Fault Lines

Ferguson: City under siege

Fault Lines examines the reaction to the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a police officer.

On August 9, 2014, an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown was shot dead by a white police officer in the city of Ferguson, Missouri.

This is more than Michael Brown, this is about civilians against law enforcement, corrupt law enforcement.

by Miller Gardner, a demonstrator

Brown was the forth unarmed black man to be killed in the US by police in the span of a month, and the killing sparked several days of protests in the community.

The street protests and police response brought Ferguson into the national and international spotlight. Things quickly spiralled: Reports of gunshots fired from the crowds, a state of emergency was declared, the national guard was deployed and the US attorney general launched a federal investigation into the killing.

So why was Michael Brown shot? And why was the authorities’ response to the protests so disproportionate?

Fault Lines travelled to Ferguson to witness the demonstrations and the subsequent heavy-handed police reaction – and to find out how Brown’s killing sparked something bigger, exposing tensions that have been bubbling beneath the surface for years.

Reporter’s blog

A fractured community demands answers

By Sebastian Walker

When we made the call on August 12 to go to Ferguson, we thought we might be too late to cover the story there. We couldn’t get there until the following day — the fourth night of protests over the killing of Michael Brown and after three nights of militarised responses by local law enforcement.

The reason why we decided to go is because we were seeing the same kinds of images that we had seen at previous events that had developed into something big. We covered the protests in Anaheim, California, during the summer of 2012, which followed the killing of two unarmed young Latino men by police officers. It was a similar kind of scenario where there was military-style force being used in the streets. Armoured personnel carriers, SWAT teams and high-powered rifles were on display. We thought that this was going to develop into a situation that would kind of spiral. And sure enough, it did.

We had heard very little about Ferguson, and I had never been to St. Louis. For Fault Lines, we’ve covered a lot of stories similar to this across the United States. But it wasn’t until we got on the ground that we started to hear about Ferguson’s legacy of what was referred to as “economic segregation”. We heard many young men say that they had far more friends who had gone to jail than had gone to college. In this community, the unemployment rate for young black males between the ages of 16 and 24 is reportedly approaching 50 percent.

It wasn't until we got on the ground that we started to hear about Ferguson's legacy of what was referred to as “economic segregation”. We heard many young men say that they had far more friends who had gone to jail than had gone to college.

by ,

The way that law enforcement plays into that in this part of Missouri seemed as problematic as anywhere I’ve been in the United States. Despite being a majority black community, out of 55 officers in the local police force more than 50 are white. African-Americans account for nearly 90 percent of the stops, searches and arrests by local police. And while I wouldn’t dare compare my experience to what residents of that community have endured for decades, while trying to cover the events of the last 10 days or so, we have seen a lack of transparency and surprising level of aggression on the part of the police. It’s a circumstance that other journalists we spoke to in Ferguson echoed.

When we arrived in town, the protest we found that Wednesday afternoon was pretty calm. So it was a very surprising set of decisions on the part of the police that led to a militarised response, complete with tear gas, flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets.

We were with a group of peaceful demonstrators throughout the afternoon. Women, children and families had assembled in the neighbourhood where Michael Brown was shot asking for justice, asking for their message to be heard and basically raising awareness about what’s been going on in their community. We saw nothing in the realm of weapons or violence on the part of the protesters.

At around 6pm the police showed up in riot gear and ordered those assembled to disperse. The crowd — I’d say it was a few hundred, not a huge number of people — was blocking the street and preventing traffic from flowing. But this is not a major urban centre, it’s a street through a neighbourhood. To see riot police turn up was mildly disconcerting. But then we spotted armoured vehicles rolling down the street. We saw three heavily armoured trucks; two of them had ballistic armour designed to withstand high-powered weapon fire.

It was at dusk that the police started to advance. The spark was the sound of a breaking glass bottle. We didn’t see anybody throw anything up to that point. In fact, some in the crowd told us later that they’d seen a police vehicle run over a bottle that was lying on the street. Immediately police officers were putting on gas masks and getting ready for what was the predictable next step: escalation of force and the firing of tear gas. It was one of the most intense, militarised police responses that I’ve seen — and I have covered protests like this across the United States and internationally. It felt, and looked, like a war zone.

More alarming was that we saw officers firing tear gas canisters down side streets into communities. It seemed indiscriminate. It was extremely scary to be in the middle of it. As a journalist, you like to think that you’re not part of the intended target. But journalists that evening were arrested and shot at and gassed, and we were no different. We got a throat full of tear gas, and it was excruciatingly painful. But it was nothing compared with what happened to some of the protesters. By that point, there was a small number of people in the crowd throwing projectiles back at the police. They told us they felt like they were under attack, and that it was hard to stop themselves from fighting back.

You have a situation in Ferguson where there's a community that feels oppressed and unfairly targeted by the police. And now they were being shot at and killed.

by ,

Most disconcertingly, we heard from many in the crowd that this style of policing was not particularly surprising to them. That’s tragic, when you take a step back and think about it. During our four days in Ferguson, we spoke to families, community leaders and activists — we heard from the full spectrum of voices in the community. So whether that’s the state senator that we interviewed or the head of the local chapter of the NAACP or a longtime community activist who’d been organising for decades in that part of Missouri, all of them had facts and figures to back up what we were hearing from the young black males who were the most angry of the voices that we heard. The overall assessment was universally similar: things were completely out of control.

You have a situation in Ferguson where there’s a community that feels oppressed and unfairly targeted by the police. And now they were being shot at and killed. Michael Brown was the case in point.

The way that the police treated the media lent credence to what the members of the community told us. Many of our interactions with law enforcement — and I know this is true for other colleagues in the field and those from other news organisations — were incredibly frustrating. There was very little transparency and very little accountability that you could get for any of the decisions being made. Officers would refuse to talk to us when events were unfolding. Even when we would ask for their senior commander or a representative who could talk to the press, access was denied. We saw police officers covering up their badges, refusing to identify themselves to media.

These are public servants whose job it is to serve and protect a community and also to be transparent and allow the media to document what’s happening. But journalists were being actively prevented from doing their work, whether by being intentionally fired at with tear gas and rubber bullets, being arrested, or simply being stonewalled by media officers.

We were wrong when we thought we deployed too late. The story in Ferguson is still developing — in fact, it may just be beginning.

Follow Sebastian Walker on Twitter: @sebwalker

undefined
 

This episode of Fault Lines can be seen from Saturday, August 23 at the following times GMT: Saturday: 2230; Sunday: 0930; Monday: 0330; Tuesday: 1630. 

Watch more  Fault Lines