They Can't Kill Us All

by Wesley Lowery

  These years of posts prepared Netta for her role as one of the protest movement’s chief on-the-ground correspondents in Ferguson. In fact, it was a friend she had made online who first saw news of the officer-involved shooting in St. Louis on August 9, 2014 and flagged the tweets for Netta, who at the time was home at her aunt’s house, where she had been living since her mother’s death.

  Netta spent two or three hours glued to her Twitter timeline—searching for updates from eyewitnesses and tweeting in outrage at news outlets that seemed already, before much if any information had been released, to have decided that Mike Brown had deserved his fate. Then, around 9:30 p.m., Netta and a friend decided to make the drive to Ferguson and see the scene for themselves.

  They approached Canfield Drive with apprehension. Netta had seen photos on Twitter of police trying to wash the blood from the street. Soapsuds, now illuminated by a streetlight, did little to make the pooled blood vanish. “It was devastating,” Netta recalled. “It made me feel like his body might as well have still been out there.”

  As she paced the streets, taking video clips that she uploaded to Instagram and photos that she sent out on Twitter, Netta heard the words of several young children, residents of the Canfield Green apartment complex, repeating over and over in her mind. “I kept hearing them say that they saw Mike Mike get killed.”

  With that morbid chorus on loop in her brain, Netta approached another local woman, who said she was a nurse and that when she had raced into the street to render care to Michael Brown’s body, one of the responding officers had raised his weapon in her face and told her to “get the fuck back!”

  But Netta wasn’t surprised by the police response, or by the perceived hostility. It was only a matter of time, she figured, before the local media began attacking the character of the man whose blood was still seeping into the ground in front of her.

  She’d been born and raised in St. Louis. She knew how this works.

  For decades, some in St. Louis had boasted proudly about their city’s relative racial harmony. It was one of the only Midwestern metropolises, they were quick to note, not to have seen violent riots break out during the 1960s.

  But it didn’t take much research, or many conversations with black residents, to see that there was little racial harmony here. One day, months into covering Ferguson, I realized that, if anything, this city felt like a place that was constantly overcompensating, trying to convince you that everything was going to be just fine: move along, there’s no race or racial tension to be seen here! But the robust memorial of Mike Brown, the protests that still raged more than a hundred days after his death, and the shells of burned-out storefronts told a much different story.

  When I arrived, it had been almost two decades since Neal Peirce had first come to St. Louis. A journalist by trade, Peirce spent much of the 1980s and 1990s writing comprehensive investigative reports on the status of America’s cities. Along with his coauthor, Curtis Johnson, Peirce would parachute into a major city to take the locale’s temperature economically, socially, and racially by interviewing the movers and shakers—zooming out to ten thousand feet in cities that often were used to little more than granular coverage. These “Peirce Reports” would often later be published in their entirety by the local newspaper in whichever town was profiled, serving at the time and now, decades later, as some of the most comprehensive and revealing assessments of many of America’s big cities pre-Internet, when it took much more than a few clicks and Google searches to collate deep social science and research with reporting. With an agreement struck to have the final product considered for publication in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Peirce and Johnson began their work.

  “I recall two poignant moments,” said Curtis Johnson, who cowrote the 1997 reports about St. Louis with Peirce, when I asked him two decades later about their research. “First, when one leader, when we asked what he would regard as evidence that St. Louis was making progress on race relations, his response revealed the quiet seething among blacks. He said something like, ‘When white leaders quit picking our leaders for us.’ That really said it all. He had no particular animus and went out of his way to show respect for St. Louis leaders. But it was the patronizing that mostly got to him. Obviously, many less privileged blacks would have been more than quietly seething.”

  As they finished their interviews, Johnson and Peirce increasingly found leaders—both black and white—voicing concern that if St. Louis didn’t initiate honest and robust efforts to address structural and systemic inequities, a day of reckoning would, sooner or later, arrive. “I hope the report generates fire in the belly and stimulates fear,” Thomas Purcell, who ran Laclede’s Landing Redevelopment Corporation, which aimed to bring new business to a historic district downtown, told Peirce when they sat for an interview. “St. Louis, if you don’t fear and do something about it, there are consequences.”

  After conducting dozens of interviews, Peirce and Johnson issued an urgent prognosis, which was published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on March 11, 1997:

  Race pervades every St. Louis regional issue. It feeds the sprawl and all the costs of sprawl as people run from inner-city minorities. It explains the disparities in school funding and the extraordinary percentages of private and parochial school enrollments. It limits the geographic appeal of the new rail system because far-out suburbs don’t want too easy a connection to the core.

  No one even bothers to deny that race relations in the St. Louis region are a tough, seemingly intractable problem. Some African-Americans say it’s a “volcano destined to erupt,” that the apparently calm racial atmosphere masks a seething cauldron of resentment that will inevitably explode when today’s black leaders, nurtured in the hopefulness of the civil rights revolution, yield to a next, less patient generation.

  It took longer than they may have imagined, but by 2014 the magma beneath the volcano that was Greater St. Louis’s intractable problem had begun to stir.

  For decades, many of the black residents of St. Louis County had complaints not just about policing, but also about why they had so little access to quality housing, why the region’s leaders couldn’t provide the number of jobs they so desperately sought, and why the trains and buses to get them to those jobs were inconveniently routed around the black parts of town.

  Ferguson is in all ways suburban. One of a series of small municipalities that make up “North County,” the city’s residential streets cut long, weaving paths lined with duplexes. As they have for years, basketball hoops and discarded footballs rest in many front yards. Most of the suburbs were, for most of modern history, majority white. For generations, locals recall, they were “sundown towns” where blacks could work as domestics or handymen but dared not attempt to live.

  But in recent decades a massive migration of black residents, both from surrounding suburbs and from parts of East St. Louis, transformed these small cities. According to US Census numbers, Ferguson was 99 percent white in 1970. A decade later, blacks made up 14 percent of the population, and by 1990 they were 25 percent of the city’s population.

  By the turn of the century, Ferguson had become a majority—52 percent—black suburb. Its elected and appointed city leadership struggled to keep up. The council remained almost all white (white councilors recruited the only two black candidates to ever run), and soon the city was dealing with the distrust and suspicion that come when an almost-all-white police force is charged with monitoring a majority-minority city.

  “The American dream is if I work hard, bust my rear end, no matter where I start I can put myself in a better place,” said Jason Johnson, a political scientist at Hiram College, who grew up in Greater St. Louis and traveled to Ferguson to witness the protests. “These aren’t just protests of hopeless downtrodden black folk…these are protests born of expectation. Of people who say: ‘I moved up here to get away from this crap.’ It’s the notion that no matter what you do, many African-Americans still feel like they’re denied the American
dream.”

  In hundreds of interviews, residents of the North County suburbs told me heartbreaking stories of arbitrary traffic stops and aggressive street stops and patdowns, emergency calls ignored by police, and the enduring perception that the deaths of black and brown men are neither fully investigated nor solved—especially deaths at the hands of police officers.

  “There is this overwhelming feeling that they can shoot us, they can beat us—we can even have this stuff on video and the police officer still gets off,” said Patricia Bynes, a member of the local Democratic committee who was a regular at the protests. “There is the idea that police officers are untouchables.”

  This is why a local minister like Derrick Robinson left his family night after night, grabbed a cardboard sign, and ventured into the thick summer heat or biting winter to cry “Justice for Mike Brown!” into the stone-cold faces of armed police officers. It’s why he stood on the same street corner night after night, waiting for something to go sideways—maybe tonight it’s tear gas and rubber bullets, or maybe tonight it will be gunshots bursting from an illicit weapon fired toward the crowds from the window of a high-rise apartment.

  In Ferguson, protest was a means for the many to assert, with unified voice, their humanity. Disruptive protest brought with it the promise of finally making the system listen.

  “Indict, convict, send that killa cop to jail, the whole damn system is guilty as hell!”

  Just a few days into covering the Ferguson protests, a question constantly leveled by editors back in Washington, as well as skeptics of the protests, was: What, exactly, do these protesters want? A grand jury was considering whether to charge the officers, after all.

  Before Ferguson, most of the nation—and many of us in the media—knew very little about the process for charging a police officer with a crime. If a shooting was unjustified, most of us assumed, the officer would be charged.

  Months after the Ferguson grand jury concluded its work, two of my colleagues teamed with Phil Stinson, a professor at Bowling Green State University, to conduct the most thorough review to date of how often, if ever, police officers are charged.

  Out of what was likely more than ten thousand fatal police shootings by on-duty police officers between 2004 and 2014, just fifty-four officers had been charged with a crime—and in just a handful of those cases were the officers convicted.

  The people of Ferguson didn’t need that analysis. They already knew.

  Among the first things that typically happen after a police shooting is a round of calls for a special prosecutor. Local prosecutors rely on police officers every day for both evidence and testimony, so the logic goes that a local prosecutor may be inclined against aggressively pursuing charges against police officers whom he likely knows and on whose work he relies.

  St. Louis County’s elected prosecutor is Bob McCulloch, a well-known power player in Missouri’s Democratic circles who has close ties to Governor Jay Nixon and Senator Claire McCaskill—who at the time of Michael Brown’s shooting were the two most powerful Democrats in a once-red state that over time had begun to purple.

  McCulloch came from a cop family—his father was a St. Louis policeman. When Bob was just twelve years old, his father was killed in the line of duty, during a shooting involving a black suspect. McCulloch’s brother and a nephew are both St. Louis police officers, and his mother spent twenty years as the department’s clerk.

  The death of his father, in part, inspired McCulloch to pursue a career as a police officer, but he lost a leg after a bout with cancer during his high school years and settled instead for a long career as the county prosecutor.

  McCulloch argued that he was elected to be the county’s prosecutor, and that was not a responsibility he was going to relinquish willingly. And soon, Missouri’s Democratic power brokers publicly stood by their prosecutor.

  “I believe that Bob McCulloch will be fair,” McCaskill declared in an interview with MSNBC, one of just a handful of on-the-record statements she provided during the August round of unrest in Ferguson. “You have to understand the only allegation against this prosecutor is he can’t be fair. Well, what does that say about the people of this country where people are elected? You don’t come along and just remove someone from that job unless it is under the powers of an emergency.”

  As his allies began to take to the media to defend him, I approached McCulloch’s office and asked how many times they had previously considered charges against a police officer and how many times, if any, they had secured the indictment of an officer.

  It took them a while—the prosecutor’s office didn’t keep records in a way that was searchable, and like many government agencies, the St. Louis County prosecutor’s office had seen significant employee turnover in the years since McCulloch first took the job in 1991. Eventually, they produced a roster of thirty-three cases, put together by their office staff’s collective memory, in which McCulloch had pursued the indictment of a police officer. But of that list, just a handful of cases had resulted in charges against an officer for exhibiting force while on the job. None of the indictments were for an on-duty shooting.

  Among those cases was the 2000 Jack in the Box shooting. Two unarmed black men, Earl Murray and Ronald Beasley, were shot and killed in St. Louis County, sparking the largest police protests that St. Louis had seen until Ferguson came along a decade and a half later. Agents had been zeroing in on Murray, a small-time drug dealer, who earlier in the day had asked his friend Beasley, who worked as an auto mechanic, if he could help him fix his car, which had been acting up. McCulloch to date has refused to release video evidence in the shooting, and said at the time of the investigation that he agreed with the decision of the grand jury not to charge the two officers involved.

  Then, in a series of interviews, McCulloch called the two slain men “bums” who had “spread destruction in the community.” I went back and forth half a dozen times with McCulloch’s spokesman, who had been inundated with media requests. In one of our last correspondences, the spokesman conceded that, with the perspective of a decade, perhaps there was little honor in calling the dead names.

  “In retrospect, Mr. McCulloch believes Murray and Beasley should have been described as ‘convicted felons’ rather than ‘bums,’ as that would have been a more accurate description,” the spokesman told me in an email.

  At the time, local leaders and Al Sharpton had led demonstrations and blocked freeways as they called for an indictment. But, as was almost always true in the case of police violence between the early-1990s beating of Rodney King and the 2014 shooting of Mike Brown, soon enough, the commotion died down.

  But the black residents of St. Louis County hadn’t forgotten the Jack in the Box shooting, or the way the slain men—especially Beasley, who hadn’t even been a target of the drug sting—had been described by the county prosecutor. They remembered vividly.

  One afternoon, as I worked my way up and down the street protests, a middle-aged woman walked right up to me, asked if I was the reporter she had heard about on TV—the sole advantage of our arrests was that Ryan Reilly and I had become recognizable pseudocelebrities among the protest crowd—and then urged me to focus my next story on McCulloch.

  “That’s the real story, that’s the real scandal!” this woman insisted, before she went on to compare the mild-mannered St. Louis County prosecutor to the notorious public safety commissioner who faced off with Martin Luther King, Jr., in Birmingham in 1963. “He’s our Bull Connor!”

  But despite calls for him to step aside that were sustained from the day Mike Brown was killed until the day a grand jury declined to indict Darren Wilson, McCulloch was consistent in his refusal. “I have absolutely no intention of walking away from the duties and responsibilities entrusted in me by the people in this community,” he told a local radio station in August 2014. “I have done it for twenty-four years, and I’ve done, if I do say so myself, a very good job.”

  There would be no special prosecutor. An
d there would be no indictment.

  What makes a young man stand before a police line and throw a water bottle toward their armor? It’s certainly part ego. And it’s part the foolishness of youth.

  But in Ferguson, it was also at least part helplessness.

  These residents, time and time again, offered a discouraging assessment of the plight that was their reality: If, no matter what a police officer does to you, he or she will not be charged with a crime, why does it matter if you disperse at those officers’ commands? If it doesn’t matter how the police—the system—treats you, does it matter how you treat them?

  Much of my job as a reporter consists of desperate and, more often than not, failed attempts to convince people with no reason to trust me that this is exactly what they should do.

  A fellow reporter once remarked to me that a reporter deals in the extremes—showing up on what is either the best or the worst day of your life, stepping up to your doorstep to find either elation or pain. We ring your phone the morning after you’ve claimed the winning Powerball ticket. And we show up, notebook tucked in our back pocket, the day after your mother or brother has been killed. Maybe it was a car accident, or a murder, or a police shooting. How did you find out? And will you tell us more about them? We’re so sorry for your loss. Oh, and by the way, you don’t happen to have a color photo, do you?

  It’s not an exact science. Sometimes those closest to a news story are eager to talk to you and every other reporter, and other times just to one or two lucky souls who happen to show up with their notebook at the exact right moment. Other times, no matter the technique, no number of attempts or approaches will convince someone to submit to an interview. But every reporter works their own advantages, developed by trial and error. I knew immediately which tack I’d take with Netta Elzie, whose trust later became one of my advantages when seeking interviews with other residents and activists.