Washington: The white policeman who shot dead the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, showed no remorse in a racially inflammatory interview published on the one-year anniversary of the shooting.
Darren Wilson has been living in hiding since he shot the 18-year-old on a suburban street and inadvertently caused days of rioting and a national debate about race and police violence in America.
In language that commentators described as racially coded, Wilson told The New Yorker he tries to take his wife and baby daughter out in public only to places with “like-minded individuals” and avoids what he called “a mixing pot”.
He also forcefully denied that he looked at the world through a racial lens while he was a police officer.
“Everyone is so quick to jump on race. It’s not a race issue,” he said when talking about the relationship between police and black communities.
In the article, the 29-year-old Wilson said he did not spend much time thinking about the young man he killed in Ferguson. “Do I think about who he was as a person? Not really, because it doesn’t matter at this point,” he said. “I only knew him for those 45 seconds in which he was trying to kill me, so I don’t know.”
Wilson has long maintained that he opened fire in self defence after Brown, who had just stolen a pack of cigarillos from a nearby shop, attacked him through the window of his police car. He was cleared of criminal wrongdoing by a grand jury of local citizens but also by an exhaustive investigation by the federal government, which concluded that Wilson’s decision to open fire was “not unreasonable”.
However, a separate federal investigation found that the Ferguson police department where he worked had a deeply ingrained culture of racism and disproportionately targeted black people for arrests and fines. In the interview, Wilson suggested that some younger black people were using race and America’s racial history as an excuse for their own problems.
“People who experienced that, and were mistreated, have a legitimate claim,” he said. “Other people don’t.”
