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To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Wilson had been a police officer for six years in Ferguson and nearby Jennings. Wilson resigned from the Ferguson Police Department shortly after a grand jury decided not to indict him for the Brown shooting. The Jennings City Council then brought in entirely new officers to start a credible police department from scratch.
After the shooting, video footage was released purportedly showing Wilson in arresting a man, Mike Arman, for recording the officer without his permission. On August 9, Wilson was leaving from a previous call when he stopped Brown and his friend, Dorian Johnson, for jaywalking. The facts of the case showed that under Missouri law — and in accordance with Supreme Court precedent — Officer Wilson was justified in shooting Michael Brown.
In fact, compared to other police use-of-force cases, this incident was pretty simple and pretty easy to evaluate. Under Missouri law, a police officer is authorized to use force in self-defense when in fear of death or great bodily harm to himself or another person and to effect an arrest or prevent escape under certain prescribed conditions. In Jones v. City of St. Louis , 92 F. In Fitzgerald v. Patrick , F. It really boils down to two things: An unarmed assailant can legitimately threaten life or great bodily harm to another person — even an officer — and an objectively reasonable officer in a similar position to Wilson would have done what Wilson did.
There seems to be evidence — or there is evidence — indicating a struggle taking place with the officer while he was still in his patrol vehicle and a struggle or attempted struggled for the officer's gun, which would justify the officer's perception that he was in danger of serious physical injury or death. Such a size disparity affects the perception of the threat on the part of the person being attacked.
Merely five minutes before the shooting, Brown and an accomplice had manhandled a store clerk while robbing a convenience store. When Wilson stopped the pair, they were walking down the middle of the street, something often done as a means of intimidating drivers and pedestrians. This action alone suggests a mindset bent on confrontation.
Further, remember that Officer Wilson told investigators that Brown had pushed him back into his SUV, then struggled for his pistol inside that squad. When there is a physical fight between an officer and an assailant, there is always at least one gun present. He applied to the Eastern Missouri Police Academy and was accepted. Being a police officer, he reasoned, was a recession-proof career. Wilson found the classwork fascinating, especially when he and other cadets role-played at handling stressful situations.
When Wilson applied for a police job, he focussed on the northern portion of St. Louis County. The towns in what is called North County tend to be poorer, and to have a higher percentage of black residents, than other towns in the St. Louis area—such as St.
Peters, the broadly middle-class, white town where Wilson grew up. North County also has more crime. Wilson felt that working in a tough area would propel his career.
There are almost fifty municipalities in North County. The officers in some of the towns are not just fighting crime; they also issue countless traffic tickets and ordinance-violation citations. The local governments often rely on the fines generated by tickets and violations to balance their budgets. In , the town of Edmundson, which comprises less than a square mile, issued nearly five thousand traffic tickets. Police officers, meanwhile, can be paid as little as ten dollars an hour, according to Kevin Ahlbrand, the president of the Missouri Fraternal Order of Police.
Interacting with residents, he felt intimidated and unprepared. A field-training officer named Mike McCarthy, who had been a cop for ten years, displayed no such discomfort. McCarthy, a thirty-nine-year-old Irish-American with short brown hair and a square chin, is a third-generation policeman who grew up in North County.
Most of his childhood friends were African-American. This is a culture shock. Would you help me? Because you obviously have that connection, and you can relate to them.
You may be white, but they still respect you. So why can they respect you and not me? McCarthy had never heard another officer make such an honest admission of his own limitations. Police officers are rigorously trained in firing weapons and apprehending suspects but not in establishing common ground with people who have had different experiences. For several months, McCarthy taught Wilson how to walk the beat—coaching him to loosen up, joke, and curse occasionally.
McCarthy, who is gay, said that he understood what it meant to be marginalized. McCarthy helped Wilson, in part, by letting him make mistakes. One night, they were patrolling a neighborhood where burglary was common. McCarthy had spent two years working as a police officer at a predominantly black middle school in the city of Normandy. Michael Brown attended the school, but not when McCarthy worked there. When Wilson became a police officer in Jennings, he was joining a department that had a reputation for racism.
Louis moved to North County. Numerous towns there went from being majority white to being majority black. The police forces remained almost completely white. McCarthy showed me several police logs from those decades, and many entries documented bigotry on the part of Jennings authorities. In April, , a lieutenant described a holdup that had occurred near the police station. The suspects were two black males. Niggers are going to come in the police station next and rob us.
McCarthy said that police officers resist discussing racism, past or present. Be honest about it. Wilson strongly disagreed with McCarthy about this. In January, , a white officer stopped a vehicle with expired license plates. The driver got out, but a black woman who had been riding in the passenger seat drove off. There was a child in the back seat. The officer resigned.
Not long afterward, it was discovered that a lieutenant in Jennings had stolen federal funds allocated for drunk-driving checks. Louis County to take over. McCarthy secured a job at the local jail, which the town still ran, but most of the other officers were laid off, including Wilson.
That October, he began policing in neighboring Ferguson, which was slightly more prosperous and about two-thirds black. He was mentored by another field-training officer: Barb Spradling, his future wife. Barb had been working in Ferguson for seven years, as one of three women on a force of roughly fifty officers. The training went smoothly. Wilson also told Barb stories about his mother. Barb was moved, and before long they became a couple.
In July, , Wilson visited the home of Scottie Randolph, a sixty-seven-year-old African-American man, after Randolph reported hearing gunfire. Good values, Wilson insisted, needed to be learned at home. He spoke of a black single mother, in Ferguson, who was physically disabled and blind. This sounded like racial code language. Wilson struggled to respond.
At one crime scene, he discovered the mangled bodies of two dead women. I asked him if such incidents made it hard to sleep. According to court papers, Barb said that John drank, and had beaten her in the past. Wilson says that he liked working in Ferguson, but after a year or so he discerned problems within the department.
One day, he received a call about a woman screaming in the street. When he arrived on the scene, a rookie officer had already forced her onto the ground, arrested her, and handcuffed her. Arman had several broken-down vehicles parked on his property, in violation of city rules.
In the video, Wilson approaches the front porch of the house and notices that he is being videotaped. The video ends. Arman was fined for his violation. According to NBC News, in Ferguson filed more than twelve thousand cases charging ordinance violations—everything from loitering to petty larceny. And there were more than eleven thousand cases charging traffic violations. Wilson told me that he knew of an officer who had once issued sixteen.
I asked Wilson if he had issued multiple tickets. Three tickets, of course, could have ruinous consequences for a resident who was poor.
I met a man from St. Ferguson police chief talks changes since Brown's death. Wilson says his conscience is clear. Story highlights Darren Wilson tells The New Yorker that he "didn't want to work in a white area" Wilson fatally shot unarmed teenager Michael Brown last year; he was cleared in the death. Few people know where he lives with his wife and baby daughter. The year-old former Ferguson police officer hasn't been able to land a new police job, and is haunted by death threats stemming from Brown's shooting almost exactly one year ago.
Those are among the latest revelations about Wilson's life as detailed in a profile by The New Yorker. Here are the six things we learned about Wilson:. His mother was a habitual criminal. Wilson was raised in Texas by a mother who was a compulsive thief, according to the New Yorker profile.
Read More. His mother, Tonya Dean, even stole money raised for her son's Boy Scout troop, Wilson told the magazine. As a teenager, Wilson distrusted his mother so much that he had two bank accounts -- one that had little money in it, so his mother couldn't steal from him, and a secret account where he stashed earnings from his summer jobs. He said he even warned a friend's parents to not let her into their house because she'd likely find a way to steal their identities and use their credit cards.
But his mother managed to avoid prison. She died suddenly when Wilson was a teen, under circumstances that weren't clear to him at the time. Wilson now believes she may have committed suicide. He said he 'didn't want to work in a white area'. After his mother's death, Wilson worked in construction before deciding to become a police officer.
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