A lot of us have known that police brutality, as it used to be known, is not new. When I first joined the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1977, a duo of investigative reporters had just finished a series on police brutality. The incidents in the series all involved — exclusively — Black people getting shot. And while racial prejudice was a theme of the series, it wasn’t the only theme. The conclusion was that the St. Louis police needed more checks and more accountability.
A few years later, starting in 1982, I covered the police beat, with a desk in the “press room” on the first floor of police headquarters. At the time, the PD had a competitor, the St. Louis Globe Democrat, and the Globe reporter and I shared the office. The Globe was known to be much more police friendly than the Post, and I was advised by my predecessor not to take it personally when police officers preferred to speak to my competitor rather than to me.
I covered police for 5 years, and then filled in occasionally after that. I would sum it up this way: I wrote about a murder a day. It influenced my outlook on life and justice in many ways. I got to know and respect many police officers. They saw themselves as the good guys, but at the same time, many of them were not shy about their willingness to beat heads in, whether it was in “tough bars” in white South St. Louis or in “gang-infested” parks in black North St. Louis.
Writing about those daily murders, I shared tears with many victims’ family members. One of my most vivid memories is interviewing a mother whose second oldest son was shot by police. I think perhaps he was wounded and not killed, but I could be remembering wrong. What I do remember was that she was in the lobby of the police headquarters with her third son, who appeared to be a preteen or young teenager. As we talked, she mentioned that her oldest son was fatally shot “in the neighborhood.” And that she worried about her youngest son. I was aghast at her matter-of-fact tone. I wondered empathetically how any mother could carry on, knowing that the life expectancy of her baby boy was not likely to reach adulthood.
Fast-forward to 2001, when I applied to join the PD editorial board. I wrote an editorial about the most recent police shooting, of a sixteen-year-old boy with a BB gun that looked like a more deadly pistol (shades of Tamir Rice). I didn’t get the job, and the editorial has never been published — until now. I am saddened that the problem of police violence hasn’t changed in the last 19 years.
In 2014, I had already retired by the time the issue erupted in Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, where Michael Brown was killed by a police officer. My colleagues were awarded a Pulitzer prize for their photos of the protests arising from that death. In St. Louis, they are still talking about what could be learned from: Brown’s death, the continuing protests, the shabby grand jury sessions that led to no charges for his killer, police actions at later protests that resulted in officers being indicted, and banning of the practice of “kettling” — surrounding a crowd so that people couldn’t leave the area even if they wanted to.
Today, some of my conclusions in 2001 for addressing the problem are being revisited, and the exhortation to police and city officials to “examine whether the best strategy for dealing with this war is martial law or a Marshal Plan” is very current.
War Zone
Written 6/26/2001
In the past year (2001) 12 people have been fatally shot by a law enforcement officer in the metropolitan area.
In the past year at least 15 local police officers have been shot at in the line of duty — nine were wounded and two were killed.
This clash — this guerrilla action — is most striking in an area between Fairground and O’Fallon parks. In the past three and a half months, nine people have been killed there and several others wounded — including a police officer. The officer was wounded in the hand and leg by bullets from different guns as he chased three men suspected of a carjacking near Fairground Park.
A story about that shooting by Donald E. Franklin and Jeremy K. Kohler, characterized the neighborhood as “a mixture of tranquillity and violence” with “well-kept homes and lawns interspersed with boarded-up and abandoned houses and businesses.” Police have responded to the violence by beefing up patrols with an anti-gang unit. The effort has yielded several drug busts, the story said.
Last week sixteen-year-old Torrence Mull stood at a bus stop on Natural Bridge Avenue near Fairground. It was 11:30 p.m. and the night’s skirmishes were in full swing. Perhaps Mull felt a little safer with the look-alike BB-gun pistol he carried in his waist.
But instead of sending the message, “don’t mess with me,” the pistol caught the eye of Officer Anthony Martin. Thirty-year-old Martin has been on the St. Louis police force for four years. Chief Joseph Mokwa calls him “a good officer.” He was patrolling the combat area, and he caught a kid with a gun.
It could have been a misunderstood gesture. But the result was that Martin believed Mull was going for his pistol, and the officer shot the teen dead with one bullet.
In the aftermath of this death and others that follow, let’s not focus on assigning blame. Instead of inquests and insults — are the police trigger happy? Is every teenage male on a nighttime street corner a suspected gang member? — let’s start a peace movement.
Church leaders, declare Peace Sunday and preach peace from every pulpit. Activists, organize weekly peace marches calling for an end to street violence. Mothers take the guns away from your children — even the toys and look-alikes. Police officers and city officials examine whether the best strategy for dealing with this war is martial law or a Marshal Plan.
And those of us who live in neighborhoods that we think are safer than the area around Fairground Park, end our smug assumption that the war zone’s boundaries don’t extend to our homes. In a grisly paraphrase of the African proverb that Hillary Clinton is fond of quoting, It takes a whole village to kill a child.