FERGUSON FALLOUT

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FERGUSON FALLOUT

On Aug. 9, an unarmed black 18-year-old named Michael Brown was shot by a white policeman in Ferguson, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. That – and the riots afterward – made the old fissure of race perhaps 2014’s biggest public issue. Many blacks don’t trust cops, polls show, while most whites do. Black mistrust is rooted in experience – they’re far more likely to be stopped by police for even minor infractions. Meanwhile, whites still control political power in lots of towns like Ferguson where minorities are becoming the majority. African-Americans are tired of feeling the justice system is stacked against them.

Subsequent events made the racial rift starker. A St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Mr. Brown. A Staten Island, N.Y., grand jury declined to indict Daniel Pantaleo, a white policeman who killed Eric Garner with a chokehold. In Cleveland, a rookie cop shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice for brandishing an air gun that fires plastic pellets.

This is a “systemic problem ... black folks and Latinos and others are not just making this up,” said Mr. Obama in an interview with Black Entertainment Television in December.

The good news is there is progress, noted the president. Overt racism has declined while more subtle forms of discrimination remain entrenched. Younger people have evolved on race amid much greater exposure to multiculturalism.

Ferguson and other cases should lead to specific reforms. There will be more police wearing cameras, fewer militarized police riot units, and more minority faces in uniform.

But America’s racial rift remains a challenge in a country where 80 percent of blacks said the Brown shooting raised important issues about race, according to a Pew Research Center poll, while only 37 percent of whites agreed.

In that context the impact of the Garner case in Staten Island may turn out to be larger than that of the Brown case in Ferguson. Both whites and minorities say they’re disturbed about the facts of that case, in large part because of the presence of a video that shows Mr. Garner saying he “can’t breathe” while being subdued.

“Mr. Brown’s death largely divided Americans along racial lines and political lines. The early reactions to the Garner death suggest that Americans are far more united in their response,” wrote the Monitor’s Feldmann.