• AP Photo/Charlie Riedel

Before I moved back here to Chicago, I was a reporter in Saint Louis for five and a half years. I worked for the Riverfront Times, the city’s alt weekly. A few months before I left, I wrote a story about Ferguson. Well, it was about a group of record collectors who wanted to preserve their 50 tons of 78s; Ferguson was where they happened to live. My cubemate was, I think, the only other reporter during my time there who wrote about Ferguson. He was the food critic, and he was reviewing a wine bar and microbrewery. This was notable because such things were very new to Ferguson. Ferguson, as everyone has learned since last week, is in north Saint Louis County, where most residents are working class or poor. It does not have many wine bars. But it was also one of the last places I would have expected for a domestic war to break out. Then again, I am also white, and so was the staff of our paper—or Asian.

“There were no tremors or anything,” he told me, “nothing to indicate that this would happen. Obviously, race is the undercurrent of everything in Saint Louis—the politics, the power structure—but it’s quite a powder keg that blew.”

Or maybe I’d gotten it wrong. It’s a pretty segregated city. The whole separation between the city and the county, where Saint Louis City is a separate entity, surrounded by 91 other municipalities, each with its own government and police department, even if, in the case of Champ, it has less than a dozen people, is totally fucked-up. And maybe it was more typically Saint Louis to hold it all in, passive-aggressively, until it all blew up.

“There are two sides,” Garrison said. On one hand, what McGee did was illegal. On the other . . . “It’s a black community. Everyone should have people from their community represent them, not some white officers who come from south county.”

While we were talking, the news came through that a man in Saint Louis City had come after a pair of cops brandishing a knife. The New York Times would describe him as “emotionally disturbed.” “Shoot me now,” he allegedly told them. “Kill me now.” And, apparently, they’d learned nothing. They did.