One lesson should have been driven home from the shooting of Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in August 2014: racial interpretations of complex events are dangerous. The media and Eric Holder’s Justice Department initially cast Wilson as a racist who shot an innocent black youth. They were, as we now know, flat wrong. Not only did a state grand jury decline to prosecute Wilson last fall, but the Justice Department itself backtracked and recommended against federal prosecution. The evidence confirmed that Wilson acted in self-defense and didn’t provide a whiff of support for allegations of anti-black bias.
Nevertheless, it bears recalling that the racial narrative did serious damage. It sowed mistrust of police around the nation, especially among African-Americans. The antipolice protests and the shootings of police officers, in Brooklyn last year, in Ferguson this year, and most recently in Houston, were byproducts of the poisoned atmosphere created by the campaign against allegedly racist law enforcement. Perhaps unsurprisingly, shooting deaths of law enforcers spiked 52 percent in 2014, declining in 2015 as tensions eased. (Forty-seven on-duty officers died from intentional gunfire in 2014, compared with 31 the previous year. Twenty-four died as of the end of August 2015, which at the same rate would result in 36 deaths for the year.) . . .
Well-established research on police has shown that, contrary to what we see in television cop shows, a small part of police officers’ duties involves actually fighting crime. This is even truer for departments in places like Ferguson, where serious crimes are uncommon. Police officers in small cities spend most of their time answering calls for assistance—such as for fires, accidents, illness, or injuries—handling minor disturbances, and controlling traffic. How well does the Ferguson Police Department (FPD) do these things? For that matter, what exactly is the crime situation in Ferguson? Readers will get no earthly idea from reading the Justice Department report, which devotes none of its 102 pages to the everyday work of the FPD or to crime conditions in the city. Indeed, at least one-quarter of the report has little to do with the FPD, focusing instead on the city’s municipal court.
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