‘Bracing’ for Violence in Ferguson

Encouraged by Sharpton and other agitators, too many see rioting as a black entitlement.

Beleaguered store owners in Ferguson, Mo., are boarding up their shop windows again; police departments throughout the area are purchasing riot gear; and the governor of Missouri has declared a state of emergency, a condition precedent to activating the National Guard — all in anticipation of the grand jury’s imminent decision on whether to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in August. These depressing precautions are considered normal. Fifty years after the cataclysmic riots of the 1960s, rioting is still regarded as virtually a black entitlement. No one is “bracing,” in press parlance, for white riots or police violence should Officer Wilson be indicted. Nor were there preparations for Asian riots last month in Los Angeles as a jury heard a murder case against a 22-year-old thug from South Central L.A., who, along with an accomplice, had shot two Chinese engineering students attending the University of Southern California in 2012. That murder, as the Ph.D. candidates sat quietly in their car near campus, was part of a horrific pattern of attacks on Asian students at USC, one that has not resulted in either the threat or the reality of Asian “unrest.”

The fear of riots in Ferguson has grown more intense because of a growing sense that the grand jury might not deliver a murder indictment. Why might it not indict for murder? There is no hint of jury bias or biased prosecution, despite the groundless and incendiary claim to the contrary by a Brown family lawyer. Rather, the jury might not indict for murder because the evidence might not support a murder charge. The story offered up by Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson about the shooting — that Wilson had grabbed Brown without provocation and tried to choke him, and then had ruthlessly shot Brown when his hands were up — was always unlikely. Forensic evidence supports Wilson’s claim that Brown had repeatedly punched and scratched Wilson in his car and tried to grab his gun, putting Wilson in fear for his life. One might think that it would be good news if Wilson did not initiate the violent encounter or shoot Brown in cold blood: It would mean one less instance of alleged police brutality. Instead, the possibility that there might be no basis for charging murder apparently increases the risk of violence, since the conviction that Brown was the victim of murderous police racism is unfalsifiable.

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