Seasons Greetings

You know what I think? I think it’s pointless to get up in arms about the grand jury verdict.

Depending on the number of middle aged white men in your news feed, you may have seen the video of Michael Brown shoving that guy in the convenience store multiple times by now. That five second clip seems to be the lynchpin of the case against Michael Brown in the court of public opinion – since every teenager who acts like a dick while high in a convenience store obviously has cop-killing murderous intent. It’s worth noting that Michael Brown had no criminal record, and in a town where the nearly all-white police department would arrest and extort black people for just about any reason, that’s quite an accomplishment.

Michael Brown was probably an asshole to some people, and probably a great and loving friend to others. I know this because I’m the same way, as is every other person I’ve met. If your entire assessment of my character was a couple of Facebook pictures and a grainy three second clip of me screaming obscenities at the traffic terrorists who use the right turn lane at the top of Laurel Canyon to try and zip up ahead of the line, you would believe anything about me. Somebody could tell you that I planned 9/11 and you’d believe it if all you had to go on was a few unflattering seconds of my entire life.

Darren Wilson was probably an asshole to a fair number of people in his professional capacity and a great and loving friend to others. I don’t think he wakes up and goes to bed hating black people. I don't think he stopped Michael Brown with the intention of shooting him. I do think he was working in tightly knit power trip bro culture which we know for a fact was extremely racist – this is the police department that beat an innocent black man within an inch of his life and then charged him with destruction of property for bleeding on their uniforms. Before Ferguson, Wilson was a cop in a town three miles away until the all-white police department was officially disbanded by the city council because of overwhelming tensions with the mostly-black citizens.

For what it’s worth, Darren Wilson had a clean disciplinary record, and the fact that he was a cop who had spent his career working in corrupt, racist departments does not mean he was a cold blooded killer who would execute a young man in the street. But it also doesn’t seem likely that he was a particularly good police officer – a former commanding officer toldThe Washington Post he was “average,” which isn’t much of an endorsement in a police department deemed too racist to exist.

I don’t know what happened on that street, but I know that it happened between a teenager who happened to be acting like an asshole on that particular day and an average police officer working for his second consecutive racially troubled department. Large patches of Officer Wilson’s statement don’t really make a lot of sense, nor do large patches of the statement from Michael Brown’s friend and eyewitness Dorian Johnson – so pretty much the only logical assumption is that people on both sides of the case are telling the truth about some parts and lying about others.

Based on what I’ve seen of how the Ferguson police do business, it seems pretty likely that Officer Wilson yelled at Michael Brown to “get the fuck on the sidewalk”; based on what I’ve seen of Michael Brown’s behavior that afternoon, it seems pretty likely that his response wasn’t as cordial as Johnson’s statement suggests. Based on what I’ve seen of how the Ferguson police do business, it seems pretty likely that Officer Wilson would respond in a way that escalated the situation.

I’d be really, really surprised if Michael Brown charged “like a demon” at Officer Wilson with intent to kill him. I would bet money that that was not why he turned around. It’s doubtful whether he was even really lunging –pretty much every eyewitness described it a different way, because as it turns out, human memory is extremely malleable and susceptible to outside contamination the likes of which you might find in the middle of a polarizing national media frenzy. This is why eyewitness testimony itself is notoriously unreliable.

Whatever Michael Brown was doing, I believe Darren Wilson took it as a threat to his life and fired in self defense. And that’s the only question the grand jury was trying to answer, because it’s legal to kill people when you genuinely think they’re trying to kill you – especially when you’re a cop in Missouri.

The grand jury wasn’t looking into militarized police departments, racial oppression, a fundamentally unfair criminal justice system, or the other controversies that have taken center stage since Michael Brown’s death. They weren’t tackling the root causes of why young black men are 21 times more likely to be shot by police officers than young white men, or why86% of the drivers stopped and searched by Ferguson police last year were black, even though whites were more likely to be carrying contraband. They weren’t deliberating over why white people can freely point assault rifles at federal agents to defend a tax evading racist, but black men and boys holding toy guns get shot on sight.

The grand jury wasn’t ruling on whether neglected, failing schools, limited economic opportunities, and communities destroyed by punitive enforcement of anti-drug laws have created an environment where it’s extremely difficult for black people to escape poverty and get ahead in life.

The grand jury was just trying to determine whether a police officer feared for his life during an aggravated tussle with an unarmed black man, and regardless of all the very real racial injustices taking place in Ferguson and everywhere else in this country, it seems pretty likely that he did. In light of the fact that his department responded to peaceful protestors with tear gas, machine guns, and trucks built to withstand bombs made by the Taliban, I think it’s abundantly clear that a lot of cops in Ferguson and beyond seem to be very scared of black people.

Real justice for Michael Brown is asking what it is they’re so scared of.