The War on Cops. Heather Mac Donald
block Brown from proceeding. At that point, Brown reached into Wilson’s car and started pounding him and grabbing for his gun. Wilson fired, and Brown ran off. Wilson gave chase on foot. Brown then turned and charged toward Wilson. At no point did Wilson fire at Brown when Brown’s back was turned or when he was on the ground.
As for the now-iconic “Hands up, don’t shoot” claim, the DOJ report is withering: “There are no credible witness accounts that state that Brown was clearly attempting to surrender when Wilson shot him. As detailed throughout this report, those witnesses who say so have given accounts that could not be relied upon in a prosecution because they are irreconcilable with the physical evidence, inconsistent with the credible accounts of other eyewitnesses, inconsistent with the witness’s own prior statements, or in some instances, because the witnesses have acknowledged that their initial accounts were untrue.”
In other words, no prosecutor with any understanding of his professional duties would think of going forward with this case, since there is no evidence to support it. This is not a standard-of-proof issue; it is an absence-of-any-case-whatsoever issue.
The report also explains why Brown’s body lay on the ground for four hours after he was killed, before being taken away by an ambulance—another plank in the “Black Lives Matter” indictment of the allegedly racist treatment of Brown. The reason for the delay is that detectives’ efforts to process the crime scene were continuously interrupted by protesters who were encroaching on their work, chanting, “Kill these motherf—ers” and “Kill the police.” What sounded like automatic gunfire was reported in the area, resulting in further suspension of activity until more backup arrived.
The initial news stories on the Brown killing contained several key elements of Wilson’s self-defense, which the Justice report would vindicate, but they were immediately purged from the dominant narrative. They resurfaced periodically: a caller to a local radio show in mid-August, for example, reiterated the essential facts; in October, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the autopsy and several witnesses corroborated Wilson’s account of the encounter. (A San Francisco pathologist who had seconded the autopsy conclusions for the Post-Dispatch story recanted a day later, after coming under attack for her initial assessment.) None of this had the slightest effect on the anti-Wilson juggernaut.
Eyewitnesses who corroborated Wilson’s account were intimidated away from cooperating with the police. The Canfield Green neighborhood, where the shooting occurred, was plastered with SNITCHES GET STITCHES signs. A 74-year-old black male who believed that the shooting was justified had told a friend two days after the incident that he “would have f—ing shot that boy, too.” He refused to give formal statements to county or federal authorities, however. He would rather go to jail than testify before the grand jury, he said, so enormous was the community pressure to support a “hands up” surrender narrative. A 53-year-old black male called a police tip line after seeing Brown’s companion lie about the incident on national television. He, too, stated that the shooting was justified, but told authorities that he would deny everything if his phone call were traced. He was served with a grand-jury subpoena but refused to honor it. A 27-year-old biracial male said that it appeared to him that Wilson’s life was in jeopardy, describing Brown as a “threat” moving at a “full charge.” At the scene, as angry crowds were gathering and collecting false narratives about the shooting, two black women asked him to recount what he had seen into their cell phones. When he told them that they would not like what he had to say, they called him a “white motherf—er” and other racial slurs. A 31-year-old black female initially told investigators that she had seen Wilson fire shots into Brown’s back as he lay dead in the street. When challenged with the autopsy findings that revealed no shots to the back, she confessed to making up her story. “You’ve gotta live the life to know it,” she said. In fact, she then admitted, it looked like Wilson’s life was in danger as Brown was charging him. When authorities tried to serve her with a subpoena, however, she blocked her door with a couch.
In short, a reign of terror against witnesses had served to sustain a false narrative. The exposure of the hoax should have demolished the antipolice movement, since its core conceit—that police officers are the biggest threat facing young black men today—was launched off a phony story. The idea that local district attorneys are incapable of prosecuting shootings by cops derived from the claim that the grand jury’s failure to indict Officer Wilson represented a grotesque miscarriage of justice. It turns out that the only reason that the prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, took the case to the grand jury at all was political (as explained in Chapter 3). Under circumstances that were not so politically charged, the case would have been thrown out from the start. Yet there is now a dangerous campaign to create special prosecutors dedicated solely to indicting cops for using deadly force.
Meanwhile, true believers either rejected the Brown report entirely or adopted the “it could just as well have been true” apologetics that followed the discrediting of the gang-rape hoaxes at Duke University and the University of Virginia. Benjamin Crump, attorney for Brown’s parents, complained on Face the Nation that the Justice Department was “sanitizing all these shootings of people of color who are unarmed.” Crump invoked Holder’s own complaints regarding the purportedly excessive standard of proof as grounds for dismissing the report. Democratic strategist Donna Brazile told the New York Times: “‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ has become a larger symbol of the desire to prove one’s innocence. In many ways, it will always resonate as a symbol of an unarmed dead teenager lying for hours on the street.” Never mind that that symbol never happened. Racist cops gunning down innocent black men in cold blood is simply too good a story to retract. “Hands up, don’t shoot” has lived on among diehard cop-haters.
The mainstream media quickly turned their full attention to the second Justice Department report, on Ferguson’s police department, consigning the Brown examination to oblivion. The two reports were produced by different sections of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and it shows. The report on Michael Brown, written by the Criminal Section in conjunction with the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Missouri, displays a striking understanding of police work. It respects long-standing legal presumptions protecting police discretion from unjustified second-guessing. The report on the Ferguson Police Department came out of the Special Litigation Section, known for its hostility to the police and staffed almost exclusively by graduates of left-wing advocacy groups, as Hans von Spakovsky noted in The National Interest. No wonder it strains so hard to cobble together a case of systemic intentional discrimination out of data that show only that law enforcement has a disparate impact on blacks.
The most disturbing section of that second report consists of anecdotes about unconstitutional stops and arrests made by Ferguson police officers. These accounts portray rude, aggressive cops who abuse their authority and trash-talk to suspects. In a November 2013 incident, for example, an officer allegedly approaches five black young people listening to music in their car. He claims to have smelled marijuana and places them under arrest for gathering for the purpose of engaging in illegal activity. The officer allegedly finds no marijuana in the car but detains and charges them anyway, taking some teens home to their parents and delivering others to jail. In a summer 2012 stop, an officer accosts a man sitting in a car with illegally tinted windows. The officer groundlessly accuses the driver of being a pedophile—the car is next to a children’s park—tells him not to use his cell phone, and orders him out of his car for a pat-down without reason to believe that he is armed. The driver refuses to allow the officer to search his car. The officer then points his gun at the suspect’s head and arrests him for making a false declaration because the suspect initially gave his name as “Mike” rather than “Michael” and provided an address that differed from the one on his driver’s license, among other charges.
If these incidents and others are true exactly as alleged, they suggest a police agency deplorably ignorant of the Fourth Amendment and grossly deficient in courtesy and respect. But are they true? And if so, do they represent normal procedure in the department? After the implosion of the Michael Brown martyr myth, accepting one-sided accounts of interactions between officers and civilians seems risky. In New York City,