#Ferguson Cops Want to Believe They Are Right, Not Racist

What is it the police in Ferguson want out of escalating the violence? What is the end goal?

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At one point last night, when my Twitter feed was all #Ferguson, I noticed several tweets asking what the cops planned to get out of all of this—why go to such lengths?

I wondered this same question as I read about the cops shooting tear gas at Al Jazeera America reporters, about the two reporters arrested, about the demands that no video be taken (violating the first amendment), about the officers stripping off their ID numbers, about the absence of the governor and the slow clap when he finally canceled his trip to the state fair, about the calls for Obama to lead, about the debate over whether this was or was not representative of America.

On the phone w/my sis on the ground, @Aturah & she’s telling me Ferguson police were firing rubber bullets at prayer circles

— dream hampton (@dreamhampton) August 14, 2014

At first, I was just afraid and sad and unsurprised-yet-shocked. Of course this is America, and then again, this is America? I thought, as usual, about my kid, about the world we are passing down. About what our responsibility to that world is. About all the timely reactions that would appear on this site and others. The last timely reaction I wrote to a tragedy was after the Zimmerman verdict: it asked why we keep doing this, responding after-the-fact, and how to change things so that we are not left with just the response. And yet here I am.

I am writing this because I wonder what the reaction means—not writers’ reactions to another racially motivated murder but the police’s military reaction to the protests after one of their own killed an unarmed black teenager because he was black. 

There’s no use talking around it, even to get at why the police might try to talk around it: a white police officer killed a black teen and the largely white police force responded with violence toward the largely black community, while shutting down video of that violence.

Why?

The answer I keep kicking around goes back to Twitter’s focus on whether this latest tragedy “is” or “is not America.”

This is not a passive question. At the time of the shooting, the cop who killed Michael Brown had a choice—either admit (to himself) that he had racially targeted an innocent kid, or keep believing that the kid was a person to fear. After the shooting, the police had a choice—either admit (to the community and to the nation) that one of theirs had racially targeted an innocent kid, or keep believing that people who look like that kid are people to fear.

This is a choice because of race.

What do the cops get out of escalating the violence? What is the end goal? They want to make the protestors fearful. What the cops want, on some level, is to see their version of the world, a world in which black people are dangerous, and at any moment protest or argument can turn into riots and violence–and even, for a white cop, self-defense. They have chosen to keep believing their fears by trying to make them real.

What they want, whether they know it or not, is the continued conviction that their system makes sense.

What is hanging in the balance right now may be the system itself.

Perhaps that is a hopeful thought. How do we upset the scales? Maybe by making sure everyone sees the system in play as it really is. That is the what they don’t want us to see when they shut down coverage of their reaction. The real question has always been how to make it clear that racism is a choice. How to change people’s minds when they would kill to hold onto their beliefs.