13 Days in Ferguson

by Ron Johnson

  I pivot in another direction now and see several K-9 officers restraining their dogs. The German shepherds growl, snarl, bare their teeth. Suddenly I feel as if I’ve been transported out of suburban St. Louis 2014 and dropped into the middle of Watts 1965, urban Detroit 1967, or South Central Los Angeles 1992.

  The white officers on the scene don’t have the same frame of reference and don’t realize what police dogs evoke in the hearts of African American citizens.

  Shock.

  Terror.

  Submission.

  Standing there with my uniform and badge, I share their feelings. I look at my fellow officers in their riot gear, and I know they’re wearing shields to protect themselves, but seeing them now, having abandoned their standard blues for pale-green camouflage, I can’t help but view them as soldiers. And to those who live in urban communities, these officers look like occupiers.

  Again, they may not realize the message they’re sending. They don’t see a choice. They are responding by the book, wearing their riot gear for protection against rocks and bottles. Standing in the center of this coiling, deafening chaos, I watch helplessly as the already tenuous link between law enforcement and the community snaps and severs. The police have flooded the neighborhood to guard the gates of the community. But the community itself has been disconnected and set adrift.

  For the first time since I was a child, I feel fear.

  I have worked SWAT. I have kicked in doors, charged into dark houses, chased armed fugitives into the woods on pitch-black nights, and confronted a cornered perpetrator as he went for his gun, but I have never felt this kind of crippling fear. I’ve felt the adrenaline pumping and my heart pounding, but I never felt fear.

  I’m not afraid for my well-being. I feel a different sort of fear: a deeper fear, an all-encompassing fear. This fear shakes me. Slices me.

  I’m afraid we have come to an end—an end to complacency, to good behavior, to the acceptance of an unacceptable status quo, to conditions that are unfair and unequal, conditions that must change. Here on the smoke-filled streets of Ferguson, everything has suddenly and irrevocably changed. The truths I knew—the truths I thought I knew, the truths we were told—have been revealed as lies. There is no going back now. The people I see, the people I know, have had enough.

  I fear the unknown. Or maybe I fear the known. I can see what happens next. More of this. More fires. More violence. More looting. More chaos. Chaos leads to fear.

  Perhaps most of all, I fear that what I see and feel all around me—the people’s collective pain—has only just begun, and I don’t know what to do for that pain. I feel helpless. I feel lost. I don’t know what lies ahead, except more pain. I know we face a troubled tomorrow. I know that for sure. I fear the future—all of our futures.

  I fear the future most of all.

  Later, at a hastily assembled command post in a strip mall across from Target, a short drive from West Florissant, I huddle with the incident commander—Chief Jon Belmar of St. Louis County—and other officers to receive briefings on the rapidly changing situation in Ferguson. Together we search for explanations.

  What do we know? Not much. Social media has blown up. Mainstream and national news outlets have descended on Ferguson. So have self-declared news outlets—young people with cell phones and a few thousand Twitter or Facebook followers. People from neighboring towns, feeling outraged or opportunistic or both, have joined the protest. Police officers have rounded up rioters and protesters and made arrests.

  I wonder why looters torched the QuikTrip. What does the QuikTrip have to do with Michael Brown? The sad, strange answer is nothing. The looters made a mistake. They acted on bad information. They’d heard that Michael Brown stole a pack of cigarillos from the service station. I shake my head. I know that’s impossible. I know at QuikTrip they keep all the cigarettes and cigars behind the counter. Michael Brown couldn’t get back there. (Later we’ll learn that he did steal some cigarillos—from another store. The looters set fire to the wrong store. They burned down the QuikTrip for no reason. Logic does not live in chaos.)

  Sometime after 2:00 a.m., with helicopters still hovering over West Florissant and bathing the area in long streams of floodlight, the smell of smoke and ash drifts up from the remains of the QuikTrip, now nothing more than a smoldering shell. The streets are nearly empty; most of the police officers and protesters have scattered. After several hours of offering support, consultation, and observation to the incident commanders, I head for my car. I remain in a state of shock.

  Police have made thirty arrests. Two officers were injured by rocks and bottles hurled at them from the shadows. Rioters overturned at least one police car, smashed in the rear windshield of another, and looted and vandalized twelve businesses along West Florissant. The sound of gunfire intermittently cracked through the night.

  I pull into my driveway at 2:30, cut the engine, and sit behind the wheel for a few moments. I can’t catch my breath. I stare through the windshield into the night, hyperventilating, closing my eyes, trying to calm myself.

  “You got to keep moving,” I say, murmuring the wisdom of my father, words he lived by, words I live by. “Live moment to moment.”

  Finally, settling myself, I get out of the car and trudge to the house.

  I don’t sleep at all.

  “THESE PEOPLE”

  * * *

  Empathy must be cultivated.

  MICHAEL ERIC DYSON

  TEARS WE CANNOT STOP

  LYING IN BED, coming out of a fractured daze, I’m not sure if I’m dreaming. Images flicker furiously in front of my eyes—Michael Brown’s body lying in the street, protesters clogging West Florissant, rows of police in riot gear, the QuikTrip in flames.

  Michael Brown’s body lying in the street.

  I gasp and rise to a sitting position. The images fade, replaced by the familiarity of my bedroom. I feel numb. And then a thick sense of doom grips me.

  Life as I know it has changed.

  Today I will not report to my usual job as a troop commander in the Missouri State Highway Patrol, overseeing more than three hundred employees dedicated to the primary mission of promoting highway safety. Instead I will report to Ferguson, to Chief Jon Belmar, the incident commander.

  Incident commander.

  The word feels flimsy, inadequate.

  I blink myself into reality.

  Reality.

  I’m not sure what that means anymore.

  As I lower my feet to the floor and rise, allowing my legs to carry me toward the bathroom, a heaviness descends. Something enormous weighs me down, a gravity I cannot grasp.

  At the command post, I’m assigned to provide administrative support for Chief Belmar. One of my first responsibilities is to designate and deploy groups of troopers and one of our SWAT teams to Ferguson. From this point forward, I will coordinate whatever trooper presence Chief Belmar requests and keep my command staff informed of new developments. When not on the phone, I will attend briefings with representatives from the two other main agencies who have been assigned here—St. Louis City and St. Louis County.

  Jon Belmar maintains a calm and steady presence, even though he’s operating in a well of tension, uncertainty, and—at times—chaos. The sheer number of people on the scene threatens to overload our circuits. In addition to an ever-changing array of protesters, citizens, and media gathered outside, representatives from more than fifty law enforcement agencies have arrived in Ferguson, many of them self-deployed officers who have come to offer their help.

  The morning ticks by. We discuss preparations—what we might do if and when. We consider various contingencies, with everyone from our assembled group of experienced law-enforcement leaders offering suggestions, tactics, and potential responses for both best-case possibilities and worst-case scenarios.

  Nothing feels familiar or even exactly appropriate. I sense that Jon, like the rest of us, is struggling to find his footing. No one here has ever faced anything remotely
like what we saw last night. We are in uncharted territory.

  Somebody refers to the National Incident Management System (NIMS), a set of procedures put out by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). We have adhered to the first step of the NIMS guidelines—setting up a command post—but last night’s protests seem to take us beyond the parameters of the NIMS protocol. During a break from the briefings, I wander through the small command post, feeling on edge, antsy, and far away from what is happening outside.

  Too far away.

  In the afternoon, I drive up West Florissant and pull over to what had been the QuikTrip gas station less than twenty-four hours ago. I want to see what remains in the light of day. I squint into the sun and see a charred husk of a building. A few people mill around the still-smoking structure, taking pictures with their phones.

  Across the street, several business owners sweep up glass and debris outside their shattered front windows and splintered doors. Some nail plywood sheets over the openings. Others walk through their stores and back out to the sidewalk, shaking their heads in disbelief, their shoes crunching through the shards of glass. I hear a smattering of voices. They talk about the damage, the looters, the night. They look shell shocked. To me, West Florissant looks like a bombed-out street in Iraq or Syria.

  I look back at the QuikTrip, and a moment of disbelief swamps me.

  Has this really happened?

  I picture myself filling up my car at those gas pumps or buying gum or Life Savers at the counter inside, strolling down the street, stepping into a store to buy a soda.

  I suddenly feel violated. The pain I felt oozing from others on the street last night is my pain. The protests, the unrest, are happening to me—in my heart and in my home. I wear the uniform and the badge, and I’m sworn to protect and serve and keep the peace. But Ferguson is not some isolated, foreign dot on a map. It’s my hometown. My place. Ferguson belongs to me. It lives within me.

  All day long I hear the undercurrent of a distant, approaching drumbeat.

  Footsteps.

  More and more footsteps.

  As each hour passes, more people arrive—first the protesters and then the police, the press, and the politicians. Some have come because they believe they must be here—including a state senator, whose presence surprises me. Others I believe have come only to be seen. Three days after Michael Brown’s death, Ferguson has become a kind of landing point.

  We have chosen to wage the war here.

  Nobody says those words out loud, but nobody has to—it’s what I feel, what everyone feels. The nation has chosen Ferguson as a battleground. The name alone has become an instant symbol, a statement.

  More people arrive by the minute, by the carload, by the busload, and West Florissant teems with protesters. As night falls, the anger and pain simmer, boil, and then explode, like a lid flying off of an untended pressure cooker. The heat of the summer day scorching the pavement equals the heat of the anger pulsing through the mass of people who now begin to advance. That surging anger—that pain—has become their engine.

  A day later, still no new information about the shooter has surfaced. The community narrative remains unrefuted: A young, unarmed black man was murdered by the police.

  That cannot happen here. But it has.

  By late afternoon, the fury returns. Protesters begin to chant, “Whose streets? Our streets!”

  Rioters mix with peaceful protesters, and soon the police can’t tell the difference. Rioters heave bottles. They sling rocks. They fire guns in the air. Shirts off, fists waving, voices raised, the people advance in waves with signs held high, chanting, “Hands up, don’t shoot!”

  The police on the streets in their camouflage riot gear form a human barricade. They brace themselves behind their shields, like soldiers preparing for battle. I know what’s running through their minds, but they don’t know what to say. They don’t have the right words, the right sentiments, the right experience to draw from. They want to voice the confusion they feel as they try to do what they see as their responsibility.

  We didn’t burn the QuikTrip.

  We didn’t loot the stores.

  We’re here to restore order.

  I see both sides. I belong to both sides. But there shouldn’t be sides. Taking sides implies a winner and a loser. There are no winners here. Even if some police see it as a battle to be won, I see only a no-win situation.

  I feel as if I’m floundering, trying to figure this out. There are no by-the-book rules to guide us. NIMS doesn’t seem to be enough. Or even right. Nobody has written a manual for Ferguson.

  Before the officers lob tear gas into the crowd that gathers near the QuikTrip, and before they shoot PepperBalls and beanbag rounds into a mob on West Florissant, I drift in and out of pockets of people. Referring to Michael Brown’s shooting, young men shout, “We want answers!” But other young men, seeing me, approach and don’t talk about Michael Brown at all. They talk about their lives. One says, “You don’t understand. We don’t have jobs!”

  At first, their pleas knock me back. “I do understand,” I say after a moment. “I’m listening.”

  “No, man, you can’t understand. You have a job.”

  “Talk to me. Tell me.”

  Before our conversation can continue, these young men are swallowed up by the crowd, or they see the police advancing and run. Another young man, who looks to be in his early twenties, about the same age as my son, comes right up to me, stares at me for a moment, and then says, “Sir.”

  “Yes?”

  “For the first time in my life, I feel that I’m part of something.”

  I find his words heartbreaking.

  Before I can respond, I feel someone’s hand on my shoulder.

  “We have to go.”

  I turn and face a trooper I know well, a man I have served with for twenty-seven years. A white man. He and his wife and Lori and I have often attended work functions together. We’ve laughed and enjoyed each other’s company. I consider him a friend.

  “What?” I say, not understanding.

  “We have to go.”

  “Why?”

  I catch a whiff of it then. His fear. Oozing out and engulfing us both. Nearby, more people amass, spilling onto the street. I sense people moving in behind us. Troopers.

  “You’re comfortable here with these people,” he says. “A lot of us are not.”

  These people.

  I can’t speak. I feel as if he has slapped me across the face. I start to say something but hold myself back. The trooper outranks me. We need to talk. But we cannot have that talk right now, in the middle of all this chaos. The trooper pivots away toward two other officers. I see a third trooper, another white man, who shifts his weight uncomfortably. I can tell he has heard our conversation because he looks away, his eyes fixed on the pavement.

  “You okay?” I ask him.

  He says nothing. He keeps his head down.

  The first trooper rushes toward me again. “I told you we have to leave.”

  At this moment, I know that everything in my life has changed. This man, my coworker, a man I’ve called a friend for twenty-seven years, no longer sees me. He sees through my uniform. He sees only the color of my skin.

  I can no longer help myself. Heart racing, I say, “What do you mean by these people?”

  “I’m saying that the people here are not going to accept me the way they accept you.”

  “These people,” I say again softly.

  “You’re being overly—” He tilts his head and glares at me. “Are you calling me a bigot? Do you think I’m a bigot?”

  I don’t want to answer him. I don’t want to continue this conversation. I want to flee. I turn away before I say something I will regret, but I know I’ve already lost a friend. Then I realize: He has never truly been a friend.

  We drive back to the command post in silence. As we ride, a scene from my childhood flashes before me: I am in grade school. My family has moved from an al
l-black neighborhood in St. Louis City to an all-white neighborhood in the suburbs. We are, in fact, the only black family on our street, and my brother, sister, and I are the only black kids in our new school. My first week in third grade, one of the kids calls me the N-word. I’ve heard the word before, of course, but only from other black kids who said it in a familiar, almost joking way. I have never heard the word directed at me with hatred.

  That’s how I feel driving back to command with that trooper. He hadn’t used the word, but he might as well have.

  We pull up in front of the command post, and I storm out of the car. I hurry into the storefront that serves as our on-site headquarters and find my boss talking on the telephone. I mouth that I need to speak to him, and I pace the room, fidgety, on edge, as I wait for him to complete his call. I rub my hand over my shaved head, and it comes up slick. Even with the air-conditioning on full blast I can feel myself sweating. The trooper steps inside the door and walks over to me.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” he says. “I want to know. Do you think I’m a bigot?”

  I feel my face burn. “When you say these people,” I reply as evenly as I can, “you’re answering the question yourself.”

  He starts to speak, but I cut him off. “You may not even be conscious of what you said, or the words you used, but certain words have certain meanings. The meaning here was clear.”

  He looks at me hard. He says nothing, but his eyes narrow, his pupils becoming like pinpricks.

  “Emotions are high right now,” I say. “People are upset. There’s a lot of anger. But there is no way we should have left that street.”