Tex McIver was not the only armed American who would feel endangered by Black Lives Matter demonstrations. On March 2, 2020, the husband of Los Angeles County district attorney Jackie Lacey threatened to shoot Black Lives Matter demonstrators gathered outside of the couple’s home in Granada Hills, an affluent Los Angeles suburb in the San Fernando Valley. The timing of the confrontation was strategic. A primary election was to be held the next day in which Lacey would face a vigorous reelection challenge from several opponents encouraged by the Black Lives Matter organization.
Melina Abdullah, a professor in the department of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, led a group of about thirty protestors who arrived in the early morning dark and brought lawn chairs with them, intending to settle in until prosecutor Lacey met with them. Abdullah is the leader of the Black Lives Matter chapter in Los Angeles.[1] She described the crack of dawn visit to the Lacey home as the inevitable result of years of frustrated attempts to meet personally with the district attorney to complain about her failure to prosecute police officers accused of violence and her support for the death penalty, among other racially charged issues of law and order.
“We’ve been standing in front of her office, demanding that she meet with us for two and a half years and she refused to come out,” Abdullah said. “What alternative is there?”[2]
According to news reports and a video posted online, when Abdullah knocked, David Lacey opened the front door, pointed a handgun at her and two others, and said, “Get off of my porch. I will shoot you. . . . I don’t care who you are. . . . We’re calling the police right now.”[3]
David Lacey and his wife are both black.
Five months later, on August 3, 2020, California attorney general (and former U.S. Representative) Xavier Becerra filed three misdemeanor assault charges against David Lacey, one for each of three persons at whom he allegedly pointed his gun.[4] Abdullah scoffed at the charges, pointing out that California prosecutors usually filed more serious felony charges for firearm threats. “Had it been anyone else who pointed a gun at someone’s chest, at three people in fact, and said the words, ‘I will shoot you,’ we know they’d be getting more than misdemeanors,” Abdullah was quoted by The Guardian newspaper as saying. “The system is there to protect themselves.”[5]
The incident poses two questions. Why is there a Black Lives Matter movement in the first place—what are its roots? And how could Jackie Lacey in particular—the first woman and first African American to serve as the Los Angeles County district attorney since the office was created in 1850—have ended up in such a volatile confrontation with the leader of the first organized local chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement?
The bitter conflict between a black woman and a black civil rights organization is especially striking when viewed in the light of a laudatory sub-headline in the October 2014 edition of the newsletter of the University of Southern California, Lacey’s law school alma mater. “Even though she’s a prosecutor, the USC alumna serves as the voice for victims in the courtroom.”[6] The crux of this apparent paradox lies in Jackie Lacey’s formative years in the gang-infested South Central Los Angeles neighborhood of Crenshaw, the rise to power of a new generation of black scholars and activists who hold views of victimhood and racial justice significantly different from that of Lacey and many others in elected office around the country, and a shift to the left in the criminal justice politics of American progressives and perhaps most Americans in general.
Not unlike U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, a black woman who was previously the San Francisco district attorney and the attorney general of California, Lacey found herself trapped between the horns of a cultural dilemma, resulting in a “bitter irony.” That irony in Harris’s case was described in The Atlantic by writer Peter Beinart after the senator ended her campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
She lost, in part, because she couldn’t forthrightly defend her record as a prosecutor. She couldn’t forthrightly defend that record because party activists deemed it insufficiently progressive. They portrayed her as complicit in the unjust incarceration and killing of black and Latino men. . . . Yet had Harris—especially as a black woman—been the crusading criminal-justice reformer that Democrats now want to see, she would likely never have been in a position to run for president in the first place.[7]
The tough law and order stance that voters demanded of politicians in the 1980s and 1990s, when Harris and Lacey were building their careers in elected office, were swept away in the Democratic party by a remarkably sudden shift in the political winds of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Beinart’s point is illustrated nicely by California congressman Adam B. Schiff’s political back flip, executed with no apparent embarrassment in less than a year’s time. In October 2019, Schiff issued a statement lauding Lacey. “Time and time again, Jackie Lacey has demonstrated her ability to protect the public, fight crime and ensure justice for all the people of Los Angeles County,” he said.[8] But in June 2020, after an uproarious spring of Black Lives Matters protests, Schiff tweeted the withdrawal of his enthusiastic support. “This is a rare time in our nation’s history. We have a responsibility to make profound changes to end systemic racism & reform criminal justice . . . and I no longer feel our endorsement of Jackie Lacey a year ago has the same meaning [and] have decided to withdraw it.”[9]
To add ironic insult to injury, Kamala Harris also abandoned Lacey to twist in the shifting political winds. When Harris was attorney general of California in 2012, she endorsed Jackie Lacey in her successful run to become the first woman and first black district attorney of Los Angeles County.[10] Eight years later—after her failed run at the presidential nomination was derailed in part by her own law and order record—Harris endorsed Lacey’s principal opponent in the 2020 election, Cuban American George Gascon.[11]
Lacey’s election challenge and her political abandonment by former allies aptly illustrates a well-worn phrase that writer Finley Peter Dunne coined in 1895: “Politics ain’t beanbag.”[12] But this was much more than the routine infighting common to local politics. This was a skirmish along a major front of an ideological and cultural war in which Americans have been engaged for a good half century.[13] An actor turned conservative activist, then–National Rifle Association First Vice President Charlton Heston evoked all of the divisive, polarized resentments of this culture war in a speech before the right-wing Free Congress Foundation at its twentieth anniversary gala on December 7, 1997—which coincidentally also happened to be Pearl Harbor Day. Heston spoke at length about those whom he described collectively as the “victim of the cultural war.”
Heaven help the God-fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middle class, Protestant, or—even worse—evangelical Christian, Midwest, or Southern, or—even worse—rural, apparently straight, or—even worse—admittedly heterosexual, gun-owning or—even worse—NRA-card-carrying, average working stiff, or—even worse—male working stiff, because not only don’t you count, you’re a downright obstacle to social progress.[14]
That single paragraph sums up the cultural divide that has polarized American politics. The front in that war in which Jackie Lacey and Black Lives Matter engaged is a narrower but critical battle over the prime values and methods of America’s system of law, order, and racial justice.
Like the Balkan wars of the early twentieth century,[15] alliances shift opportunistically on both sides of the cultural war. Fierce internecine guerrilla scrimmages, sparked by changing demographics and the vagaries of polling, draw political blood.[16] But the broad lines are drawn and the trenches dug. On the one side are the increasingly authoritarian nature of Trumpism and its appeal to Heston’s white male “working stiff.” On the other is an increasingly confrontational progressive left, a rough coalition of people of color, minority ethnics, and well-educated young people.
The outcome of the culture war lies in the future. It is unlikely to be settled by a single election.
There is one issue about crime and justice over which the ideological combatants in America’s culture war strongly disagree—who are the victims?
To the surging progressive left, the primary victims are people of color—mostly black males—whom a racist system has victimized by policies that criminalize minor drug usage, enhance penalties for crimes committed primarily by black offenders, promote mass incarceration over large-scale programs designed to deal with the root causes of economic and social deprivations, inflict civil disabilities on convicted felons that are equivalent to the old Jim Crow laws, and rely on militarized “hyper-policing” to enforce this harsh law and order ethic.
To the reactionary right, best characterized by Trumpism, the victims are ordinary people in poor communities, innocents who suffer from the violence brought to their communities by drug-dealing criminal predators, summed up in the phrase “black on black crime” that is often raised by the right. The primary vehicle for implementing this conservative view of law and order is the “War on Drugs,” a term first floated by President Richard Nixon in 1971 but formally declared by President Ronald Reagan in 1982.[17] To these advocates, the drug war is essential to law and order, and can only be successfully pursued through a harsh collection of criminal penalties, streamlined criminal procedures, and aggressive policing.
Underlying the conservative right’s priorities is what Harvard professor Lawrence Bobo and his colleagues have called “a modern free market or laissez-faire racist ideology.”[18] The Jim Crow variety of racism was based on perceptions of racial inferiority. It was implemented by overt means, laws, and policies that never bothered in the least to conceal their racial basis (think of separate black and white drinking fountains as but one starkly simple example). Bobo and his colleagues argue that with the decline of Jim Crow racism, a new racial ideology emerged. “Under this regime, blacks are still stereotyped and blamed as the architects of their own disadvantaged status,” as “a larger number of white Americans have become comfortable with as much racial inequality and segregation as a putatively nondiscriminatory polity and free market economy can produce.”[19] Or, as William Julius Wilson put it more simply, laissez-faire racism is “a perception that blacks are responsible for their own economic predicament and therefore undeserving of special government support.”[20]
One outcome of laissez-faire racism has been the reluctance of the predominantly white power structure to address underlying structural problems that affect communities of color in general, and crime in those communities in particular. In the view of racial free market thinking, the solution to any such problems is for troubled communities of color to clean themselves up by buying into law and order ideals in the marketplace of ideas. The residents of these disadvantaged American enclaves should support tough law enforcement efforts intended to help them, and not ask for special economic programs or social consideration.
In August 2016, candidate Donald Trump indirectly summed up the laissez-faire view. Speaking to a rally of white people in a suburb of Lansing, Michigan, Trump made a pitch for black votes by posing his uniquely Trumpist description of black communities that rely on liberal social programs, such as those historically favored by the Democratic Party. “You’re living in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58% of your youth is unemployed, what the hell do you have to lose?”[21]
Trump more directly articulated the conservative position on crime and its victims in The America We Deserve, a book published under his name in 2000. “[U]nless we stand up for tough anticrime policies, they will be replaced by policies that emphasize criminals’ rights over those of ordinary citizens,” the book argued. “Soft criminal sentences are based on the proposition that criminals are the victims of society.”[22]
Trump further argued that “the only victim of a violent crime is the person getting shot, stabbed, or raped. The perpetrator is never a victim. He’s nothing more than a predator, and there can be no excuses made for killing old ladies, beating old men, or shooting adolescents.”[23] He dismissed social and economic conditions, and historical mistreatment as factors generating criminal behavior. “There is a philosophy in our country that says criminals plunder because they have little or no choice; that they have been forced into crime by poverty, lack of opportunity, or early childhood mistreatment. That’s an excuse? Ridiculous!”[24]
The America We Deserve also argued in favor of the death penalty, describing going to prison as a “social promotion” for violent criminals.
I totally reject the idea that hanging these sorts of criminals is uncivilized. In fact I believe that letting them live would be totally uncivilized. They’ve taken an innocent life, so they should have to give theirs in return. That’s the very least they can do. They don’t deserve to be put into a prison where they can spend their time working out, reading, watching television, earning advanced degrees, filing bogus lawsuits, and even getting married. For this type of person, prison is a social promotion.[25]
Trump’s attorneys general worked hard to make this roughshod law and order vision a reality. Jeff Sessions, the first Trump attorney general, dismissed “the false story that federal prisons are filled with low-level, nonviolent drug offenders. The truth is less than 3 percent of federal offenders sentenced to imprisonment in 2016 were convicted of simple possession, and in most of those cases the defendants were drug dealers who accepted plea bargains in return for reduced sentences.” Sessions argued that minority communities are “disproportionately impacted” by violent crime and “ravaged by crime and violence.” Tough anticrime policies and enforcement, he suggested, actually benefit minority communities by helping to create safe neighborhoods.[26]
Sessions was true to his word. He overturned several policies of the Obama administration that were aimed at ameliorating racial imbalances in law enforcement. For example, Sessions cut back Justice Department investigations into local police departments. These investigations helped expose police abuses and in some cases led to the imposition of monitored reforms. He revoked a Justice Department policy that directed federal prosecutors to avoid pressing charges against low-level drug offenders that might trigger lengthy mandatory minimum sentences. Sessions told prosecutors to “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense” in all cases, regardless of disproportionate consequences.[27]
Michelle Alexander is a clarion voice on the other side of the criminal justice front of the American culture war. A professor of law at Ohio State University and an experienced advocate for social justice, Alexander’s award-winning book The New Jim Crow has been praised as “the secular bible for a new social movement in early twenty-first-century America.”[28] Alexander argues that the drug war has not stopped crime. On the contrary, it has created a system that imprisons disproportionate numbers of people of color in record numbers.
The impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than thirty years, the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran.[29]
“The racial dimension of mass incarceration is its most striking feature,” Alexander writes. “No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.”[30]
When the men and women of color scooped up by this system are released from prison or jail, they are subject to lifelong civil disabilities that prevent their ever becoming integrated as productive and fully accepted members of society. These disabilities, Alexander argues, have in effect recreated the racially discriminatory regime of Jim Crow laws, albeit without that era’s specific reference to race.
[I]t is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. . . . Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow.[31]
Alexander describes a three-stage process in the New Jim Crow system. The first stage is “the roundup” during which “[v]ast numbers of people are swept into the criminal justice system by the police, who conduct drug operations primarily in poor communities of color.”[32] The second stage begins with the arrest, after which “defendants are generally denied meaningful legal representation and pressured to plead guilty whether they are or not.” Due to “harsh sentencing laws, drug offenders in the United States spend more time under the criminal justice system’s formal control—in jail or prison, on probation or parole—than drug offenders anywhere else in the world.”[33]
The final stage is a period of “invisible punishment” that “operates largely outside of public view and takes effect outside the traditional sentencing framework.” Its sanctions are “imposed by operation of law rather than decisions of a sentencing judge, yet they often have a greater impact on one’s life course in the months or years one actually spends behind bars. . . . Unable to surmount these obstacles, most will eventually return to prison and then be released again, caught in a closed circuit of perpetual marginality.”[34]
There is little room for even the most progressive prosecutor to maneuver between the front lines in this contest between different definitions of the victims of injustice and the perpetrators of their victimization. Kamala Harris, then San Francisco’s district attorney, spoke to the difficulty in the preface to her 2009 book, Smart on Crime, arguing that “both sides of the political aisle . . . urgently need a broader vision and a willingness to innovate.” For the political left that meant “getting past biases against law enforcement and recognizing that even low-income communities . . . want and deserve greater public safety resources so that they can live free from crime.” For the right it meant “acknowledging that crime prevention is a key to crime fighting” and that the tools needed “are far more diverse than simply laws that make prison sentences longer.”[35]
Such middle-ground voices have little traction in twenty-first-century American policy discourse. In a 2017 op-ed, legal reform activist Josie Duffy Rice raked over Lacey and other prominent and ostensibly progressive prosecutors as “faux” reformers “who get credit for changing the game while continuing draconian practices.” These prosecutors “say the right things,” Rice charged, while making only “bite-size improvements” and continuing “to promote the same harsh practices behind the scenes.”[36]
George Gascon defeated Jackie Lacey in the November 2020 general election.[37] Kamala Harris made a remarkable comeback, winning the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nomination. But even as candidate Joe Biden’s running mate, advocates to the left continued to raise critical questions about her record as prosecutor and attorney general.[38] And Joe Biden himself faced skepticism about his prominent role in the passage in 1994 of a tough law and order crime bill that critics say helped drive mass incarceration.[39] Nevertheless, their team won the election.
The 1991 coming of age drama Boyz n the Hood was set in and around the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood in which Jackie Lacy grew up. The film’s dramatic arc traces the challenges young black men faced growing up in the area’s violent gang culture. By the end of the film, most of a clique of young friends are either dead or scooped up in the grim system that Alexander describes.
Jackie Lacey emphasized her experiences as a young person in South Central during the 1960s and 1970s to justify what she sees as her advocacy for the real victims of criminal violence. “It felt like a dangerous time,” she told the New York Times. “I can remember my parents’ home getting burglarized and everything getting wiped out while they were at work. And it seems like after that they put bars on the windows and had the iron-gate door. And I really thought everybody in L.A. was doing it because all of the neighbors were doing it.”[40]
Because of her early exposure to this criminal violence, Lacey was determined “to advocate for those who couldn’t advocate for themselves in the criminal justice system,” namely the poor victims of crime. “People who’d had their cars stolen, children who’d been molested, women who’d been beat up by their sole source of support. There are a whole lot of people that you can connect with and you can say, ‘I’m going to be your voice in that courtroom.’”[41]
Kamala Harris made a supporting, corollary point in Smart on Crime. She argued that it is a myth that the residents of African American and Latino communities don’t want the police in their neighborhoods. “In fact, the opposite is true . . . economically poor people want and support law enforcement.” But the myth is perpetuated by the “extreme” ends of both sides of the American polarized divide. Partisan conservatives argue for “containment” of hopelessly crime-ridden communities, whereas partisan liberals argue that “police are an unwelcome occupation force in poor neighborhoods.” Neither approach makes any sense, Harris maintained.[42]
Lacey consistently expressed her support for the death penalty. “I think the biggest fear, morally, of the death penalty is that we do not want to execute the wrong person,” she said after her first election. “I think we need checks and balances in place. . . . Although I’m a prosecutor who has been on the side of seeking justice by seeking the death penalty, I believe everybody has a right to a fair trial.”[43]
Lacey’s discussions of the roots and nature of crime in her neighborhood brush up against one of the most charged issues of crime and race—the role of specific racial and ethnic cultures as factors in criminal behavior. That question of the impact on crime of a community’s shared norms, attitudes, and behaviors is one of the “third rails” of academic and policy discourse for many experts. According to William Julius Wilson, a prominent scholar who has studied and written about the roles of social structures and culture among blacks in America, “many liberal scholars are reluctant to discuss or research the role that culture plays in the negative outcomes found in the inner city. It is possible that they fear being criticized for reinforcing the popular view that the negative social outcomes—poverty, unemployment, drug addiction, crime—of many poor people in the inner city are due to the shortcomings of the people themselves.”[44] Nevertheless, Wilson argues that “cultural explanations should be part of any attempt to fully account for such behavior and outcomes. And I think it is equally important to acknowledge that recognizing the important role of cultural influences in creating different racial group outcomes does not require us to ignore or play down the role of structural factors.”[45]
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates described a similar reluctance to discuss another racial “hot-button issue”—reparations for slavery—in an interview with the New York Times. “[T]here are few people today who have the courage to stand up within the community and say, ‘I genuinely think reparations is a mistake,’” Gates said, making it clear that was not necessarily his own position on the issue. “But I’m saying you will find nobody black standing up and criticizing reparations—it’s very rare—because they’re afraid that students are going to boycott them or that they’ll be called an Uncle Tom. That’s not right. We fall apart, particularly in the academy, when we succumb to or perpetuate that kind of intellectual bullying.”[46]
Jackie Lacey won acclaim among black leaders on election night after her landmark victory in 2012.[47] But nine months earlier and twenty-five hundred miles away, the death of a young black man in Florida had already sparked the grass roots movement that would confront her at her own front door in 2020.
On the rainy evening of Sunday, February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, a black seventeen-year-old high school junior, walked to a nearby 7-Eleven store from the home where he was staying with his father. The home was in a racially mixed gated community in Sanford, Florida. The young man bought some iced tea and Skittles candy and started walking back in the rain. He was wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt.[48]
At 7:11 p.m., George Zimmerman, a white resident of the neighborhood and a “neighborhood watch volunteer,” spotted Martin. Zimmerman, armed with a Kel-Tec 9mm pistol, called the police, as he had often done in the past. “Hey, we’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there’s a real suspicious guy,” he told the 911 operator. “This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining, and he’s just walking around looking about.”
At about the same time, Martin noticed that he was being followed. It happened that he was talking on the phone with his girlfriend, who advised him to run. He did. At 7:13, Zimmerman told the police operator, “S—, he’s running.”
A beeping sound is heard at this point on the 911 tape. Zimmerman had opened the door of his vehicle. He went after Trayvon Martin on foot.
“Are you following him?” the operator asked Zimmerman.
“Yeah,” he replied.
“Ok, we don’t need you to do that,” the operator said.
Zimmerman spent a few more minutes on the phone. First he gave the operator directions about where he would meet a police officer. Then he seemed to change his mind.
“Actually, could you have him call me, and I’ll tell him where I’m at?” he said.
At 7:15, four minutes after the call began, he hung up.
What happened next is a classic case of the only survivor to a shooting death claiming self-defense. What is known for sure is that within a few more minutes, George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin to death. Zimmerman claimed that he had acted in self-defense after Martin attacked him. The Sanford Police Department originally declined to charge Zimmerman with any crime. But the governor appointed a special prosecutor to look into the case. Zimmerman was eventually charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter.
Trayvon Martin’s homicide caused a national outcry, mostly about the racial tensions inherent in the shooting, but also about Florida’s concealed carry and “Stand Your Ground” statutes, relaxed gun laws that critics argue encourage such violent confrontations. Although those laws were not directly at issue in Zimmerman’s case, prosecutors had a difficult needle to thread between the relaxed social standards on violence that those laws embody and the murky facts of exactly how Trayvon Martin was killed. On July 13, 2013, a Florida jury accepted Zimmerman’s self-defense claim and acquitted him of all charges.[49]
It appeared to many observers that it was okay in Florida to hunt down, confront, and kill an unarmed black teenager who had the misfortune to be out at night on an innocent errand.
Thousands of demonstrators gathered in cities across America to protest Zimmerman’s acquittal.[50] President Barack Obama said that Trayvon Martin “could have been me 35 years ago.” The president spoke eloquently about pain in the black community, underscoring that “it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that—that doesn’t go away.” The question, Obama said, was “where do we take this? How do we learn some lessons from this and move in a positive direction?”[51]
As President Obama spoke and thousands demonstrated, three young women—Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza in Los Angeles, and Opal Tometi in New York—decided to “take this” in a forcefully positive direction.[52] Garza posted fourteen words on Facebook that would change the racial discourse in America forever. “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter. Black Lives Matter.” In a Rolling Stone interview, Garza described the moment. “We see black death all the time, and I don’t know what it was about this, but I know I went home and then I woke up in the middle of the night crying. And I picked up my phone and I started clickety-clacking, right?”[53]
Cullors saw Garza’s post and added the hashtag “#blacklivesmatter.” Tometi described the impact the post had on her. “There [was] a lot of rage, a lot of pain, a lot of cynicism. But her post resonated with me, for a number of reasons. I think it being explicitly black, it being a message rooted in love, and it just felt very hopeful.”[54]
The three women connected over the issue and discussed how to build a “movement not a moment.” They called together a group of other activists, including Melina Abdullah, to start that movement.[55] It was to become a tidal wave within a few years. That wave continues to roll over America. In the words of writer Jamil Smith, “The struggle continues to build an America where black people can breathe, one where we do not need white people to validate our demand to do so.”[56]
In 2016, George Zimmerman auctioned off the pistol with which he had killed Trayvon Martin. He got $250,000 for the gun. In an interview with ABC News, Zimmerman promised to use some of the money “to push back against the civil rights movement Black Lives Matter.”[57]
If Sanford, Florida, was the birthplace of Black Lives Matter, Ferguson, Missouri, was where it came of age. Trayvon Martin died at the hands of a private citizen. Zimmerman was one person along an ambiguous spectrum of armed private law and order enforcers who operate without much supervision at the margins of the criminal justice system. (That spectrum included Tex McIver, as we shall see in greater detail further on.)
The death of a young unarmed black man, Michael Brown, in 2014 was different. Brown was shot to death by a white policeman, a sworn officer of a government agency. The incident would focus the nation’s attention on racism in the criminal justice system and police brutality in its enforcement. The nascent Black Lives Matter movement was propelled into national and enduring prominence and power.
“Hands up, don’t shoot!”
A volatile narrative erupted like wildfire when news of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown’s death raced through a neighborhood in the small town of Ferguson. It went like this: Shortly after noon on Saturday, August 9, 2014, an officer of the Ferguson Police Department had aggressively confronted Brown—often described as a “gentle giant”—and another young black male friend for jaywalking. The encounter had quickly escalated from verbal to physical. The officer, later identified as Darren Wilson, shot Brown in the back several times as he tried to flee. When the teenager turned and tried to surrender, lifting his hands up and imploring “don’t shoot,” Wilson shot the young man to death. The fatal round struck Brown in the top of his head as he was on his knees.
It was not a difficult narrative to believe for many.
Ferguson is a small town of about twenty-one thousand residents, one of eighty-nine municipalities in St. Louis County. It became an enforced all-white community in the 1940s when its white burghers erected a chain across the main street that connected a tiny black community to the rest of the otherwise white town. Ferguson thus became one of the “sundown towns” examined by James W. Loewen—communities all over America that excluded black residents by various means. Some towns went so far as to post signs warning African Americans to be out of the town by sundown.[58] The unstated implication was that vigilante justice would deal with any blacks found after dark, perhaps even killing them. But the facts about where such signs were located illustrate a truth that contradicts what most people think that they know about harshly segregated sundown towns, namely that such towns were a primarily a Southern phenomenon. That is certainly how they have been portrayed in films and literature. Loewen has documented that in fact, the reverse is true. For example, he discovered 472 all-white towns in Illinois alone.[59] And of the 184 towns that he identified as having had sundown warning signs, only seven were in the “traditional South.” A total of 125 were in northern or western locales.[60]
Ferguson’s demography has changed dramatically over recent decades. As late as 1990, 74 percent of the population was white, and 25 percent black.[61] By 2019, census data showed the ratio had flipped—24 percent were white and 70 percent were black.[62] Significantly, the town’s police department was almost entirely white at the time of Michael Brown’s death—of fifty-four sworn officers, only four were African American in 2015.[63] Loewen noted that all-white police forces in former sundown towns “may still be viewed by themselves and other residents as a city’s first line of defense against black interlopers.”[64]
The phrase “hands up, don’t shoot” became a rallying cry for Ferguson residents, a powerful slogan for the Black Lives Matter movement that led weeks of demonstrations, and a universal meme for activists protesting violent mistreatment of black youths by police.[65] National Football League players raised their hands in symbolic protest. So did several members of Congress as they spoke to the issue on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. T-shirts and demonstrators’ signs were emblazoned with the slogan.[66]
But doubts began to be raised about the facts of the incident and just how gentle a giant Michael Brown really was. Leaks from a grand jury about Officer Wilson’s version of events and the prosecution’s case appeared in conservative media in late October. They told a different story, one in which Officer Wilson was under physical attack from a much bigger Michael Brown and acted in self-defense.[67] On November 24, 2014, the grand jury accepted Wilson’s version of events and declined to indict him.
The grand jury’s decision led to more angry demonstrations and two separate federal investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice. One was a criminal investigation examining whether Officer Wilson violated federal law when he shot Brown. The other was a civil rights investigation into the operations of the Ferguson Police Department. Lengthy reports of both federal investigations were released by the Justice Department on the same day, March 4, 2015.
The criminal investigation vindicated Wilson’s self-defense version of the events. Based on interviews with over one hundred witnesses, detailed records of forensic evidence including three autopsies of Brown, police communications, surveillance videos, and blood patterns at the scene, the Justice Department’s eighty-six-page report firmly refuted the “hand up, don’t shoot” narrative.
Pulitzer Prize winner Jonathan Capehart wrote in the Washington Post that the report “made me ill” and “forced me to deal with two uncomfortable truths: Brown never surrendered with his hands up, and Wilson was justified in shooting Brown.”[68] Four days later, the newspaper awarded the viral Ferguson narrative four of its falsehood “Pinocchios”—the maximum for a finding of an assertion that fact-checking found to be false. “‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ did not happen in Brown’s killing,” the fact-checker reported.[69] Here is what did happen that day, according to the Justice Department’s report:
Wilson was on duty and driving his department-issued Chevy Tahoe SUV westbound on Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri when he saw Brown and his friend, Witness 101, walking eastbound in the middle of the street. Brown and Witness 101 had just come from Ferguson Market and Liquor (“Ferguson Market”), a nearby convenience store, where, at approximately 11:53 a.m., Brown stole several packages of cigarillos. As captured on the store’s surveillance video, when the store clerk tried to stop Brown, Brown used his physical size to stand over him and forcefully shove him away. As a result, an FPD dispatch call went out over the police radio for a “stealing in progress.” The dispatch recordings and Wilson’s radio transmissions establish that Wilson was aware of the theft and had a description of the suspects as he encountered Brown and Witness 101.[70]
After admonishing the two young men about walking in the middle of the street, Wilson drove past them. But looking at them in his rear view mirror, he realized that these were likely the two subjects of the “stealing in progress” report.
According to Wilson, when he backed up his SUV and attempted to get out to speak with Brown, Brown blocked him from opening the door. Brown then reached through the window and began to punch Wilson in the face, after which he reached for and gained control of Wilson’s firearm by putting his hand over Wilson’s hand. As Brown was struggling for the gun and pointing it into Wilson’s hip, Wilson gained control of the firearm and fired it just over his lap at Brown’s hand. The physical evidence corroborates Wilson’s account in that the bullet was recovered from the door panel just over Wilson’s lap, the base of Brown’s hand displayed injuries consistent with it being within inches of the muzzle of the gun, and Wilson had injuries to his jaw consistent with being struck. Witnesses 102, 103, and 104 all state that they saw Brown with the upper portion of his body and/or arms inside the SUV as he struggled with Wilson. These witnesses have given consistent statements, and their statements are also consistent with the physical evidence.[71]
After that struggle, in which he was first shot in the hand, Brown disengaged and headed down the street, away from Wilson. The officer got out of his SUV and chased after Brown.
Brown ran at least 180 feet away from the SUV, as verified by the location of bloodstains on the roadway, which DNA analysis confirms was Brown’s blood. Brown then turned around and came back toward Wilson, falling to his death approximately 21.6 feet west of the blood in the roadway. . . . As detailed throughout this report, several witnesses stated that Brown appeared to pose a physical threat to Wilson as he moved toward Wilson. According to these witnesses, who are corroborated by blood evidence in the roadway, as Brown continued to move toward Wilson, Wilson fired at Brown in what appeared to be self-defense and stopped firing once Brown fell to the ground. Wilson stated that he feared Brown would again assault him because of Brown’s conduct at the SUV and because as Brown moved toward him, Wilson saw Brown reach his right hand under his t-shirt into what appeared to be his waistband. There is no evidence upon which prosecutors can rely to disprove Wilson’s stated subjective belief that he feared for his safety.[72]
In sum, the Justice Department’s report seemed to confirm conservative columnist Rich Lowry’s observation in the National Review magazine. “The bitter irony of the Michael Brown case is that if he had actually put his hands up and said, ‘Don’t shoot,’ he would almost certainly be alive today.”[73]
Predictably, a number of activists refuse to accept the grand jury’s refusal to indict Wilson and the Justice Department’s report as refutation of the Ferguson “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative. In their view, the system had simply found ways to protect a violent white police officer. In any case, a series of police shootings of unarmed young black men in following years sustained the continued use of the meme in other circumstances.
If the system indeed worked to cover up wrongdoing in Ferguson, it was not yet done with its machinations. Another blow was awaiting activists who insisted that Michael Brown had been murdered.
In November 2018, four years after Michael Brown’s death and three years after the Justice Department’s twin reports, a young lawyer—the son of a police officer—won an election for St. Louis County prosecuting attorney. Wesley Bell’s victory ended the twenty-seven-year reign of white prosecutor Robert P. McCulloch. Setting the same precedent as Jackie Lacey had in Los Angeles, Bell became the first black county prosecuting attorney in St. Louis County history when he took office in January 2019.[74] Among his first priorities, he proclaimed, would be reopening the Michael Brown case, which he soon did.
The hammer fell in July 2020 when Bell announced that after a five-month independent examination of the case, he had decided that there was not enough evidence to bring charges against Wilson. The decision angered activists, who cried betrayal and predicted a one-term tenure for Bell.[75] An editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper proposed a different perspective on the prosecutor’s decision. “Bell gave it his best shot to find some hidden piece of evidence or the hint of a smoking gun that would allow him to reopen the homicide case against former Officer Darren Wilson and score some semblance of justice for Brown’s family,” the paper remarked. “But the evidence simply is not there.”[76]
The angry focus on finding a case against Officer Darren Wilson tended to mute public discussion of the damning conclusions of the second Justice Department report, the review by its Civil Rights Division of the overall operations of the Ferguson Police Department. That report found that—wholly aside from the shooting of Michael Brown—the police department operated as a deeply racist machine whose principal purpose was not maintaining impartial law and order, but treating the city’s black residents like so many often overdrawn human ATM machines. The system imposed on and extracted from black residents accumulating fines and penalties for minor offenses, including not only traffic stops but even failing to keep one’s grass cut short:
The City’s emphasis on revenue generation has a profound effect on FPD’s approach to law enforcement. Patrol assignments and schedules are geared toward aggressive enforcement of Ferguson’s municipal code, with insufficient thought given to whether enforcement strategies promote public safety or unnecessarily undermine community trust and cooperation. Officer evaluations and promotions depend to an inordinate degree on “productivity,” meaning the number of citations issued. Partly as a consequence of City and FPD priorities, many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.[77]
Journalist Wesley Lowery, the Washington Post’s on-the-ground reporter in Ferguson, spent weeks in the community. He discovered that the Ferguson police revenue scheme was endemic throughout the greater St. Louis area. Police departments were known for stacking multiple violations onto a single traffic ticket. When tickets went unpaid, arrest warrants were issued. Warrants added additional fines and fees if the subject failed to make court appearances. Court dates were often scheduled at inconvenient times. According to Lowery, on the day that Michael Brown was killed Ferguson had “almost as many active warrants as it did residents.”[78]
The Ferguson system of justice was little more than a mandatory Ponzi scheme imposed on its unwilling black residents.
Residents told Lowery stories of police misconduct that “on their face seemed unbelievable.”[79] Yet the Justice Department’s report made believable the claims that residents described to Lowery—“officers who pulled them over repeatedly, nights spent in jail for unpaid speeding tickets, and, most disturbing of all, shootings and other deaths at the hands of police officers about which they and the people of Ferguson still lacked answers.”[80] Lowery found that the people of Ferguson had no relationship other than as victims, and accordingly did not trust the police. The police in turn “seemed to exhibit next to no humanity toward the pained residents they were charged with protecting.”[81]
The municipal court through which these revenue-raising offenses were processed did not act as an independent judicial body, but as a partner in fund-raising:
The municipal court does not act as a neutral arbiter of the law or a check on unlawful police conduct. Instead, the court primarily uses its judicial authority as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees that advance the City’s financial interests. This has led to court practices that violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection requirements. The court’s practices also impose unnecessary harm, overwhelmingly on African-American individuals, and run counter to public safety.[82]
The Justice Department found widespread evidence of racial bias in the administration of Ferguson’s criminal justice system:
Our investigation indicates that this disproportionate burden on African Americans cannot be explained by any difference in the rate at which people of different races violate the law. Rather, our investigation has revealed that these disparities occur, at least in part, because of unlawful bias against and stereotypes about African Americans. We have found substantial evidence of racial bias among police and court staff in Ferguson. For example, we discovered emails circulated by police supervisors and court staff that stereotype racial minorities as criminals, including one email that joked about an abortion by an African-American woman being a means of crime control.[83]
Within 105 pages of scathing detail, the report fleshed out these summary findings and, in effect, held up the Ferguson Police Department as a shameful case study confirming much of the Black Lives Matter movement’s complaints about the structure of the American criminal justice system. The deaths of Michael Brown and scores of other young black men are symptoms of a structural sickness. So long as that illness exists, so will Black Lives Matter.
Within a year, Tex McIver and Atlanta were to find out what a powerful movement grown to maturity could do.
Andrea Castillo, “How Two Black Women in L.A. Helped Build Black Lives Matter from Hashtag to Global Movement,” Los Angeles Times, June 21, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-21/black-lives-matter-los-angeles-patrisse-cullors-melina-abdullah.
Stephanie Elam and Jason Kravarik, “Black Lives Matter’s surprising target: Los Angeles County’s First Black District Attorney,” CNN, July 15, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/10/us/jackie-lacey-la-da-black-lives-matter/index.html.
Sam Levin, “‘I Will Shoot You’: Husband of LA District Attorney Pulls Gun on Black Lives Matter Activists,” The Guardian, March 2, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/02/jackie-lacey-husband-gun-black-lives-matter-la.
Misdemeanor Complaint, California v. Lacey, Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles, filed August 3, 2020; Tim Elfrink, “Husband of Los Angeles District Attorney Charged with Pointing a Gun at BLM Protesters,” Washington Post, August 5, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/08/05/jackie-lacey-blm-protesters-gun/.
Sam Levin, “Husband of LA District Attorney Charged after Pointing Gun at Black Lives Matter Protesters,” The Guardian, August 4, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/04/husband-los-angeles-district-attorney-charged-with-pointing-a-gun-at-black-lives-matter-protesters.
Lori Craig, “District Attorney Jackie Lacey: Born to be an Advocate,” University of Southern California, USC News, October 28, 2014, https://news.usc.edu/70188/district-attorney-jackie-lacey-born-to-be-an-advocate/.
Peter Beinart, “Progressives Have Short Memories,” The Atlantic, December 4, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/kamala-harris-was-impossible-bind/602971/.
Tim Arango, “Two Prosecutors Were Shaped by 1980s Los Angeles. Now They Have Opposing Views on Criminal Justice,” New York Times, October 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/los-angeles-district-attorney-george-gascon.html.
Link to tweet available in Jeremy B. White, “Schiff Renounces Jackie Lacey as Los Angeles DA Bleeds Reelection Support,” Politico, June 20, 2020, https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/06/20/schiff-renounces-jackie-lacey-as-los-angeles-da-bleeds-reelection-support-1293900.
Sentinel News Service, “Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris backs Jackie Lacey,” Los Angeles Sentinel, August 16, 2012, https://lasentinel.net/atty-gen-kamala-harris-backs-jackie-lacey.html.
Larry Altman, “Sen. Kamala Harris Endorses Gascon in Tight LA County DA Race,” Los Angeles Daily News, February 18, 2020, https://www.dailynews
.com/2020/02/18/sen-harris-endorses-gascon-in-tight-la-da-race/.
Chuck McCutcheon and David Mark, “Politics Ain’t Beanbag,” Christian Science Monitor, November 14, 2014, https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Politics-Voices/2014/1114/Politics-ain-t-beanbag.
For an overview of America’s ongoing culture war, see “American Tsunami—The Causes and Consequences of Polarization,” in “Introduction,” Tom Diaz, Tragedy in Aurora—The Culture of Mass Shootings in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 16–26.
Quoted with citations in Tom Diaz, The Last Gun—How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans and What It Will Take to Stop It (New York: The New Press, 2013), 192.
For an overview of the early Balkan Wars, see Richard C. Hall, “Balkan Wars 1912–1913,” in International Encyclopedia of the First World War, edited by Ute Daniel, et al., issued by Freie Universität Berlin, October 8, 2014, https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/balkan_wars_1912-1913.
An example of variable demographics and polling is the shift in priorities among young people from gun control to racial justice described in Giovanni Russonello, “What Happened to the Young Voters Focused on Guns?” New York Times, August 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/us/politics/gun-control-voters.html.
Andrew Glass, “Reagan Declares ‘War on Drugs,’ October 14, 1982,” Politico, October 14, 2010, https://www.politico.com/story/2010/10/reagan-declares-war-on-drugs-october-14-1982-043552.
Lawrence Bobo, James R. Kluegel, and Ryan A. Smith, “Laissez-Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Ideology,” in Steven A. Tuch and Jack K. Martin, eds., Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1997), 16.
Bobo, Kluegel, and Smith, “Laissez-Faire Racism,” 41.
Wilson, More than Just Race, 16.
Associated Press, “‘What Do You Have to Lose?’ Donald Trump Appeals for Black Vote,” The Guardian, August 19, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/20/what-do-you-have-to-lose-donald-trump-appeals-for-black-vote.
Donald J. Trump with Dave Shiflett, The America We Deserve (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 2000), 91. Excerpts here are from Scribd.com, https://www.scribd.com/book/182526899/The-America-We-Deserve. Shiflett, the book’s actual writer, later denounced Trump. Jack Moore, “Donald Trump’s Former Ghostwriter Won’t Be Voting For Donald Trump,” GQ, January 1, 2016, https://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-ghostwriter-vote.
Trump, The America We Deserve, 93.
Trump, The America We Deserve, 93.
Trump, The America We Deserve, 101.
Jeff Sessions, “Being Soft on Sentencing Means More Violent Crime. It’s Time to Get Tough Again,” Washington Post, June 16, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jeff-sessions-being-soft-on-sentencing-means-more-violent-crime-its-time-to-get-tough-again/2017/06/16/618ef1fe-4a19-11e7-9669-250d0b15f83b_story.html.
German Lopez, “Jeff Sessions Turned Trump’s ‘Tough on Crime’ Dreams into Reality,” Vox, November 7, 2018, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/7/18073074/jeff-sessions-resigns-war-on-drugs-crime.
Cornel West, “Foreword,” in Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012).
Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 6. For comprehensive statistical overviews of state, local, and federal imprisonment in the United States, see Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020,” Prison Policy Initiative, March 24, 2020, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html; and “Fact Sheet: Trends in U.S. Corrections,” The Sentencing Project, June 2019, available at https://www.sentencingproject.org/.
Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 6.
Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 2.
Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 185.
Alexander, The New Jim Crow,186.
Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 186.
Kamala D. Harris, Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2009), 14.
Josie Duffy Rice, “Cyrus Vance and the Myth of the Progressive Prosecutor,” New York Times, October 16, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/opinion/cy-vance-progressive-prosecutor.html?.
NBC 4 News, “Incumbent Jackie Lacey Conceded Defeat in the Race to Become LA County’s Top Prosecutor,” November 6, 2020, https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/politics/decision-2020/jackie-lacey-george-gascon-los-angeles-county-district-attorney-decision-2020/2453809/.
See, for example, Jose A. Del Real, Kayla Ruble, and Vickie Elmer, “For Black Activists, Biden’s Selection of Harris as Running Mate Brings Pride but also Compromise,” Washington Post, August 14, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/for-black-liberals-bidens-selection-of-harris-as-running-mate-brings-pride-but-also-compromise/2020/08/14/ecb87c82-dd87-11ea-b205-ff838e15a9a6_story.html.
Reuters, “Black Activists Praise Biden’s Pick of Harris, but Warn Challenges Remain,” New York Times, August 12, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/08/12/us/politics/12reuters-usa-election-biden-race.html?; German Lopez, “The Controversial 1994 Crime Law that Joe Biden Helped Write, Explained,” VOX, June 20, 2019, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/20/18677998/joe-biden-1994-crime-bill-law-mass-incarceration.
Tim Arango, “Two Prosecutors Were Shaped by 1980s Los Angeles.”
Lori Craig, “District Attorney Jackie Lacey: Born to be an Advocate.”
Harris, Smart on Crime, 81.
Shirley Hawkins, “Jackie Lacey Makes History,” Los Angeles Sentinel, November 7, 2012, https://lasentinel.net/jackie-lacey-makes-history.html.
Wilson, More than Just Race, 20.
Wilson, More than Just Race, 21.
“Henry Louis Gates Jr. on What Really Happened at Obama’s ‘Beer Summit,’” New York Times Magazine, January 31, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/03/magazine/henry-louis-gates-jr-interview.html.
Hawkins, “Jackie Lacey Makes History.”
This description of Trayvon Martin’s homicide is adapted with additional sourcing from Diaz, The Last Gun, 134–37.
Lizette Alvarez and Cara Buckley, “Zimmerman Is Acquitted in Killing of Trayvon Martin,” New York Times, July 14, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/15/us/george-zimmerman-verdict-trayvon-martin.html?.
Channing Joseph and Ravi Somaiya, “Demonstrations Across the Country Commemorate Trayvon Martin,” New York Times, July 20, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/us/demonstrations-across-the-country-commemorate-trayvon-martin.html?.
“Transcript: Obama Speaks of Verdict Through the Prism of African-American Experience,”
New York Times, July 19, 2013, https://www.nytimes
.com/2013/07/20/us/politics/transcript-obama-speaks-of-verdict-through-the
-prism-of-african-american-experience.html?.
This description of the organization of the Black Lives Matter movement is based primarily on “Herstory: Black Lives Matter Los Angeles,” https://www.blmla.org/herstory; and Jamil Smith, “The Power of Black Lives Matter,” Rolling Stone, June 16, 2020, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/black-lives-matter-jamil-smith-1014442/.
Smith, “The Power of Black Lives Matter.”
Smith, “The Power of Black Lives Matter.”
Castillo, “How Two Black Women in L.A. Helped Build Black Lives.”
Smith, “The Power of Black Lives Matter.”
Michael Edison Hayden, “George Zimmerman Explains His Rationale for Auctioning Pistol That Killed Trayvon Martin,” ABC News, May 24, 2016, https://abcnews.go.com/US/george-zimmerman-explains-rationale-auctioning-pistol-killed-trayvon/story?id=39330161.
James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: The New Press, 2018), xii.
Loewen, Sundown Towns, 194.
Loewen, Sundown Towns, 195.
U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department,” Washington, DC, March 4, 2015, 6.
U.S. Census Bureau, “Quick Facts: Ferguson city, Missouri,” https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fergusoncitymissouri.
Civil Rights Division, “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department,” 7.
Loewen, Sundown Towns, x.
For a short overview, see Wesley Lowery, “Black Lives Matter: Birth of a Movement,” The Guardian, January 17, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/17/black-lives-matter-birth-of-a-movement.
Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Fact Checker, “‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’ Did Not Happen in Ferguson,” March 19, 2015, Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/03/19/hands-up-dont-shoot-did-not-happen-in-ferguson/.
See, for example, Jack Dunphy, “The Stubborn Facts in Ferguson,” National Review, October 27, 2014, https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/10/stubborn-facts-ferguson-jack-dunphy/.
Jonathan Capehart, “‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’ was Built on a Lie,” Washington Post, March 16, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2015/03/16/lesson-learned-from-the-shooting-of-michael-brown/.
Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Fact Checker, “‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’ Did Not Happen in Ferguson.”
U.S. Department of Justice, “Memorandum: Department of Justice Report Regarding the Criminal Investigation into the Shooting Death of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri Police Officer Darren Wilson,” March 4, 2015, 6.
U.S. Department of Justice, “Memorandum: Department of Justice Report Regarding the Criminal Investigation,” 80.
U.S. Department of Justice, “Memorandum: Department of Justice Report Regarding the Criminal Investigation,” 7.
Rich Lowry, “The Ferguson Fraud,” National Review, November 26, 2014, https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/11/ferguson-fraud-rich-lowry/.
Sandra Jordan, “Wesley Bell Elected STL County’s First Black Prosecutor,” St. Louis American, November 6, 2018, http://www.stlamerican.com/news/local_news/victory-night-for-wesley-bell-former-ferguson-councilman-makes-history/article_40e7f5ca-e24a-11e8-b793-83813ee3637c.html.
Jessica Wolfrom and Reis Thebault, “Prosecutor Will Not Charge the Police Officer Who Shot and Killed Michael Brown in Ferguson,” Washington Post, July 30, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/30/prosecutor-will-not-charge-police-officer-who-shot-killed-michael-brown-ferguson/; “Michael Brown Shooting: Officer Will not be Charged, Top Prosecutor Says,” The Guardian, July 30, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/30/michael-brown-ferguson-shooting-darren-wilson-not-charged.
“Editorial: New Investigation, Same Disappointing Result for Michael Brown’s Family,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 1, 2020, https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/editorial/editorial-new-investigation-same-disappointing-result-for-michael-browns-family/article_5701d147-4932-5279-b693-35a8aec2ac1b.html.
Civil Rights Division, “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department,” 2.
Wesley Lowery, “They Can’t Kill Us All”: The Story of the Struggle for Black Lives (New York: Back Bay Books, 2016), 15.
Lowery, “They Can’t Kill Us All,” 10.
Lowery, “They Can’t Kill Us All,” 10.
Lowery, “They Can’t Kill Us All,” 13.
Civil Rights Division, “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department,” 3.
Civil Rights Division, “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department,” 5.