An amoral conservative blogger and an actual newspaper
are insisting that if Michael Brown had a juvenile arrest record, it should be made public so they can blame him for his killing by police officer Darren Wilson. Because in America, that's how we roll these days. Police officer repeatedly and fatally shoots unarmed teenager and the police and the media rush to find reasons to blame the dead unarmed teenager.
So now shoplifting or smoking pot as a juvenile is going to be used as justification for police execution months or years later? Is that going to be a universal policy? Maybe we should just pass laws establishing a lottery into which every teenager arrested for anything ever is entered, and those whose names come up in the lottery are just shot dead by the police on the spot. Only when I say "every teenager arrested for anything ever is entered," really I just mean the black ones.
It can't be too hard to get a juvenile record in Ferguson, where in 2013 there were 10,000 more arrest warrants issued for nonviolent offenses than there were residents of the town. So you criminalize virtually everyone (or, you know, everyone black or brown or poor), then use their criminal records as your excuse for killing them in the street. It's appalling and shameful, and it's clearly the policy in Ferguson.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch should be ashamed of itself for seeking Michael Brown's juvenile records that may or may not exist; Charles C. Johnson is clearly beyond shame. Johnson insistently describes himself as an "award-winning journalist," with one of his major awards being a college journalism prize named after a New York Post editorial page editor and with a prize including an internship at Fox News. He's perhaps best known for his coverage of the Republican Senate run-off in Mississippi, where a media call held by Sen. Thad Cochran's campaign was interrupted by someone asking "if the black people were harvesting cotton why do you think it's okay to harvest their votes" after Johnson "reported" that the Cochran campaign was buying black votes, then tweeted out the call-in information for the campaign media call. Johnson has also recently distinguished himself with a series of tweets attacking James Foley after the journalist's beheading. He's already claimed that Michael Brown's hypothetical juvenile record included second-degree murder charges.
Charles C. Johnson is particularly repugnant, but he's enabled by a culture and a media that presumes that it's legitimate to blame an unarmed teenager for his own shooting death if he's black and has ever smoked pot, listened to rap, or been arrested—rightly or wrongly—at any point in his life.
10:45 AM PT: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that, according to a court official, Michael Brown was never convicted or charged with a class A or B felony. So will the Post-Dispatch drop its hunt for Brown's juvenile records, or is it going to press on looking for speeding tickets?