Michael Brown should not be the face of our protests

African-Americans suffer severe discrimination from policemen and prosecutors, and I believe more University students should take an active role in fighting it. But I did not participate in the walkout last Thursday, because I am not angry at the grand jury’s verdict in the Michael Brown case.

The grand jury's decision to acquit Officer Darren Wilson was consistent with both the forensic evidence, which shows that Brown had scuffled with Officer Wilson and was moving toward him when shot, and the testimony of half a dozen African-American witnesses who appeared before the grand jury to corroborate Wilson’s account of events. The grand jury also heard testimony from witnesses who claimed that Brown was attempting to surrender, but their accounts conflicted with each other. The Washington Post, a newspaper not known for a conservative bias, reports that these conflicts made it “difficult to parse who saw what and who saw anything at all,” adding that eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. Further, their testimony that Brown was shot in the back does not stand up to the blood spatter evidence or the analysis of the bullets’ trajectory.

In spite of all the evidence supporting Officer Wilson, the student walkout participants chanted “Hands up, don’t shoot!” to affirm Brown’s alleged passivity and staged a 45-minute “die-in” to protest the four-and-a-half hours that Brown’s body spent lying on the street. But police negligence was not a factor in that long delay. Rather, Brown’s body could not be moved until evidence had been collected from the scene, and St. Louis County detectives on duty were responding to a gun threat at a hospital that morning. Because lives were still in potential danger, the investigators had to conclude that the hospital was reasonably secure before starting their thirty-minute drive to Ferguson. By the time they arrived there, the crowd had already grown violent. According to a St. Louis County newspaper, “commanders in charge stopped the investigation at points and directed investigators to seek cover” because protesters were throwing objects and screaming, “Kill the police.” It was the crowd’s violence, not police negligence, that dragged the investigation out for so long.

I normally imagine students here to be informed when they speak vocally on an issue, so I am disappointed by our community’s distortion of the timeline and insistence on ignoring physical evidence in favor of the witnesses who tell the story we have decided to hear. But I am mostly disappointed because the Brown case is a bad example for the real and awful racial bias that minority communities face in the American law enforcement system. According to the Black Agenda Report, 60 percent of incarcerated Americans are racial and ethnic minorities. This reflects a systemic police and prosecution bias, not a higher propensity to commit crimes. For example, the same report notes that African-Americans “are 13 percent of America’s population and 14 percent of the nation's drug users but are 37 percent of persons arrested for drugs and 56 percent of the inmates in state prisons for drug offenses.” Many people have lost their liberty to this bias, and some have lost their lives.

Take the case of Eric Garner, whose death at the hands of police officers was captured on video. Garner was resisting arrest, but nonviolently, when Officer Daniel Pantaleo grabbed him in a chokehold. Officer Pantaleo was not trying to kill Garner, but the NYPD had banned chokeholds like his for a reason —they kill people. Officer Pantaleo ignored Garner’s repeated cries of “I can’t breathe” for 19 seconds, and Garner ultimately died. A grand jury failed to indict the officer.

The Garner case is a clear example of unjustified force that led to death of a black male. It played a small role in Thursday’s walkout, but only as an afterthought. (The grand jury did not reach its decision until after the walkout had been planned.) Instead, the face of the protest here was Michael Brown, and he is dividing campus rather than joining us together. Using the Brown case to evoke an emotional response to race relations is a two-way street. Those who are upset about the events will press for change, but many people who are not sympathetic to Brown will not be sympathetic to the larger cause. I have spoken to students who either do not acknowledge law enforcement’s racial bias or do not understand its extent. In their minds, the problem cannot be too bad if our best example exalts a criminal who fought an officer for his gun and presented a real threat to his life. For readers who believe this way, I implore you: Look beyond the Brown case. Look at the data at large, and look at Garner. For readers who are already angry, please, let us choose a less polarizing face for our protests so that we can unite more people in the struggle toward racial equality.

Newby Parton is a freshman fromMcMinnville, Tenn. He can be reached at newby@princeton.edu.