#dnaEdit: Facing up to realities

It is hardly surprising that the US has struggled to defuse the widespread protests, sometimes violent, that broke out over the Ferguson grand jury decision to not indict police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of unarmed African-American teenager Michael Brown under controversial circumstances. The protests signify that the killing of Brown represents a shared experience for many young blacks living in poorer localities. The anger of the protesters clearly has its roots in similar experiences of adversarial policing and racial stereotyping. Officer Wilson’s disproportionate response of firing so many rounds on an unarmed person, to a provocation that had a relatively innocuous trigger in Brown’s unwillingness to obey the officer’s order to step off the road, cannot be condoned. Seen in this light, the grand jury’s unwillingness to prescribe an indictment even under lighter charges like involuntary manslaughter, if not first or second-degree murder, is problematic. After all, a police officer carrying a firearm is expected to behave more responsibly.

According to the US Bureau of Justice, grand juries declined to return an indictment in just 11 of 162,000 cases prosecuted by US attorneys in 2010. Even in India, a prosecution failure to convince a judge to frame charges, the equivalent process, is extremely rare. With the case not reaching the trial stage, the opportunity for a trained judicial mind, instead of the civilians who sat in the grand juries, to sift and weigh the evidence has been lost. The rejection of the Brown family’s plea to have a representative on the prosecutor’s briefings to the jurors or when evidence was presented has not helped either. A ProPublica analysis of 1,217 fatal police shootings from 2010 to 2012 indicated that blacks, aged 15 to 19, were 21 times more likely to be killed than white males in that age-group. President Obama, speaking after the decision not to indict, noted “a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of colour”, linking this to the legacy of racial discrimination. While legacy issues are correct to an extent, recent US presidents have left their resolution to local grass roots politics, which appears a mistake now considering the scale of the protests. Until the 2012 Travyon Martin killing case, where a neighbourhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges, Obama had refrained from intervening on race and identity issues.

Obama, has unwittingly allowed his spectacular achievement of ascending to the US presidency, to be bandied as a normative signifier of the progress achieved by the African American community. Lost in the heady feeling of having elected a black President were the slowly-changing social realities of ghettoisation, racial stereotyping and the retributive, rather than reformative, treatment reserved by the criminal justice system for black offenders when others accused of similar misdemeanors were luckier. Even as they brave heavily-armed riot police and show the courage to hit the streets, it is these protesters who at great personal risk have brought ground realities to public discourse. To be fair, the Justice Department under Attorney-General Eric Holder has responded, albeit belatedly, constituting nearly two dozen investigations across the country against use of excessive force and biased policing. Only last week, a Cleveland Police officer shot dead a 12-year-old boy mistaking his toy gun for an actual weapon. But with little political capital left for the Obama presidency, the opportunity to address deeper socio-economic issues that trap African-Americans in a vicious cycle of poverty, or gun-control,which has perpetuated a certain fear psychosis in the name of self-defence, may have been lost.