Another Black Teenager Was Shot Last Night in St. Louis

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

09 October 14

nother black teenager was shot last night in St. Louis by another white police officer, and St. Louis is a place now that is full of doubts of which nobody gets the benefit any more. The circumstances of the incident are ambiguous at best. The officer was off-duty, but apparently wearing his official uniform, while moonlighting for a private security company contracted to guard the surrounding neighborhood. Police say that the officer got suspicious when he saw three young black males running away, and one of them was wearing his pants in such a way as to suggest he might have a gun. Police say the man with the suspicious pants fired first. Police say the officer then returned fire -- 17 times -- and the man in the suspicious pants was killed. Police say that a 9mm handgun was found at the scene and presumed to belong to the man in the suspicious pants. An angry crowd gathered. Harsh words were exchanged. Police cars were kicked and their windows smashed. The circumstances of this latest incident are ambiguous, but ambiguity died in St. Louis at the same time Michael Brown did.

If you truly want to see what happens when citizens lose trust in their institutions, don't look to fanciful speculation about the CDC and its relationship to an IRS office in Cincinnati, look in the streets of St. Louis, where the slow-playing of the investigation into one police shooting has led to the death on ambiguity in this latest one. (17 shots? Really? And suspicious pants are probable cause? And isn't running away from the St. Louis police these days sensible self-preservation?) The police story may be entirely true this time and, regardless of what you may have heard out of the Bundy Ranch, if you draw down on law enforcement, you are taking your life into your hands. But, because one kid took his life in his hands by surrendering, this simple truth is irrelevant in St. Louis because ambiguity died there with Michael Brown.

This is going to be a weekend of protest in St. Louis over the strangely unresolved case of the killing of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson. Those protests cannot help but be energized, for good or ill, by the events of last night. There is a continuum of suspicion between the two cases. In one direction, it leads to a distrust of the police and, in the other, it leads to a presumption of guilt towards anyone who is wearing their pants suspiciously and runs away when he sees the uniform. There are garrison mentalities facing off against each other across a wasteland of bad faith and bureaucratic blindness. There is still a lot that is vague and thinly substantiated about last night's shooting. (For example, how widespread is the practice of wearing your official uniforms while working your second job? That seems a bit hinky to me.) There is so much we don't know, and not knowing is where ambiguity resides. But, in St. Louis these days, everybody knows everything and nobody knows anything and ambiguity died with Michael Brown, and all the doubts have no benefit to anyone at all.