Four years ago, a good friend, mused
about the death of Mike Brown and the protests aimed at his killer, Ferguson
police officer, Darren Wilson.
“Maybe Mike died for a reason,’ she told
me. “Maybe there’s a bigger meaning to all of this.”
At the
time, seething from the mounting injustice in the so-called investigation of
the officer, I didn’t want to hear her. Reason was blocked by images of an over
aggressive, militarized police force gassing, tasing and brutalizing
protesters. As time passed, my journalistic mind wouldn’t allow me to ignore St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch’s
bodacious efforts to ignore evidence and influence the grand jury impaneled to
indict Wilson.
I
couldn’t overlook the fact that Wilson was never ordered to write a police
report. His story seemed incredulous at
best. Supposedly, after ordering Mike Brown and a friend to get off the street,
Brown became irate and tussled with Wilson while he sat in his police car. Wilson
said Brown reached for his gun, which discharged. Mike, who was shot in the
hand, took off running. Mike, who was wounded, ran more than 100 feet away from
Wilson. Apparently, Mike decided the hand wound was insignificant, so he stopped,
turned around and ran into more blazing, hot bullets from Wilson’s gun.
I cry B.S.!
The only rational explanation for the shooting was that Mike had the audacity
to disregard Wilson’s orders, tussle with him and take off running. What was
more than obvious to me, was that Wilson, probably angry and insulted, decided
to exact a bit of street justice in the heat of the moment.
Days after
the shooting, police released a video of Mike Brown allegedly assaulting a
neighborhood liquor store owner and “stealing” a pack of Cigarillos. The video was
offered to the public as evidence of Mike’s violent behavior.
Turns
out, it was doctored. Police left out a portion of the video that seemed to indicate
Mike’s attempt to trade a bag of marijuana for the cigarillos. Jason Pollock, director of "Stranger
Fruit," an independent film that
chronicled the shooting and case against Wilson, said the edited film was
critical in defining Brown’s guilt. Had the footage been
released in its entirety, Pollock told CNN, “it would've altered the narrative
that Brown was shot after robbing the store.” Instead, Pollock continued,
investigators lied “to make Mike look bad, so they put out half a video to
destroy his character in his death."
McCulloch’s father, a K-9 police officer, was killed
by black men at the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Complex in the 1960s. Several
of his relatives has worked for the St. Louis police department. McCulloch,
throughout his 27-years in public office, has never prosecuted an officer-involved shooting to
the point of an actual indictment. Because of his loyalty to police and his own personal
experience, a special prosecutor should have been assigned to the incendiary, highly controversial case.
Instead, McCulloch decided to go the grand jury route, which critics say was intentionally
designed to exonerate Wilson.
McCulloch once told reporters, “Ever since I saw my father pull on that blue uniform and go to work . .
. I know that the true police officers always have been and always will be the
heroes of this nation.” In an interview with St. Louis Magazine
one year after Mike’s death, McCulloch asserted “there’s nothing wrong with bias. It just depends on how
it manifests itself.”
Well, his bias manifested greatly
in the Darren Wilson case.
Somehow,
the witnesses, including a group of white contractors who said Brown had surrendered
and had his hands in the air as Wilson emptied his gun into him, were deemed suspect or unreliable. Somehow, Wilson and his attorney were allowed the
unprecedented opportunity to listen to all the grand jury witness’s testimony
before offering his version of events. McCulloch failed to get an
indictment against Wilson and some voters never forgot or forgave him.
Call it poetic justice, but this week, four years, almost to the day of Mike Brown’s death,
voters sent Bob McCulloch packing. A
virtual unknown, under-funded, black candidate, Wesley Bell, a Ferguson City
Council member, beat McCulloch with nearly 57 percent of the vote. Because
there’s no Republican challenger, Bell presumably has a lock on the office.
The election, to me,
serves as a sweet referendum on injustice. It’s a sign that perseverance, tenacity
and focus can pay off in the long run. It’s an affirmation to the hundreds of
protesters who were maligned, mistreated, jailed and brutalized for standing on
the side of justice. St. Louis, which garnered the world’s attention after Mike’s
death, has once again offered a template for redressing systematic injustice.
Bell’s campaign promises include criminal justice reform and fundamentally
changing “the culture" of the prosecutor's office. VOX.com
posted an article detailing how prosecutors are the driving force behind mass incarcerations. Prosecutors, who are enormously powerful in our
criminal justice system, are given huge discretion as to who gets prosecuted,
or not, and when grand juries should be used for indictments. Since more
than 90 percent of criminal convictions are resolved through plea agreements, the
article asserts, “prosecutors and defendants — not judges and juries — have
almost all the say in the great majority of cases that result in incarceration
or some other punishment.”
The “ByeBob” hashtag floating around the Twitter-Verse lately has much bigger implications than just St. Louis. Despite the pro-cop, no-matter-what-they-do, “Blue
Lives Matters” rhetoric exploited mostly by the conservative crowd,
McCulloch’s defeat indicates that all kinds of people-not just “Black Lives
Matter” protesters and black people-are fed up with systematic injustices. From
their graves, Travon Martin, Tamir Rice, Mike Brown and so many others whose
killers were either exonerated by the criminal justice system or were brutally
slain by irresponsible police officers, can still impact elections in this
country.
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