"THIS DOESN'T CONCERN YOU!"

My thoughts on Ferguson, Mike Brown, and Justice.

"This doesn't concern you!" The police officer yelled. "GO back to where you came from!" he grunted, dangerously close to poking me in my chest as he points. "This is where I come from." I answer, being very careful to keep my face and voice calm. I point at the door of the apartment building, directly behind me. "I live here." The cop grimaces, grunts and turns away, his attention pulled towards another officer that is threatening a young man. I let out a nervous breath, my heart racing.

Imagine, if you will, that it is  the 4th of July, in a typical suburban neighborhood. People are sitting outside their homes, talking with their neighbors, a few families have gotten out barbecue grills and are cooking some hot dogs and burgers. Some of the young men have gathered in the middle of the empty street to light some fireworks . Neighborhood children stand on the side of the road with their hands over their ears in anticipation of the noise, but then burst out with laughter and cheering every time a fireworks goes off in a bright, colorful explosion.
Everyone is smiling, happy.

Sounds good, doesn't it?

Imagine then the fear and confusion as several several police cars pull up with their lights on and a small group of officers get out of their cars without speaking they start kicking over barbeque grills, spilling food and burning ashes all over the street. The officers start yelling for everyone to get inside or they will be arrested. When several of the children began to whimper and cry out of fear, one of the policeman looks at his fellow officers. "I bet a little pepper spray would really make them cry!"
His friend laughs and kicks over a barbecue grill.  He stops and stares at the owner of the upturned grill as he steps on a now unrecognizable piece of meat, daring him to say anything.
They are a well armed force, no one dares to challenges them. Even the younger men keep silent, they know that anything they say will result in them being beaten, and if they are lucky, arrested. If they are not so lucky....
... something worse.

What if this were to really happen, here, in America?
What would be the reaction?
Anger?
Disbelief?
Outrage?

Well I have news for you.
It did happen.
I watched it happen.
4th 0f July,
2008.
The reason you've never heard about it is simple:
It didn't happen in the suburbs.
It happened in Brooklyn.
Menahan street, in Bushwick.
The reason you never heard about it is because it happened in a poor neighborhood
 to "brown" people. 
If it had happened in a "white" neighborhood it would have made headlines all over the nation.
The internet would have exploded with accusations of police brutality and rights violations.
It would be the lead story on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  
Everyone on facebook would be posting about it and taking sides.
Police officers would be placed on suspension, some may even be fired.
Every politician would be talking about it.
But because it happened in a poor neighborhood, to "minorities"  it didn't even make it in the papers.
Just to some blog, more than 6 years later, written by yours truly.
I stood there that night, protected, slightly, only by the fact that I am white.
Was I outraged? Yeah.
You now what else I was?
Powerless.
and unless you know how that feels, please stop talking about Mike Brown, Darren Wilson and whats going on in Ferguson.
I grew up hating police.
I grew up in Florida in a poor neighborhood where I was the only white kid.
I saw cops a lot growing up.
I was 13 the first time I heard that the police were there to protect us.
Protect?
The thought had never occurred to me.
I had seen cops harass innocent people.
I had been stopped more than once by the police and asked why I was walking through my own neighborhood. it happened so many times I had to get a state ID at the age of twelve so that I could prove I lived there.
I had watched a friend of mine, who was black, get arrested for "resisting arrest".
Re read that last sentence. It doesn't make sense.
How do you get arrested for resisting being arrested? When my friends mom picked him from juvenile detention, however  "resisting arrest" was the only charge against him.
What had really happened was that we were walking down the sidewalk, I was going over to his house to hang out, when a cop car pulled up next to us and a police officer called my friend the "N" word.
"Hey there young man! Where you going with that N-----?"
My friend, being a 13 year old boy after all, told the cop exactly what he could go do with himself.
He cop bounced my friends head off of the hood of his cop car as he was cuffing him, just to prove a point.
I had police wake me up, knocking on my window in full S.W.A.T. gear, in the early morning hours They needed to use our yard because a black man across the street had apparently threatened a cop.
That person did not survive the day.
A young black man I had known named Tyron Lewis got pulled over for speeding.  He was shot and killed while still sitting in the drivers seat, his last words were “Please don’t shoot, please don’t shoot, I ain’t even got nothing!”

I had seen the police do a lot of things, but I had never seen them protect anyone.

Yeah, I know, there are good cops out there. I know, because a good friend of mine is one.
She just entered Law Enforcement recently and I respect her immensely. I truly admire her courage. She takes what she does seriously.
 I just wish there were more like her

On that 4th of July, in brooklyn, Back in 2008, I stood there as one of the cops took a call on his radio, I didn't hear what the radio said, but I'll never forget what the officer responded.
He said:
 "The natives were getting restless, but we showed them who's in charge." 

"We showed them who's in charge."

Because in the end, that's what it's about.
Who's in charge, and who isn't.
That's what the protests and riots, both in Ferguson and around the country are really about.

They say that Mike Brown robbed a convenience store.
They say he attacked Darren Wilson.
Perhaps he did, and if he did then maybe he should have gotten arrested, but not killed
If officer Wilson was really in danger from this unarmed man, then he had many options at his disposal, from a tazer to pepper spray to a billy club
He chose to kill Mike Brown.
Because He was in charge.
When the decision was handed down that Officer Wilson was not to be arraigned for the murder of Mike Brown, what that court was really doing was simply reinstating what everyone already knows.

"We showed them who's in charge."

But every once in a while, the powerless challenge those that claim to be in charge.
That's what a riot is. It is a blind, raw expression of frustration and rage.
The Rodney King verdict, the death of Tyron Lewis, the killing of Mike brown.
They all resulted in rioting.
Unfortunately, Riots solve nothing, they fix nothing. They merely destroy. 
I am a Christian.
Unashamedly so.
I am embarrassed by some of the Facebook posts I have seen, by "christians" condemning the people of Ferguson.
They don't understand because they have never felt the way the rioters do. They've never felt that feeling of powerlessness. The frustration, the anger that comes from being told over and over again:

"We showed them who's in charge."

They have forgotten that racism still exists.

Pray for Justice. Work for Peace.
                 -Marty-