Note from the counterinsurgency

Mike Brown.

I really understand, I think, why the Justice Department finds it so hard to prosecute murderous police officers like Darren Wilson for civil rights violations against the people whose lives they have taken like Michael Brown. Only Wilson can possibly know what he meant to do to Brown and how he felt, whether he truly was in terror of what he perceived as a vicious giant or was rather high on his own lethal power, and nobody can make him testify. And he probably doesn't altogether know himself, for that matter, the ability of the human unconscious to hide our own motivations from us being what it is.

Although at the same time I wonder at the way our public opinion, managed by the media, gets so stoked up about "victims' rights" in some cases, valuing the right to vengeance of a murder victim's family even over the presumption of innocence of an accused person, but not in others. Is it just an impression, or are black victims' rights really lower on the scale than white victims'? Or are police officers just presumed more innocent than members of the general population?

(Meanwhile St. Louis County prosecutors are apparently thinking about pressing charges against members of Michael Brown's family for their attack of last October on T-shirt vendors innocently trying to make a profit off his death.)

The DOJ report on the poisoned police-community relations in Ferguson, MO, is evidently a really good thing (see this great piece from Steve M), telling a tale that desperately needs to be told, but the coverage of it points up another one of those weird little point-of-view thingies, for instance in the Times:

The report gave credence to many of the grievances aired last year by African-Americans in angry, sometimes violent protests after the deadly police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old. Though the Justice Department separately concluded that the officer, Darren Wilson, who is white, violated no federal laws in that shooting, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said investigations revealed the root of the rage that brought people into the streets.

The report does no doubt lend itself to explaining why a lot of black people were extremely angry, if you really needed to know, but I don't think that was exactly a mystery to begin with, and it's an awfully strange way of reading the report. The problem in Ferguson isn't that black people are angry, the problem is that they are abused by the police—which, unsurprisingly, makes them angry.

If you're looking for explanations, it would be nice to look for an explanation of Darren Wilson, and I think you could find one: in the treatment of the town as an insurgency, under occupation by a foreign force. What does that do, psychologically, to the occupiers? It alienates them from the population they are controlling, it elevates them into a godlike position of unquestioned power over the population, and it frightens them with unconscious guilt in the first place and the general atmosphere of violence.

In that sense it's sort of right not to charge Wilson in particular; he very likely was as terrified as he claimed, because he knew his entire position, harassing the citizens, throwing his weight around, being a member of a counterinsurgency force where there was no insurgency, made people want to attack him. It's obviously important to get a bad cop like that out of uniform and off the street, maybe not so much so to put him in jail. It's the entire system that violated Mike Brown's civil rights and killed him, and the entire system that must be judged and condemned.

Also see Ta-Nehisi Coates who might be nice enough not to think I'm a total idiot on this.