Beyond race, Ferguson is about police power

Guest Commentary

Ferguson, Missouri is a moving target. Events keep taking erratic directions, superseding comment as fast as it’s written. So I’ll open with context as of this writing: After a week of combat in the streets, governor Jay Nixon has ordered Missouri’s National Guard out to, as his office says in a statement, “help restore peace and order and to protect the citizens of Ferguson.”

The only part of the preceding statement to which we can reliably attribute any truth is the part about “order.” Police action in Ferguson has, from the moment of Michael Brown’s death, been about demonstrating who’s in charge and putting uppity citizens back in their place.

Let’s talk about peace. Peace was the situation in Ferguson before an armed government employee gunned down an unarmed young man in the street.

I lived near Ferguson for 12 years. I drove an ice cream truck up and down its streets for two summers. I seriously considered renting an apartment in Canfield Green, the complex Michael Brown lived in, in 2012. So I can say, on reasonable personal authority, that media portrayals of Ferguson as some kind of crime-plagued racial ghetto are baloney. Ferguson is, or at least was, an eminently peaceful community.

To let the uprising die in Ferguson as the National Guard moves in to suppress it, or to regard that suppression as “peace,” would likewise be a grave mistake. If what we really want is peace, we need – to steal a phrase from Nicholas de Genova – “a million Fergusons.” Or however many it takes to prevail upon these occupying armies we call “police forces” to stand down.

-Thomas L. Knapp is Senior News Analyst at the Center for a Stateless Society.