Ferguson: Is the Damage Done?

The photo to the left made the rounds via Twitter yesterday, circulated by @jRehling. The inscription read, "The new head of the Ferguson response is marching WITH the protesters and suddenly military weapons aren't needed."

Oh, if it only were that easy to resolve police-community problems. As later events proved, no "sudden" respite was forthcoming, and there was plenty of further unrest and violence going on. People are still upset. The killer of Michael Brown has not been arrested yet. And people are very cognizant of the spark that started the fire of unrest in the first place.

Bay Area readers will probably recall the protests in Oakland after Johannes Mehserle's trial for killing Oscar Grant ended in a conviction for involuntary manslaughter. Four years ago, blogging about those protests over at CCC, I wrote:

While older literature from the 1960s analyzed riots and community action in itself, newer studies of riots by criminologists and sociologists portray a very complex picture of how such events develop. It is important to see, as Michael Keith argues, race riots within the larger context of race relations, and to acknowledge the fact that a great part of the problem is not the riot itself but the moral panic generated by the riots. I would not go as far as to say that the riots would not happen if not for the projected police response. But seeing thousands of officers, helicopters, and various devices in Oakland yesterday did seem to communicate an expectation that something very foul was about to occur. This sort of overpreparedness communicates to citizens the expectation of violence and crime. In this interesting paper by Clifford Stott and Stephen Reicher, they interview police officers, showing how tense situations can escalate through the communication between police and protesters at the event.

I think that is true here as well, but there is always plenty of temptation in these situations to escalate, fearing that community reaction will not mirror police calm unless there's readiness. I've seen (and, during grad school, participated in) research conducted on sports events that suggests that audience violence in games increases with the presence of police. Expectations are not everything, and unrest is not in the eye of the beholder, but they do shape reality. And once there is unrest and anger in the air, expectations become, as we've tragically seen in Ferguson, incredibly important.

As an aside note relating to the militarization: I've started thinking that our traditional distinctions between international warfare and domestic conflicts is becoming, if not obsolete, at least much more blurry. What with armies increasingly engaged in traditional policing acts, and police units engaged in warfare, it's becoming harder to tell whether the oppressed public/feared enemy is the "other" or part of the collective "us." I expect international law scholars to be writing about this, if they aren't already.