No one should really be surprised at the lack of charges being brought against Darren Wilson by the United States Department of Justice.
The claims by the DOJ about how the bar for prosecution in these cases is “too high” are transparently false. It is very difficult, for instance, to compare this case with the Federal trial of the four officers who beat Rodney King — two of whom were convicted — and conclude that the killing of Michael Brown is somehow less substantive legally.
This is an administration that went through the most strenuous efforts to eviscerate the Fourth Amendment in order to legalize spying on every U.S. citizen, yet somehow finds it too difficult to make a case against a guy who not only used clearly racially motivated imagery in his grand jury testimony and was a a member of two, not one, two police forces that are well documented as being racist.
To understand this, we have to realize it’s about politics. We see a similar situation with the Big Banks. It has been well-documented that criminal charges could have been brought, yet the DOJ demurred. The Obama Administration clearly prefers tinkering with the status quo rather than changing it in any appreciable way, even when it admits systemic problems as with both Wall St. and racism. The problems may be systemic but the institutions the banks and the police are “too big to fail,” thus any significant challenge to them must be avoided.
We have to understand their response to Ferguson as an attempt to address the palpable anger while avoiding any significant polarizing precedents. For instance if charges had been brought against Wilson that would have opened up the door for just about every police killing involving a white officer and Black suspect to be tried federally.
Were this to have occurred, the consequences would be explosive, opening up the possibility for a major assault on racism in the U.S. which undoubtedly would be controversial and certainly could have a destabilizing effect politically and socially. It would go right to the heart of the racist and brutal nature of police departments nationwide and the mass incarceration laws that underpin these practices.
Instead the administration sticks with the “reports” and band-aids like oversight and consent decrees and so on which isolate the problem to particular “departmental cultures” and elide the fact that it’s not about particular officers or departments but the entire institution. Similar to the tinkering around the edges with the banks, they get people for procedural things or minor violations but avoid any major assault on banks that could be destabilizing politically and socially for U.S. capitalism.
