For days and nights on end, the town of Ferguson was torn asunder in a rampage of anger sparked by the shooting death by police of teenager Michael Brown, and fuelled by a belief that law enforcement officials were motivated by race and bigotry. Now an official report into the events of that shooting, the burning and looting that followed, and the records and policies of the police there has sadly underscored what all black people in America felt in their souls: Ferguson police were biased.
The reality is that if you were a black motorist behind the wheel of a car, you were seven times as likely to be stopped by police than if you were white. If you were black and jaywalked across the street, you were nine times as likely to be ticketed by police than if you were white. And if you were black, the chances were that you were 19 times more likely to be arrested than if you were white.
In essence, every statistic was based on race. Black and white. It was even acceptable in the Ferguson police department to make fun of President Barack Obama, the first black man to sit in the White House, with one departmental email noting how unusual it was for a black man like Obama to keep a stable job for four years.
This report is a damning insight into institutional bigotry that exists in modern day America. It is not a historical insight into the Deep South that existed during times of racial segregation — it is the here and now. And sadly too, it is a situation that all too likely exists in towns and communities across America. Its findings are no surprise to black people who are harassed by police, who receive unequal treatment when stopped and frisked or pulled over to the side of the road, or who stand accused in courts before a judiciary and justice administration that remains largely white.
This report should be a wake-up call that America needs to change. And maybe it should try and fix its own endemic problems before meddling in everybody else’s around the world.
