Here, as promised, are answers to some (not all) of the questions I posed about Ferguson in an earlier post. I’ve focused here on second-order questions about the shooting. The first-order questions are mostly, as I’ve already suggested, unanswerable at this stage of the case.

5. Must we always wait for a verdict before passing judgment on a criminal case?

I think there ought to be a default rule of waiting for a verdict in a criminal trial before passing judgment on matters of guilt or innocence. The principle here is that the accuser bears the burden of proof, and the accused has to be presumed innocent until the accuser meets the burden of proof. In criminal trials, the burden of proof is guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, a fairly high standard as I understand it.

A great deal of the evidence in a criminal case is bound to be in the hands of the contending parties in the case, and for a variety of reasons may not (often is not) publicly disclosed to the media (despite the impression one gets that the media has the ‘inside scoop’ on a case). So declarations of guilt or innocence about criminal cases prior to a legal verdict are bound to be premature, counter-productive, and encouraging of bad epistemic habits.

There are exceptions to this general rule. In some cases, guilt (or innocence) may be transparent enough to obviate the need for a trial, at least as far public, non-legal discussion is concerned. But I think such cases are rarer than people tend to think, because even putatively transparent evidence can be highly ambiguous.

In some cases, a trial may not be possible, and yet a ‘verdict’ of some kind is necessary in order to take action to deal with an undeniable threat to one’s rights. I don’t think, for instance, that the US or Pakistan needs to put the Taliban on trial before deciding to launch drone attacks on them. Nor do I think that ‘extrajudicial murder’ is involved in killing Taliban militants. Unlike the metaphorical talk about Ferguson as a ‘war zone’, northwestern Pakistan really is a war zone (as is Gaza). But de facto war zones involve a de facto reversion to (a Lockean) State of Nature, where lower epistemic standards are both necessary to defend one’s rights against clear-cut aggression, and morally justified. One of the reasons I object to talk of Ferguson as a ‘war zone’ (or comparisons of Ferguson to, say, Gaza) is that such talk induces us to regard Ferguson as a place where lower epistemic standards are prematurely justified.  It also induces us to compare like with unlike. But Ferguson is not Waziristan or Gaza. Comparisons of the two are wrongheaded and irresponsible.

It might be objected that a criminal case can drag on for decades as a defendant exhausts his appeals. Should we wait until the last appeal is in to pass judgment? I think that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis. The principle I would adopt is to regard the first jury (or bench) verdict in the case as defeasibly conclusive unless there are reasons to suspect the bona fides of the case. If there are reasons for suspicion, one simply has to wait until they’re resolved, and that can require decades. (I realize that ‘defeasibly conclusive’ is an odd phrase in need of explication, but I think most Policy of Truth readers will understand it, if only because its readers are (a) an extraordinarily sophisticated bunch, and (b) number in the double digits.) It’s worth remembering that the Innocence Project has demonstrated the innocence of people who had previously gotten what seemed like conclusive verdicts of guilt—decades after the fact. The Central Park Five are a vivid example, but for a particularly heart-wrenching and weirdly counter-intuitive example, I’d suggest reading chapter 11 of Kathryn Schulz’s excellent 2010 book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. (Schulz’s chapter is a nice confirmation of Kathleen Wilkes’s insight that real-life cases are often more clarifying than thought experiments.)

[Postscript, September 4, 2014: Here is yet another in the endless litany of exonerations of previously-convicted people who had gotten what had seemed a conclusive verdict of guilt. I discuss a related sort of case from my own personal experience here.]

It might be objected that since courts err, it’s a mistake to wait for a court verdict before forming a judgment on a criminal matter. But it seems to me that the dangers of error are much higher if one doesn’t wait.

Finally, one might object that civil trials, including trials for wrongful death, involve a lower standard of proof than criminal trials, so why not follow suit? I actually have a moral objection to the use of lower standards of proof in civil trials, and find it objectionable that in the American system, one can try the same case twice in two different court systems. So I reject the premise behind the objection. On the view of punishment I favor, there would be no distinction between civil and criminal trials: there would be one trial per case focused on what I think of punitive rectification of the rights violation. (My definition of ‘punishment’ stands outside what I take to be the retributivist monopoly on definitions of that term.)

In the case of Ferguson, I think it’s obvious that the initial rule stands. Where we have a series of ongoing investigations into a criminal matter, it makes no sense to ‘take sides’ or even give the appearance of doing so, not just in advance of the trial, but in advance of the conclusion of the initial investigation. But partisans on both sides have done that re Ferguson.

Consider some of the attitudes expressed in this news item, expressing “support” for Darren Wilson.** At this stage of things, Wilson could either be entirely innocent or a cold-blooded racist killer, or something in between. ‘To take his side’ is to gamble that he is innocent when he could be guilty. To do that is to play Russian roulette with one’s moral and epistemic faculties.

On the other side, consider the attitudes expressed by Michael Eric Dyson in this news item. It’s not enough for Dyson that President Obama wants to wait for the findings of an investigation underway. Apparently, virtue requires Obama to become the blowhard identity-politics version of George W. Bush: he has to meet the violence of what is happening in the streets with rhetorical violence that ups the ante. For a reductio ad absurdum of the view he’s adopting, I’d suggest Dyson’s spending some time in the streets of Islamabad, Pakistan with the supporters of Imran Khan and Muhammad Tahir ul Qadri ,where tens of thousands of passionate but completely mindless protesters are besieging the presidential residence* in order to overthrow democracy in the name of democracy, but cannot articulate either the nature of their grievances, or what they want done in rectification of ‘them’. Whether he realizes it or not, those mindless crowds are the perfect expression of the politics Dyson has in mind. (Incidentally, the supposed contrast Dyson draws between Holder and Obama does not seem to me to be borne out by the facts).

In answer to both sets of partisans, I’d suggest reading Gary Alan Fine and Patricia Turner’s excellent book, Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America, which describes the ease with which untrammeled passion leads to rumors, and rumors in turn fuel race riots. My favorite line in the book: “Ultimately, we, the public, are the agents of justice, and we must strive not to be blind” (p. 209). Both Wilson’s supporters and people like Dyson are practically suborning blindness in the rest of us.

[Postscript, August 27, 2014: Two items in today’s New York Times serve as a useful pair of footnotes to what I said here. A letter by Norman Siegel (former director of the American Civil Liberties Union) nicely reiterates some of the themes of my argument, but an op-ed by Erwin Chemerinsky (Dean of the Law School at University of California, Irvine) suggests the need for some qualifications to what I said.

Chemerinsky argues, plausibly, that the judicial deck is stacked against anyone who wants to hold police officers and other government officials responsible for civil rights violations. I’m not qualified to offer an opinion as to the legal merits of Chemerinsky’s argument, but if he’s right, we need to distinguish between two different reasons for waiting for a legal verdict before passing moral judgment on a legal case: (1) an evidence-based reason: we won’t have full access to the evidence until the verdict has been handed down; (2) a quasi-positivist reason: the legal verdict is constitutive of the facts re guilt or innocence. I’m defending (1), not (2). I doubt that anyone would defend a literal version of (2), but it’s worth stating explicitly, so as to differentiate it sharply from (1). The point is that courts have better access to the evidence relevant to guilt or innocence than does the general public (and the press), not that court verdicts magically “make” people guilty or innocent of the crimes for which they’ve been charged. Of course, even (1) is only true as a general rule; given the exclusionary rule, courts sometimes exclude relevant evidence from consideration, thereby handicapping their own access to the truth. But the point is, they have access to the relevant evidence.  In other words, the overarching point I’m making is primarily epistemic, not legal.]

6. Can it ever be justified to use a weapon against, or shoot, an unarmed person?

I think it can. One of the better arguments of gun enthusiasts is that firearms level the ‘playing field’ between large and menacing (but unarmed) assailants and the rest of us. And the argument makes good sense. If you have reason to believe that an assailant means you serious harm, and you have no other means of escape, I think you can resort to the use of a firearm. But where possible, you must limit the damage you do to your would-be assailant. What needs an explanation in the case of Ferguson is why Brown was hit with six rounds when one would have sufficed. On the face of it, I can’t imagine a legitimate reason for Wilson’s firing six shots at Brown (he might have lived if he’d been hit with one instead of six), but I’ll leave that to the forensics experts to unravel.

In general, however, I’m surprised by how many stories I’ve read over the years of suspects being shot by multiple rounds, the Amadou Diallo case being the most jaw-dropping example. It almost sounds like a joke: How many armed cops does it take to disable a man? How many rounds does it take to neutralize a human threat? Reading some of these stories, one gets the impression that the police regard criminal suspects in the way that big-game hunters regard big game. It might take six shots to take out a charging lion, but should it take that many to take out a charging human?

7-8. Should the video of Michael Brown’s robbing or stealing from a convenience store before the shooting have been released? Is it relevant to the case?

Eric Holder has described the United States as a “nation of cowards” for its unwillingness to discuss matters of race. Personally, I think there is cowardice in Holder’s suggestion that the video allegedly showing Michael Brown engaged in a convenience store robbery ought not to have been released to the public. I so far have not heard a plausible explanation for why the video ought not to have been released, aside from the claim that doing so would upset people. I find it remarkable after all of the criticism of the hyper-sensitivity of people in the Islamic world (e.g., the Muhammad cartoons, the anti-Satanic Verses protests, etc.) the Attorney General of the United States thinks that the American people have to be infantilized in the same fashion: if the disclosure of information will upset them, the information ought, in deference to their sensitivities, be concealed.

Why not say the same thing about the conversation about race that Holder envisions? Discussions about race might upset some people, too. Why isn’t their prospective ‘roiling’ a good reason for not having such discussions? If white people threatened, en masse, to take to the streets at the disclosure of some untoward fact about Wilson’s life, would that justify concealing it? Many untoward facts (some of them not quite facts) were revealed about George Zimmerman in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case, not all of them obviously relevant to the case. Should they all have been concealed? (The same was true of Conrad Murray, by the way.) Why should anyone think concealment is justified in the current case?

I think the video of Brown’s robbing the convenience store is potentially relevant to the case. Though Wilson stopped Brown for jaywalking rather than robbery, the official police timeline suggests that he was aware that the robbery had taken place, and that he suspected that Brown and his companion, Johnson, were the robbers (or thieves, depending on how you want to describe the event in the store: I’m not convinced it was robbery). There is obvious reason to fear a robber more than one fears a jaywalker. If Brown was high on pot, there is additional reason to think that his judgment was impaired. Nothing in the way of justice is gained by trying to cover up these facts, or possibilities, whichever they turn out to be.

9. Is it too easy for the Darren Wilsons of the world to get away with murder?  

This question in effect goes back to question (1) in the original list. It’s possible that even if Wilson ends up being guilty of murdering Brown, there might (in the nature of the case) be insufficient evidence to convict him of a crime because the evidence falls below the threshold of being beyond a reasonable doubt (or being a civil rights violation in the civil context).

Suppose that that’s so, and that a jury hands back a verdict of ‘not guilty.’ Legally, of course, we’d have to treat Wilson as not-guilty. But outside of strictly legal contexts, are we justified in regarding him, in effect, as going through the rest of his life trailed by a cloud of suspicion? Depending on how the evidence turns out, I think we might be. That is in effect the current predicament of George Zimmerman. Even people who accept the verdict in the Zimmerman case might have their doubts about whether he is genuinely innocent in the moral sense. I do. Zimmerman may not have murdered Martin, but he had no business pursuing him after he (Zimmerman) had called the police. He should have stayed put, and his failure to do so strikes me as morally culpable, even if it isn’t legally adjudicable. Something similar would (on this scenario) end up being true of Wilson. Even if he ends up being legally innocent, he might end up being morally culpable of some non-legal infraction, and if so, that suspicion would (and should) follow him in our judgments of him thereafter. A legal finding of non-guilt doesn’t necessarily wash away all evidence of or suspicion of moral wrongdoing. The hard fact of the matter is that a legal finding of non-guilt doesn’t even necessarily wash away all suspicion of criminality, a fact with complex ramifications I can’t do justice to here.

10. Should the testimony of police officers weigh more heavily than those of criminal suspects?

This might have been a tendentious question on my part, but in any case, I regard the answer as obvious. I don’t know the specifically legal status of this rule (or if it’s even a ‘rule’), but I’ve seen it applied often enough in courts of law here in New Jersey: if a case comes down to the testimony of a police officer versus a criminal defendant, the judge will simply assume that it is the police officer who is telling the truth and the defendant who must be lying or in error. Why? Because police officers can be presumed to be truthful, but criminal defendants cannot. In effect, the defendant’s presumption of innocence can be defeated by a police officer’s sheer assertion that the defendant is guilty. The insouciance with which I’ve seen this rule applied is amazing, and I think the remedy is obvious: our courts should stop treating the testimony of police officers as pro tanto more weighty than those of criminal defendants. Everyone’s testimony should be regarded as being on a par, unless there’s positive evidence to the contrary.

One is obliged in a court of law to treat officers of the court with great deference and respect, which they are not obliged to reciprocate: legally speaking, there is such a thing as contempt of court, but no such thing as contempt of citizen by the court. But I’m inclined to think that the latter is more commonly exemplified than the former, and there is no legal remedy for it (aside from the very attenuated remedy of an appeal).

When the judicial system runs roughshod over whatever procedural rights one has, one is apt to feel contempt for or rage at those who run it. Having been on the receiving end of this treatment myself in a court case that had nothing to do with race, I was tempted, in court, to say something that would have gotten me a contempt citation. When, a few months later, I saw the same judge walking down the street on his way to a restaurant, I was tempted to confront and abuse him. I held my tongue on both occasions, but I understand the impulse to lash out, and anyhow, my case was a very, very trivial one (it was a traffic case involving three license points and a $100 fine).

I think one has to experience officialized judicial or police arrogance in one’s own case to be able to grasp the justified rage of the protesters on the streets of Ferguson. I don’t mean that rioting is justified. What I mean is that anger is justified, and that those who feel no anger (and by implication no sympathy for the protesters) ought to ask themselves whether they’ve had the sorts of experiences that merit the same anger. I doubt they have. I’m enough of a cognitivist about the emotions to say that one can’t think by means of anger. (I agree with Ayn Rand’s claim that emotions are not ‘tools of’ cognition.) But I’m enough of an Aristotelian or Freudian to think that justified anger is a potential ally of thought about justice. We need, as Roderick Long has apt put it in a different context, to think our anger—or our apathy, come to that. There’s more of that to do, so more to follow.

*I had originally written “Presidential Palace,” but I think I was momentarily confusing Pakistan with Somoza’s Nicaragua.

**This item makes the point better than the item I originally used.

As I said in my last post, there is less to say about Ferguson than to ask about it. What follows are some of the questions that I think ought to be asked, divided into those pertaining to the shooting, and those pertaining to the protests, the riots, and the official response to them. In this post, I ask the questions without answering any of them, including the ones that I think can currently be answered. In a subsequent post, I’ll venture a few answers. The questions are, of course, far from exhaustive.

The shooting

1. The most obvious question to ask is what happened, and how do we know? An article in this morning’s New York Times provides an informative account, but what it describes are the findings of a highly qualified preliminary autopsy report, and an official police timeline. Here is what I regard as the relevant passage:

No matter what conclusions can be drawn from Dr. Baden’s work, Mr. Brown’s death remains marked by shifting and contradictory accounts more than a week after it occurred. The shooting is under investigation by St. Louis County and by the F.B.I., working with the Justice Department’s civil rights division and the office of Attorney General Holder.

I would be suspicious of any rhetoric that tries to do an end-run around this basic, axiomatic fact.

2. It’s been alleged that there were “eyewitnesses” to the shooting. How many were there, and what exactly did they see?
3. A meta-question about eyewitness testimony: how reliable is it, and how should we assess it in this case?
4. A meta-question about police-generated testimony: how reliable is it, and how should we assess it in this case?
5. Another set of meta-questions: must we always wait for the verdict in a criminal trial before we offer moral verdicts on a criminal case? After all, criminal trials can last for years—and if appeals are figured in, for decades. Will it only be permissible to discuss Ferguson after the last appeals are exhausted in the last case on the matter? Can’t evidence of guilt or innocence sometimes be sufficiently transparent as to justify a moral verdict prior to any official legal adjudication of the case?
6. Is it ever justified to use a weapon against someone who’s unarmed? Is it ever justified to shoot such a person with a firearm?
7. It’s been alleged that Michael Brown was robbing a convenience store before he was shot. Did Officer Wilson know this or not? Suppose he did know it. Is the fact relevant to the justifiability of shooting Brown or not? Suppose he didn’t know it. Could it still in principle be relevant?
8. The Ferguson police released the video of Brown’s supposedly robbing the convenience store; others, including the Justice Department, have criticized this decision on the grounds that it encouraged rioting. Should information in a criminal case be suppressed simply because it will lead to rioting or violence (and for no other reason)? (Incidentally, what exactly does the video show? Robbery? Larceny? Battery? Police testimony aside, how many of us can be certain that the central figure in the video is Michael Brown?)
9. Suppose that the evidence of Michael Brown’s being murdered by Officer Wilson turns out to be slim. Couldn’t it still be the case that he was murdered? How do we deal with the fact that the Officer Wilsons of the world can in principle get away with murder precisely because despite being guilty, evidence of their guilt is so inconclusive?*
10. In many courts of law, a police officer’s testimony is regarded as more weighty than an ordinary citizen’s—even when the police officer is accusing the citizen of a crime, and the citizen is supposed to enjoy a presumption of innocence. If we apply that “principle” here, we reach the conclusion that Officer Wilson’s testimony ought to trump that of the eyewitnesses to the shooting. What inference should we draw?

The protests, the rioting, the response

1. What, exactly, is the causal connection between the shooting and the rioting?
2. Allegations have been made about the pervasive racism of the Ferguson Police Department, and of Ferguson in general. How good is this evidence, and how relevant is it to judging the police response to the protests?
3. How much violence has there been, and how bad has it been in aggregate?
4. Can it ever be justified to loot, vandalize, or riot? Suppose, for instance, that racism is Ferguson is pervasive, and has gone unaddressed for decades. Suppose, further, that rioting will bring this racism to light. Suppose that rioting is (as a matter of historical fact) the best way of publicizing racism and eliciting a response (cf. the Kerner Commission Report). Is rioting then justified?
5. It’s been alleged that the police response to the protests has been excessive. What would a proportional response be or have been? As a conceptual matter, can a proportional response to a threat be insufficient to neutralize the threat?
6. It’s been alleged that the police response to the protests has been indiscriminate as between protesters and rioters. Is discrimination possible or feasible? Again, as a conceptual matter, suppose that discrimination is feasible, but makes it impossible to neutralize a threat. Should discrimination be trumped by the need to neutralize the threat, or should the need to neutralize be trumped by adherence to the principle of discrimination?
7. Do non-violent protesters have a moral or legal obligation to separate themselves from violent protesters, so as to facilitate the police’s capacity to neutralize the latter? (This question is really a special case of a more general one: do we have a moral obligation to refrain from taking actions that, though legal in themselves, facilitate illegality?)
8. Is a curfew a justified response to what is happening in Ferguson? Suppose that it it’s not. Is it justified to defy the curfew? Suppose that it is. If a police officer tries to stop a curfew-violator, is that curfew-violator justified in using force against the police?
9. A long-form question: As a historical matter, why have the police become so militarized in the United States? As a normative matter, is there any legitimate reason for militarization? (Reason Papers 36.1 isn’t live yet, but I’m tempted to link to parts of our Waco symposium for this question.)
10. Is there a general problem with police non-accountability in the United States, extending beyond Ferguson, and beyond issues of race?
11. A deep theoretical question: is there any reason to believe that what happened in Ferguson could not have happened, in substantially** the same way, under anarcho-capitalism? Would anarcho-capitalism have made things better–or worse?

*PS. In asking this question, I don’t mean to be implying that I believe that Wilson is guilty of murder. I mean: ex hypothesi, if he were guilty, evidence of his guilt might still be insufficient to convict him of murder.

** I had originally written “precisely,” but I meant “substantially.”

It’s more than a little irritating to spend two weeks in a socialist dictatorship that your own country spent the better part of a decade trying to overthrow, only to come home and find that there’s more tension at home than anything you encountered under the Sandinistas. I spent two weeks in Nicaragua with ten ‘diverse’ American undergraduates—three of them African-Americans, in a country where people of African descent are a miniscule minority—and didn’t encounter a single remotely untoward racial incident in the time I spent there. Then I come home, look at the front page of the newspaper, and discover that St. Louis and environs are exploding in race riots. Either this means that my brief absence from the US is apt to lead to a deterioration of race relations here, or it means that the United States is a seriously fucked-up country which hasn’t, in the two-plus centuries of its existence, been able to come to terms with the fact that some people are darker (or lighter) than others. I’m not about to become a Sandinista or move to Managua over current events in Missouri, but really, this is a bit much.

I count race and racism as among my official academic interests, and I’ll admit that there are days when the topic has an abiding intellectual interest for me, but at some level, I find the specifically American fixation on race and racism infantile, tedious, and boring. As a non-black and non-white person of seasonally-varying complexion, I sometimes wonder whether black and white Americans have any idea how narcissistic and neurotic the whole drama of American race relations looks to an outsider. And I regard myself as an outsider. The only interest it—the contemporary American race drama—has in the year 2014 is the interest that a bizarre and primitive tribe might have to a cultural anthropologist, or that a deeply neurotic person might have to a psychologist or psychiatrist. The pathologies seem interesting at first, but become wearing with time.

I say this as preface to a confession of sorts–namely, that almost everything I have to say about Ferguson is motivated by an unpleasant combination of boredom and contempt. I’m too suspicious of the racism and arrogance of our militarized police departments to want to cut them any slack. But I’m too suspicious of the mindlessness of identity politics to want to sympathize indiscriminately with anyone’s high-decibel list of racial grievances. It sounds self-serving, but I’m inclined to think that my ‘biases’ cancel one another out, and that my ennui gives me a kind of anthropological detachment from current events that approximates objectivity. Call it the doxastic equivalent of the ‘liberty of indifference.’ I recommend the approach to anyone willing to give it a try.

The truth is that there is very little to say about Ferguson, because we know so little about the incident that gave rise to the riots, and because so few of us know anything about the tactics required successfully to deal with a riot, either. Much of what is being said about Ferguson is either irresponsible nonsense or irrelevant filler, or both, and would be better left unsaid.

A bare-bones recap of the facts: The precipitating incident in the Ferguson riots is the shooting death of one Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in as-yet undetermined circumstances for as-yet undetermined reasons. Brown was black, and Wilson is white. There was a small handful of eyewitnesses to the shooting (presumably including Wilson), but it’s not entirely clear what they saw. One prominent story has it that Brown had has hands in the air in surrender when he was shot, and one story I read suggested that the police callously let Brown die without medical assistance. But eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, and I so far have not seen a detailed account of exactly what it is that the eyewitnesses even thought they saw. It’s interesting that though “activists” have insisted on the disclosure of Wilson’s name—and the media has published long, pointless pseudo-biographies of both Brown and Wilson—fewer people have insisted on knowing the names and biographical details of the eyewitnesses who claim to have seen the shooting, not that either set of disclosures would help (or has helped) anyone outside of the evidential loop figure out what happened at the scene.

Brown has been accused of robbing a store before Wilson’s having confronted and shot him; Wilson in turn has been accused of having murdered Brown in cold blood. Given the presumption of innocence, neither accusation can be dismissed or taken at face value: both might be true, neither might be true, or one might be true and the other false. So far, no evidence conclusively shows which of these possibilities was the case. In any case, the official police story is that Brown was stopped not on suspicion of robbery but for blocking traffic by jaywalking, so even if he did rob the convenience store, it’s not clear that his doing so played any role in Wilson’s shooting him. (Of course, it’s not clear that it didn’t, either. That’s the thing about unclarity: it leaves things unclear.)

The riots, though catalyzed by the Brown shooting, are (as riots typically are) a response to a long series of prior provocations (or perceived provocations) by the police. The grievances voiced by the community against the police—a history of heavy-handed treatment and racialized harassment—seem plausible to me, given my own experiences with the police in the NY-NJ Metro Area (I’ve never been to St. Louis, much less Ferguson), but they probably contain a mixture of truth and falsity; most of them are anonymous, most of them describe events that took place a long time ago, and no one has any rigorous way of checking the bona fides of anyone making the relevant accusations. Nor do the accusers have any expectation of being checked. In any case, even if the grievances are true, it doesn’t follow, and probably isn’t true, that the rioters are motivated by the desire to respond to or rectify them.

The heavily militarized response to the riots seems at first glance to be disproportionate to the rioting—the rationale for the recent curfew seems particularly feeble—but for all that you or I know, some of it has a plausible rationale. It’s hard for a non-expert to tell exactly what counts as proportionality in response to firebomb-wielding rioters. Of course, it’s also irresistible for a certain kind of military wanna-be to use military hardware that is just sitting there and almost asking to be used, whether or not there is a need to use it. Supply sometimes creates its own demand, in goods as in bads.

It’s understandable why the people directly involved in the events might be overwhelmed by their passions and might be apt to fly off the handle about what’s going on around them. If you’ve been racially harassed by the police, you know that the police are apt to harass people like you, and so, you’ll be particularly angry about what happened to Michael Brown: he could have been you–well, at least if you abstract from the possibility that he was in the middle of a robbery at the time he was shot (you would never rob a convenience store, and the possibility that he did so is just a ‘distraction’ from the ‘fact’ that he was ‘murdered’). So you’ll be apt to take to the streets in protest of his “murder,” and want people to join in your rage.

If your store has just been looted, vandalized, or destroyed, you’ve just lost your livelihood, at least temporarily, and it will be maddening to hear people sympathize with the protesters*, who will all sound to you like a bunch of looting, vandalizing whiners. You’ll want law and order to prevail, and prevail now. It won’t matter to you that protest is a legal activity, that those engaged in it are acting within the law, and that it’s incoherent for law-enforcement officers to arrest people for acting within the law. In that case, what difference would there be between rioters and police officers?

If you’re a police officer trying unsuccessfully to discriminate between rioters and law-abiding protesters, you’ll wonder why the protesters can’t do a better job of steering clear of the rioters, and you’ll wonder why there has suddenly developed a moral imperative for supposedly innocent protesters to be on the streets after, say, midnight to protest alongside bomb-throwers. The only truly innocent protester—you’ll think—watches the riots on TV and writes angry letters to the editor of the local paper after the fact. And so you’ll want a curfew, along with free rein to arrest or shoot anyone who violates the curfew. It might briefly occur to you that this is the kind of thing that is only supposed to happen in distant, primitive places with unpronounceable names like Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Israel, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and well, France. But that’s a pretty academic thought to have in the middle of a riot, and in my experience, criminal justice majors don’t have many of those, even in college classrooms.

If you put all three of these groups in a small, fraught, racialized space, and throw the press and a bunch of politicians into the mix—along with rogue elements within each group, and a few from some other groups—they will invariably collide with one another on the streets in a tragic-comic, Americanized re-enactment of a lite version of part I of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Which is what’s happening.

What is more difficult to understand is why people at a distance from Ferguson feel the itching need to weigh in on one or the other ‘side’ of the dispute without knowing—or apparently caring about knowing—what actually happened in the particular incidents that supposedly generated the ‘dispute’. Not that anyone, as of August 17, could conceivably know that. Already people are saying (as they said, and still say, about Trayvon Martin) that Michael Brown was “murdered.” But when was the trial? Already people are saying that he “robbed” a convenience store. When was that trial? (How many people have even seen the video?) One side thinks that the cause of justice is promoted by opposing the release of the video that supposedly shows Brown robbing the convenience store, on the grounds that the release of the video would “roil” the community. So facticity is to be sacrificed to communal passion. The other side thinks the cause of justice is promoted by imposing a curfew on Ferguson, then claiming that the curfew is not to be ‘enforced’ but offered as a series of exhortations, albeit by police officers wielding military hardware, and admittedly unable to differentiate between criminals of law-abiding citizens. These are the people who profess to be worried about the credibility of the police (“the world is watching”), find the militarization of civilian police work “unacceptable,” but reluctantly decide that civilian police work has to be militarized after all. So liberty is to be sacrificed to expediency, and expediency is to be upheld by incoherent rationalizations.

It’s said that truth is the first casualty of war, and that Ferguson looks like a war zone. I’m inclined to say that the first casualty of race war is the desire for truth, and that Ferguson is now ground zero in this country’s epistemic decline into a nation of race-based misology. What we need right now is not curfews per se (or the threat of lawsuits), but a curfew on declarations about Ferguson. There is little to say about Ferguson, but a lot to ask. In my next post, I’ll pose a few of the questions that in my view have not generally been asked about Ferguson and related topics, but need asking—and when the evidence comes in, need answering. But not before then.

*I had originally written “rioters,” but I meant to write “protesters.”