My home town of St. Louis has given up its sad secrets. Journalists – like tourists taking in the sights of social dysfunction – have explored its courthouses, its speed traps, its racial tensions and its redlined housing history. Cable television has carried images of burning cars and tear gas, which better qualify as “breaking news” than clergy-led marches and civic dialogue. From the coverage, one would think a whole city walks on broken glass. Perhaps it does.
There was a killing, everyone (at least) agrees. Was it permissible? A grand jury decided that it was under Missouri’s lethal-force law. Was it preventable? We should hope and expect that police find other, less lethal options to restrain charging, unarmed teenagers. Was it meaningful? That depends on what comes next.
It is the task of the legal system to impose one narrow version of justice: guilt or innocence. The role of politics is different; it consists more of questions than verdicts. Why do circumstances such as this one reveal such dramatically different views of police, courts and the basic fairness of our society? Why do some citizens of our country feel so tenuously connected to its promise and protections?
The law requires disinterested rigor. Politics requires a measure of empathy. If I lived in a nation that had systematically oppressed people of my background for hundreds of years, that was utterly indifferent to the failure of the school my child attends, that disproportionately profiles, harasses and even jails people like me for minor legal offenses, that offers little realistic hope my children will be treated better than I am, then I might feel differently about the justice and compassion of my society.
This is not an excuse of violence – really community self-immolation – but it is an explanation for deeply rooted suspicion.