We've been reading and seeing news accounts about the events in Ferguson, Missouri with growing unease and concern. The police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen, sparked violent protests that have been mishandled by the authorities who kept changing their course of action, needlessly withholding the officer's name for days, and rewriting the rules without respect for the First Amendment rights of residents and the news media. Reporters and photographers have been arrested and pushed around for doing their jobs. The arrival this week of National Guard troops has not restored order; instead it has generated more tension.
Actually, it's more like a war zone than an American city. Until recently, armored vehicles were in the streets accompanying officers in full riot gear. The skies above Ferguson are still subjected to a no-fly zone by the federal government. And who can forget the TV images of smoke from tear gas canisters and the sounds of police firing rubber bullets? It makes the ugliest Occupy Oakland demonstrations of three years ago tame by comparison. And that's saying something.
But watching events unfold from 2,000 miles away, one thing is clear: Ferguson's response to days of anger sets a bad precedent. The American Civil Liberties Union and state authorities agreed last week that journalists and members of the public are within their rights to record on-duty police officers. Yet just days later that agreement was disregarded as Getty photographer Scott Olson was arrested and CNN reporter Don Lemon, who is gay and African American, was shoved by police while covering the protests.
But Ferguson is more than journalists being arrested while on the job. As Vox founder Ezra Klein tweeted Monday after a Getty photographer was arrested, "If police in Ferguson treat journalists like this imagine how they treat residents."
Indeed.
The use of tear gas and rubber bullets by police clad in full riot gear supported by surplus military vehicles and other equipment is not acceptable in our society. This isn't the first time that riots have broken out in an American city, and it probably won't be the last. Authorities in Ferguson, however, apparently haven't studied or learned from such incidents, because if they had, we think their response would not have been as disastrous.
At the core of the problem is race relations. Almost 40 years ago, following the Watts riots in Los Angeles, Bayard Rustin, a gay African American man who helped organize the March on Washington, wrote a compelling rebuttal to two reports, one of which was the product of a commission created by then-Governor Edward P. Brown. Reading through his lengthy analysis, it's clear that in almost four decades, the underlying economic and social problems – and the de facto segregation – that contributed to Watts were glossed over in the reports.
Watching buildings burn and people choking on tear gas in Ferguson is to see that very little has changed in 40 years. According to reports, only three of Ferguson's 53 police officers are African American, a city in which two-thirds of the population is black. Ferguson should be a wake-up call for all of us; in a society where government surveillance is the norm thanks to the National Security Administration, a free society and free press are more important than ever. City leaders here and elsewhere should also be paying attention – Ferguson offers a textbook case of what not to do when people exercise their right to protest.