached Wilson, who by then had returned to his vehicle, reached through the driver’s window, and sucker-punched Wilson. He then attempted to steal Wilson’s gun, with the obvious intention of shooting him. Though media outlets covering the case typically have referred to Brown as “unarmed,” as if to imply that he was harmless, he was anything but that. Had Wilson not hung on to his revolver, he likely would have been murdered. After avenging the imagined slight, Brown walked away. Wilson once again got out of his car. Brown, rather than continue walking, explosively wheeled around and charged at Wilson at top speed. Once again, Brown faced a life-and-death situation. This time, however, he was prepared. He fired off several rounds that hit Brown, though without much effect. He then got off a shot that killed Brown, who would lay dead on the street; the increasingly violent reaction by local residents would have placed any ambulance crew in harm’s way.
Initial accounts, especially the statement provided by Michael Brown’s companion that day, Dorian Johnson, indicated that Officer Wilson had shot Brown from behind, and moreover, did so while Brown was raising his hands in surrender. Many people chose to believe this story. With warp speed, “hands up, don’t shoot” became a protest chant around the U.S. Blacks from Ferguson, other St. Louis-area communities and even beyond assembled in the streets of Ferguson for the following two weeks, protesting by day and rioting by night. Some rioters torched a pair of convenience stores including one Brown robbed only minutes before his fatal encounter. The city of Ferguson resembled a war zone.
Under enormous pressure from the U.S. Justice Department and civil rights leaders, St. Louis County prosecutors convened a grand jury to decide whether to indict Officer Wilson. The police department, also under enormous pressure, released Officer Wilson’s name to the public, causing him only several weeks later to resign from the force for his own safety. For three months, the grand jury pored over countless documents and photos, and heard testimony from dozens of witnesses. Yet as information from the probe leaked out, the case appeared increasingly thin. In November, the grand jury reported its decision: It would not indict Officer Wilson. This was a sound conclusion. Virtually all statements claiming a police “murder” had occurred were sketchy, contradictory or invented out of thin air. The claim that Wilson had shot a surrendering Brown from behind turned out to be a complete hoax.
Local blacks, uninterested in facts much less any connection between cause and effect, once again responded with a riot – and more devastating than those back in August. Mobs looted, vandalized and burned a Ferguson commercial strip; targets of arson included an entire row of vehicles for sale at a car dealer. Yet these hoodlums did not operate in a vacuum. On some level, they knew they had a green light by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and his close ally, Reverend Al Sharpton. Sharpton, in fact, had run a virtual New York-to-St. Louis shuttle during the period between the Brown shooting and the grand jury announcement, openly demanding the arrest of cop and the release of his name to the public. That the officer, Darren Wilson, likely had acted in self-defense apparently did not matter. Neither did the possibility that exposing his identity was tantamount to putting a target on his back to potential killers. As for Attorney General Holder, he arrived in the St. Louis area less than two weeks after the shooting to express his views. In a speech at Florissant Valley Community College (located in Ferguson), he stated: “I am the attorney general of the United States. But I am also a black man.” The guilt or innocence of a white suspect appeared to be of secondary importance.
While the County of St. Louis case was underway, Holder had launched his own investigation. He informed the public via online message to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the Justice Department had assigned 40 FBI agents to the case, in addition to federal prosecutors in St. Louis, to investigate the possibility of whether Officer Wilson had violated Brown’s civil rights. By the end of August, agents already had interviewed hundreds of people. Yet in the end, the trophy hunt failed. On March 4, the Justice Department announced that it would not file civil rights charges. Its report admitted: “Some of these (eyewitness) accounts are inaccurate because they are inconsistent with the physical and forensic evidence; some of those accounts are materially inconsistent with that witness’s own prior statements with no explanation. Although some witnesses state that Brown held his hands up shoulder level with his palms facing outward for a brief moment, these same witnesses describe him then dropping his hands and ‘charging’ at Wilson.”
Even Eric Holder and fellow “civil rights” activists at the Justice Department had to admit a prosecution wouldn’t fly. But they had another ace up their sleeves: disparate impact. Ferguson police, they reasoned, might not have intentionally treated blacks more harshly, but they could be found guilty of discrimination anyway because even the most race-neutral policies could be producing wide disparities in racial outcomes. Once armed with evidence of disparities, the Justice Department could pressure the Ferguson police department to alter its practices. This doctrine of disparate impact, established by the U.S. Supreme Court in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), effectively launched affirmative action as official policy. It has legitimized anti-white quotas and timetables in employment, college admissions and federal contracting. Applying it to police work as well didn’t seem too much of a stretch. And as the Obama-era Justice Department on several occasions has forced huge financial settlements upon banks with “discriminatory” mortgage practices, it could forced major concessions from the Ferguson Police Department, and even better, establish a model for monitoring law enforcement agencies everywhere in the U.S. By seeking equality of result rather than equality of treatment under the law, America could realize its overdue racial “healing.” So went the argument.
Hoping to find that elusive smoking gun, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division initiated a study of recent Ferguson police and court records. The discovery process was separate from the DOJ civil rights investigation of Officer Wilson. On March 4, the same date as the announcement of no indictment against Wilson, the department released its Ferguson police study. The report states: “Data collected by the Ferguson Police Department from 2012 to 2014 shows that African-Americans account for 85 percent of vehicle stops, 90 percent of citations, and 93 percent of arrests made by FPD officers, despite comprising only 67 percent of Ferguson’s population.”
Source: http://nlpc.org/stories/2015/03/20/police-shootings-ferguson-bear-mark-holder-sharpton
