"Race, Place, and Suburban Policing": Too Close for Comfort
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Weeks after the shooting death of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, Jr., by police in Ferguson, Missouri, the events leading up to his death and immediately following remained ambiguous. How did a brief encounter between a young, unarmed black man and the police lend itself to such a brutal killing? Furthermore, how did concerned citizens come to experience militarized policing from countless local and state jurisdictions—where they were tear gassed, shot with rubber bullets, and arrested—in pursuit of answers and perceived justice? I myself was there, in this now internationally recognized St. Louis suburban community, witnessing and documenting much of what transpired in the wake of this incident. Perhaps the answers lie in a range of unexplained black citizen-police incidents; there is an undeniable pattern of dubious encounters and outcomes driving dissention between blacks and law enforcement.
For example, roughly a week prior to the Mike Brown incident, news broke that the untimely death of Eric Garner—a forty-three-year-old black father of six from Long Island, New York—had been ruled a homicide. How could a man lose his life during a police confrontation over his alleged selling of loose cigarettes? More directly, how could he fall prey to an NYPD choke-hold at a time when controversial policing policies and practices, ranging from racial profiling to stopping, questioning, and frisking, are at the forefront of national debates? Similarly, who could have imagined that Marlene Pinnock, a black great-grandmother, would receive a barrage of punches from a California Highway Patrolman, straddled atop her in broad daylight, alongside a Los Angeles freeway? Has there not been enough attention called to police improprieties, thereby necessitating video and cell-phone footage of bystanders to serve as wake-up calls? My answer is no; there can never be too much coverage or attention yielded to a persistently overt continuum of police aggression toward blacks.
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