Ferguson: Pushing America to the cliff?

He was believed to have been shot six times by the police officer, in many postulations, among them, that he was a robbery suspect at a store who wanted to disarm the police and was jaywalking. Brown was visiting his grandmother when he was shot and was to start classes in a trade college in […]

He was believed to have been shot six times by the police officer, in many postulations, among them, that he was a robbery suspect at a store who wanted to disarm the police and was jaywalking. Brown was visiting his grandmother when he was shot and was to start classes in a trade college in just two days.
Following the killing, the Ferguson community, composed of majority blacks was embroiled in a series of clashes with the police giving an underlying fact that there is inept disaffection by the African-Americans for too long.
According to statistics by Vox, an on-line publication, the underlying cause of the Ferguson crisis is years of racial tensions between minority communities, police, and local government.
But in fact, before the shooting, Americans were already widely discussing the history of police violence against black men, racial disparities in the criminal justice system and racism in general. This conversation particularly resonated as the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and Eric Garner, among others permeated through the national media.
17-year old Trayvon from Miami Gardens, Florida who was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida on 26, February 2012, Jordan Davis, 17, was shot on November 23, 2012, at a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida by Michael David Dunn, a 45-year-old software developer from Brevard County while Eric Garner was shot on July 17, 2014, in Staten Island, New York, United States. These are cases that might have agitated the minds of African-American on their status in the American community.
However in Ferguson, the problem may have been further magnified by the lack of black representation in the local government.  According to the US Census Bureau 67 per cent of Ferguson population are blacks. But Ferguson’s mayor and police chief are white, just one of six city council members is black, with no black on the school board.
Also according to the Los Angeles Times out of 53 commissioned police officers, only three are black, attributing the racial disparities in the local government to low voter turnout in municipal elections. The disparities also apply to the number of police actions against white and black residents.
A report from the Missouri attorney general’s office found that, although black people were 67 per cent of Ferguson’s population in 2013, they made up more than 93 per cent of arrests carried out by Ferguson police that same year.
According to the report, the statistics and on-going disparities are why some experts argue that Ferguson’s-and America’s-problems run much deeper than the shooting of Michael Brown. “The shooting of Michael Brown was the final straw for people in Ferguson,” said Darnell Hunt, a UCLA professor and expert on civil unrest and race relations.
Also, to the majority-black community in Ferguson, Brown’s death was seen as something that could happen to them or their own sons. Darnell Hunt, an expert on race relations and civil unrest, compared the situation to the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012.
He said: “Not only was this something that affected people in the country, but other people realized that the fate of Trayvon was possibly the fate of their own sons.”
But looking at the situation critically was the shooting of Michael legal? According to Vox, in the 1980s, a pair of Supreme Court decisions-Tennessee vs. Garner and Graham v. Connor- set up a framework for determining when deadly force by cops is reasonable.
Constitutionally, “police officers are allowed to shoot under two circumstances,” David Klinger, a University of Missouri-St. Louis professor who studies use of force, told Vox. The first circumstance is “to protect their life or the life of another innocent party”- what departments call the “defense-of-life” standard. The second circumstance is to prevent a suspect from escaping, but only if the officer has probable cause to think the suspect’s committed a serious violent felony.
The logic behind the second circumstance, says Klinger, comes from a Supreme Court decision called Tennessee vs. Garner. That case involved a pair of police officers who shot a 15-year-old boy as he fled from a burglary. (He’d stolen $10 and a purse from a house.) The Court ruled that cops couldn’t shoot every felon who tried to escape. But, as Klinger says, “they basically say that the job of a cop is to protect people from violence, and if you’ve got a violent person who’s fleeing, you can shoot them to stop their flight.”
Now President Barack Obama asked for restraint from both sides during a press conference stressing that: “There’s also no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protesters in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights.
And here in the United States of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people on what they see on the ground.”  He directed the US Attorney General Eric Holder to be at Ferguson by yesterday to take control of the situation in which Brown’s family are demanding a conduct another autopsy on Brown’s body.
Speaking to Daily Trust on the Ferguson matter, Rakiya Ibrahim, a barrister and rights activist said the law is very clear in presuming an accused person innocent until otherwise proven which can only be done by a court of competent jurisdiction. She said the “dehumanizing act” was carried out on a black teenager based on “suspicious tendencies”
She expressed concern why the identity of the police officer was withheld for a while wondered under what law was he being protected and for what reason? Rakiya said Brown’s case is one out of many cases where young blacks have become victims to racial discrimination in the American criminal justice system and most of the perpetrators are roaming freely despite having a black President as the leader of the free world. She noted that: “The implication of such act is that angry individuals who have been denied justice mostly tend to take justice in their hands, taking us back to living in an anarchist society because the laws of land are not being complied with.”