One does not have to live in Ferguson, Mo., or to have known Michael Brown to be dismayed by the complicated intersection of race and the legal system.
Encounters with the criminal justice system are problematic in just about every city in America. Race is a factor, as it always is in America. But race aside, the criminal justice system itself remains confusing and threatening, a roll of the dice that doesn’t always yield clarity, let alone justice.
The great unspoken truth is that minority communities fear police and police fear minority communities. This runs counter to the textbook notion that bad guys are arrested and go to jail and good guys don’t, and it hinders the pursuit of justice.
In Ferguson, this paradox sent the criminal justice system spiraling into a vortex of missteps. St. Louis County District Attorney Robert McCulloch, a man whose police officer father was killed in the line of duty while chasing a bad guy, resisted calls to step aside in favor of a special prosecutor — a decision I understand since it is his job to prosecute, not yield to community pressure.
But when he didn’t step aside, and, more importantly, when he decided to conduct a pseudo-trial in the secrecy of grand jury chambers, he fed suspicions that he was a reluctant prosecutor. He made no recommendation on whether to indict Ferguson Officer Darren Wilson. Instead, he flooded grand jurors with mountains of evidence to determine whether there was probable cause to charge Wilson.
I’m sure the grand jury was made up of hardworking citizens. But given the vast amount of conflicting witness testimony about what Brown and Wilson did and where they were throughout the fatal confrontation, the grand jury probably should have returned an indictment. That way, Wilson’s version of events could have been cross-examined. The same outcome might have been reached, but a trial would have been the proper venue for sorting out the conflicts.
McCulloch’s unorthodox approach became another thumb in the eye of residents, who have legitimate concerns about the circumstances of Brown’s death and the past practices of a mostly white police force. It also became a poor excuse for opportunistic criminals to overturn and set ablaze cars and stores in the distorted name of social justice. And that inexcusable behavior, in turn, becomes an excuse for the rest of America not to confront the underlying problem.
President Barack Obama is right: Mutual police-community mistrust is a national issue. However, the burden for finding solutions rests not with federal commissions on police-community relations but with local police departments, prosecutors and neighborhood leaders.
Locally, we have seen examples of how this might work. Dallas Police Chief David Brown’s forthright handling, on the scene, of a potentially combustible officer-involved shooting in Dixon Circle two years ago is one.
More recently, Brown began publishing public information about past police-involved shootings on a website. Transparency and accountability are a good start. That’s why Dallas County District Attorney-elect Susan Hawk favors equipping Dallas police officers with body cameras.
Credibility matters.
Jim Mitchell is a member of the Dallas Morning News Editorial Board. Reach him at jmitchell@dallasnews.com.
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