As I have been watching the Michael Brown/Darren Wilson case unfold, a few things have occurred to me.

1: Let’s just get this out of the way first: there were two distinct groups in the streets the other night. Group A comprised people with legitimate grievances about this case and its place in a much longer running history of injustice for minorities in the US. Group B was made up of punks and hooligans looking for any excuse to cause trouble. There’s no defending this element’s behavior in the wake of the announcement that no indictment for officer Darren Wilson was forthcoming. I mean, you done me wrong, so to show you how pissed off I am I’m going to burn down my own house? Not a lot of rocket surgeons in that crowd, huh? I never ate at Red’s Barbecue, but I bet it was good and I hate to think what the owners are going through right now sifting through the ashes and trying to figure out what to do next.

2: I want to consider some numbers. Ferguson is 70% black but 50 of the police department’s 53 officers are white. The city has argued that it has done all it can to recruit black officers. That may be true. But if you’re skeptical, I understand why.

3: More numbers: Ferguson is 70% black, right? But the grand jury was 75% white. Just saying.

4: How about this number: 0.0068%. What’s that?

In the more than 162,500 cases prosecuted by U.S. attorneys from 2009 to 2010, grand juries voted not to return an indictment in only 11, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics — equivalent to one in 14,759 cases, or 0.0068 percent.

The article goes on to explain that this isn’t a perfect comparison. But even if it’s off by two freakin’ decimal places, that’s still an eyebrow-raiser, init?

5: How in the hell did this grand jury find itself in such rarefied statistical company? Good question. It isn’t clear that the prosecutor tried real hard.

Faced with the high burden of proof surrounding a contested police shooting, what’s clear is that McCulloch did not aggressively push for a prosecution. Rather, the lead prosecutor took a series of steps that are unusual in a grand jury proceeding and that likely influenced the jury’s final decision. Rather than building a case intended to prove Wilson’s criminal culpability before the jury, McCulloch presented all the evidence in the case. In effect, the lead prosecutor gave equal weight to the prosecution and the defense. That’s technically in keeping with the prosecutor’s responsibility to “disclose any credible evidence of actual innocence,” but highly unusual, since prosecutors usually only appear before grand jurys in cases where they are convinced of a party’s guilt.

Was the whole grand jury proceeding an elaborate dog and pony show staged by a man determined not to put the officer on trial? Good question.

6: But why would County Prosecutor Robert McCullough behave in such an unusual fashion? Well, there’s a history there. This isn’t the first time he has been perceived as acting to provide cover for the police in racially charged cases. And while we can’t say for sure that he was biased by his own personal history, it should be noted that his own father, a police officer, was killed in the line of duty when McCullough was 12. By a black man.

I’m not going to suggest for a second that I don’t understand how that might leave a scar on a man. Seriously. And I’m not going to argue that a boy who faced that kind of adversity couldn’t grow up to be a paragon of color-blind justice. But – and I cannot stress this enough – in a case like this it is not enough to act justly. It is also critical that one appear to be acting justly. For better or worse, there are times when perceptions are simply too overpowering, and in these cases officials whose motives are potentially suspect must recuse themselves, handing the reins to someone that the public can trust.

If McCullough didn’t realize this he was either stupid or pathologically naïve.

7: Hey, I know – let’s wait and announce this decision, which we know a highly agitated population has been planning for since the grand jury was seated, after dark. You know, because they’ll probably think it’s too late to go out, right?

Hey Hollywood, I have an idea for Dumb & Dumber 3. Have your people call my agent and let’s do lunch.

8: I wonder what President Obvious has to say? Obama didn’t tell us that water was wet or that the sun rises in the east, but he came damned close.

It’s still hard to say how this is all going to play out. I’m the sort of guy who can’t help hoping for the best, but I’ve learned to expect the worst.

Sam Smith is a writer and photographer living in Bend, Oregon. He’s the founder and publisher of Scholars & Rogues and by day works in the exciting world of marketing. Sam holds a PhD from the University of Colorado and loves craft beer, Chelsea FC and Scottish Terriers perhaps a bit more than is strictly healthy.

There we had Barack Obama, the first black

President of the United States, finally admitting on one side of the television that structural racism is real. There we finally had him saying that when it comes to police terrorizing black folks, “communities of color aren’t just making these problems up”. But, in nearly the same breath on Monday night after the grand-jury decision in Ferguson, as the people were taking to the streets in cities across the nation, the president also said he doesn’t believe unequal enforcement of the law is “the norm. I don’t think that’s true for the majority of communities or the vast majority of law enforcement officials.”

It wasn’t just surreal, then, to witness Obama’s anti-Trayvon Martin moment at the very same time a split-screen on the other side of the TV showed police launching smoke bombs at protesters in Ferguson. It was heartbreaking. Because if that was reality rising up through the gap on Monday night, the reality is that legal discrimination is the norm – and our law enforcement officials refuse to acknowledge reality.

This is the gap in our collective split-screen: The Ferguson cops arrest black citizens three times more often than they do white people, but USA Today recently reported that “1,581 other police departments across the USA arrest black people at rates even more skewed than in Ferguson.” That’s right: the police department that won’t even see officer Darren Wilson stand trial – a cop, mind you, who complained that Michael Brown “looked like a demon” after he’d shot the unarmed black teenager – engages in less racial profiling than 1,581 other American police departments.

So it was nothing short of a gut punch to see our African American president on the wrong side of the gap between the fantasy of what the law does and the reality that people live. Obama, in that moment, gave credence to the fiction that if citizens just faithfully adhere to being “a nation built on the rule of law”, the result will be justice. Perhaps he will finally go to Ferguson tomorrow, but today, we are a nation looking upon a pile of ashes, death and broken dreams.

‘The most significant challenge encountered in this investigation has been the 24-hour news cycle,’ Bob McCulloch said – which … really?

And here we also had the overzealous, smarmy prosecutor Bob McCulloch telling us on primetime TV that the law allowed Wilson to shoot a kid in the head – and that there would be zero consequences. Obama and McCulloch both occupied this same gap between law and justice, but at least the president acknowledged there is a gap. McCulloch didn’t see the gap at all.

The prosecutor spoke in a bland manner about making sure things like this don’t happen again, without seeming to think he could actually do anything to deter them from happening again. He certainly didn’t display any feelings of agency as a prosecutor, and he didn’t seem to care that he’d maximized the possibility of police violence by holding his conference after nightfall. And, while deeply concerned about the potential for looting in Ferguson on one side and the “insatiable appetite” of the media and social media that was apparently the “most significant challenge” to the investigation on the other, McCulloch showed no interest in how the legal, economic looting of Ferguson and the irrational, unabated militarization of its local police force are undoubtedly responsible for countless charged interactions between police and citizens.
black lives matter fire

The people who understand this gap were and are the protesters – many very young – who have been on the streets nightly (and overwhelmingly without violence) for more than 100 nights since Michael Brown was killed. Monday night was just one night in what is a movement that cannot be contained, no matter what the (white) talking heads of the split-screen say. Today, while Ferguson and a nation full of organized protest cope with the smoldering embers, Darren Wilson goes on living his life as a newlywed groom, free to shop his story to networks without a trace of apology. Today, Michael Brown remains dead, but at least the protesters understand the gap between justice and the law, between reality and our political insanity. They know not to simply listen to words from a black president in Washington or a white prosecutor down the street. They know to take to the streets, because it’s not enough to shout in the margins anymore.
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The people on the streets know that the status quo cannot stand if justice is to be achieved. Amidst the flames and the teargas, the people on the streets are right – they are somehow even more right than the rule of law, at least when such laws won’t even let Darren Wilson face a trial for shooting an unarmed teen, whether Mike Brown had his hands up or not.

Future protests have another gap to expand: when McCulloch blames social media, and Obama dismisses news coverage of “negative reaction[s]” simply making “for good TV”, there is a root injustice there. The flames of Monday night’s unrest were manufactured, but not by media. They were stoked for hours, by McCulloch, who riled up the crowds needlessly until night fell; they were fueled for days, by Missouri governor Jay Nixon, who whipped up hysteria with his pre-emptive “state of emergency” and his calling-in of the National Guard. The flames were fanned for hundreds of years, by the white supremacy and structural racism that have wreaked economic, physical, psychological and spiritual violence upon black Americans for centuries.

It wasn’t the media that caused this history, despite Obama’s claim that to deny “progress I think is to deny America’s capacity for change”. Watching television and Twitter on Monday night – and today, and tomorrow, and 100 more days after that – reveals that media, especially social media, reflects the reality of the racial violence of these United States more than any politician in a box ever can anymore. Meanwhile, US laws haven’t just failed to catch up with what media sees: They have created the violent nightmare we are living.