Social Matter

When Ferguson started making headlines back in August, I made a couple of relatively safe bets on this site and on Twitter. I bet that the evidence would contradict the cold-blooded-execution-in-broad-daylight story Dorian Johnson originally fed the media, and I bet that the media would continue to propound that story regardless. Like I said: relatively safe bets.

It’s only in retrospect that we can see just how safe they were. In the wake of the grand jury decision, a tremendous amount of physical evidence, crime scene photos, witness testimony and the like has been turned over to the public. There’s a good rundown of it from The Washington Post of all places, which is a little mealy mouthed but hits the high points nonetheless. There’s also a handy-dandy chart that they put together of various artifacts from the crime scene. But the long and the short of it all is that Wilson’s story matches the evidence to a T, while the myriad testimonies of the other “eyewitnesses” are considerably spottier, mismatched not only with concrete realities like entry wounds and bloodstains but with each other as well.

Some key findings. Number one is that Wilson stopped Brown and Johnson because they were walking down the middle of the road, a fact that nobody disputes. Number two is that there were shots fired inside the car, one of which knicked Brown’s finger from a very close range. (Particulate from the muzzle of the gun which was embedded in the wound confirms this.) And number three is that the point on the street where the most distant blood droplets were found (numbers 19 and 20 on The Washington Post chart) were about twenty feet farther away from the patrol car than the point where Brown bled out—meaning that yes, in fact, that man had doubled back towards Wilson before he was shot to death. (The autopsy confirmed that Wilson never shot Brown in the back, needless to say.) The shell casings littering this stretch between point 20 and point 17 indicate that Wilson was in close proximity to Brown as he fired the fatal bullets, although not as close as he was in the car when he grazed Brown. It’s all laid out right there on the street. Photographed and enumerated and documented for all of our posterity to studiously ignore.

The evidence, in other words, suggests that Darren Wilson was justified every step of the way. He was justified in stopping Brown. He was justified in opening fire on Brown when they were wrestling over his gun in the driver’s seat. He was also therefore justified in attempting to arrest Brown after Brown had committed the assault. And he was justified in shooting Brown repeatedly as the latter turned and charged back down Canefield Dr. at him. Wilson didn’t do anything wrong. He did his job.

But that didn’t stop him from being relentlessly villainized. It didn’t silence the “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” chants of the protesters or the mantra of “unarmed black teen” repeated interminably in the nightly news. Both those groups called out for his blood, and the latter did it through its national megaphone.

And look at his life now. Aside from the fact that he’s been slandered as some sort of monster in front of millions of his countrymen, he’s also been forced to retire from his job. He can’t even return to his own house (the address of which was for some reason published by The New York Times). For years, he will be a marked man. Everywhere he goes, he’ll have to wonder in the back of his head: “Does anyone here recognize me?” They might. And if they do they might treat him like the child-murderer CNN says he is. Who knows? No one in their right mind would want to trade places with him.

And there’s the problem. Darren Wilson had an ugly run-in with a violent thug, but he reacted to it as well as can expected given the circumstances. The MSM still made him into a monster, though. Successfully. They kept repeating that lie over and over and over again until millions of folks bought it. And what could he do about it? Nothing. And what could the grand jury do about it? Nothing. What could the evidence to about it? Absolutely nothing. So how does that not send a little shiver of dread up every police officer’s spine? The only thing standing between his life and the total obliteration thereof by the American media is… what exactly? That he never has to defend himself in the line of duty? That nobody with a press pass notices if he does?

You can already see the chilling effect this realization has on police officers in the kiddie-gloved way they’re handling blatantly illegal protests. Compare this scene in San Diego, where no arrests or even citations were made, to the Occupy protests a few years, where marchers were netted, zip-tied, or even pepper-sprayed routinely for exiting “free speech zones.” (Now don’t get me wrong. I love seeing unwashed hippies get maced just as much as the next guy. I only bring up OWS for illustrative purposes.) And then compare the media treatment each of these movements received. Occupy was a confused mass of malcontents in search of a purpose. The Ferguson rioters, however, are crusaders on a sacrosanct mission to right historical injustices. They’re also considerably blacker. Who wants to lay a hand on one of these doubly-sacred rioters, even if it might stop an AutoZone from being burnt to the ground? What police officer wants to risk the Wilson treatment?

The dynamics of the whole situation are surreal. Journalists, many of whom hail from private liberal arts schools and white enclaves in coastal cities, have found a way to insinuate themselves between police officers in flyover country and the black criminals they have the unenviable task of attempting to corral. These are the same sort of journalists who confused ear plugs for rubber bullets, who consistently mistook riot noises for the firing of live ammunition, who ran around Ferguson in those first nights of chaos like children on a campout, telling ghost stories to spook themselves and imagining a boogeyman in every shadow. These are the people who can dictate policy to cops on the street. Unofficially, of course. By roundabout channels, of course. But with the power of the bully pulpit behind them and the cautionary tale of officer Wilson broadcasted 24/7. I’d trust a contemporary journalist to churn out a catchy clickbait headline on demand. I don’t trust them for much else. And for coming up with reasonable law enforcement reform not at all. The influence they have over law enforcement, then, is a toxic one. And it ought to be broken.