A Militarized Assault on Grief—by Ayala Emmett

A Militarized Assault on Grief
Ayala Emmett
August 14, 2014

Last night we saw on our television screens armored vehicles carrying mounted gunners pointing ominously at unarmed grieving people. No, it was not in the Middle East. The pictures we saw were live from Ferguson Missouri.

The local authorities brought to the streets of Ferguson masses of police in full riot gear, not really trained in dealing with demonstrations according to the chief of police, but armed to battle. This militarized presence of police was there to disperse a grieving community protesting the killing of Michael (Mike) Brown. Last night in Ferguson grief replaced earlier anger in a peaceful vigil of citizens of the United States exercising their right of freedom of assembly.

Right in front of our eyes, teargas filled the evening air; we could hear the loud noise of stun grenades, screaming people vomiting, trying to run away, including reporting journalists. Two of them have been arrested earlier and released but reported on the excessive force used by policemen at the time of their arrest.

This was the response to people’s grief over the shooting of Michael Brown, a young black teenage man by a policeman; Mike was about to start college. The police were evasive in their response to the tragedy, protecting the identity of a policeman who shot an unarmed young man several times, his body left for a few hours right there on a street.

This has been the nightmare of every black parent in America.

African Americans in many places in this country do not have recourse to justice because the highest local authorities are often implicated, indifferent, or racist. This, as we all know, is not the first time that the life of a young black man has been treated as dispensable, as a life that could be taken away in a blink of eye with utmost impunity.

The local authorities in Ferguson, rather than responding to grief resorted to power. Rather than offering comfort they chose confrontation. They sent to the streets of Ferguson police dressed for battle in a warzone rather than for a grieving American city.

This has got to stop if we want to insist that this country is a democracy, that we support human rights, that we respect life, that when we use the bible in our courts and put our hand on, “You Shall Not Murder,” we really mean it.

As for Michael Brown, he has not joined the freshman class of 2014. His parents did not get to give him a goodbye hug. His mother and father will not be sitting four years from now watching him graduate. They will not see him get a job, get married have children.

Nothing will change the fact that Mike is no longer alive. The Ferguson local authorities, however, can still act with decency and justice. And so can the rest of America.