- Getty Images
- Captain Ronald Johnson of the Missouri State Highway Patrol talks with protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, after being put in charge of security there.
I haven’t lived in Saint Louis for a long time. When I did—and for many years afterward—Ferguson was a white, blue-collar suburb north of the city. My senior year we beat their football team 33-13. Cleaned their clock. As we usually did.
And now Ferguson is national news. In the time since I lived in the area, black Saint Louisans pushing beyond the city limits for a better life transformed Ferguson into a suburb that was mostly black, while the power structure stayed white. Last Saturday Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot to death by Ferguson police. And Ferguson went up for grabs.
But Saint Louis is bad enough. What’s so compelling about Ferguson is how little sympathy there’s been for the police. “Our problems with police brutality and racial profiling can be found in every major city,” Sultan goes on, as if the role of police brutality in creating, or at least profoundly aggravating, the crisis in Ferguson were something stipulated by all sides.
Before Johnson took over, a Saint Louis alderman and a couple of out-of-town reporters were arrested in Ferguson, and an Al Jazeera reporter complained that police had tear-gassed his camera crew.
