Closure in Ferguson
March 7 | Posted by mrossol | American Thought, Racism, The LeftWell, well, well.
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March 5, 2015 6:47 p.m. ET
So maybe Ferguson was the wrong vignette after all, at least if the political goal was to indict modern America as irredeemably bigoted. After the protests about race and policing, and public disorder including riots in the St. Louis suburb, the Justice Department has now discredited the proximate cause.
On Wednesday Justice’s civil-rights shop published the findings of its investigation into the August shooting of black teenager Michael Brown. The 86-page report draws on the testimony of some 40 witnesses and essentially confirms Darren Wilson ’s account of the altercation, in which Brown attacked the officer after robbing a convenience store.
“There is no evidence upon which prosecutors can rely to disprove Wilson’s stated subjective belief that he feared for his safety,” the report concludes. Perhaps someone will apologize for vilifying the Missouri grand jury and local prosecutor who declined to charge Mr. Wilson with the cold-blooded murder that liberals invoked even after the facts emerged.
Few organizations had more incentive to malign Mr. Wilson than Justice, which has helped galvanize the demonstrators and inflame racial tensions. Attorney General Eric Holder nonetheless said that “it is not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg”—given that the report also reveals some unacceptable behavior by the police, especially the pattern of harassment of minority residents.
Law enforcement is never above corruption, though cops also have to protect public safety in high-crime environments. The Ferguson department in particular seems to operate as an entrepreneurial venture, assigning officers “productivity” quotas and using tickets and other petty legal offenses to prop up the municipal budget.
Liberals might find more allies on the center-right if they challenged these and other systematic abuses of government power, rather than inflating a single tragic incident into a national allegory of racism.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/closure-in-ferguson-1425599225
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