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| AP |
The protests came after a black man was shot and killed by a Milwaukee police officer during a traffic stop on Saturday. As in the Michael Brown case, local media and law enforcement were quick to point to Sylville Smith’s ‘lengthy criminal’ record and his alleged wrongdoing –- he ran from police and refused to drop a gun loaded with 23 rounds before he was shot.
The incident seemed cut-and-dry to many Americans. Smith allegedly broke the law; he refused to drop his weapon and he was a criminal, charged last year in a shooting and then charged with trying to intimidate a witness in that shooting. Those charges were dropped. Smith had been arrested or ticketed nine times since 2011, but had only one conviction, a misdemeanor, for carrying a concealed weapon. In Smith’s case, the officer was African-American, causing many to further question why the shooting was gaining so much attention.
On social media, many said Smith was the last person protesters should support. But in Milwaukee, just like in Ferguson, it wasn’t just about Sylville Smith, according to Chenjerai Kumanyika, an assistant professor at Clemson University who researches communication for social justice and perspectives in popular culture.
“If you listen to the voice of people protesting, it’s not about a specific case, but part of the pattern of structural violence that people are protesting about,” Kumanyika said.
And as in Ferguson, where the Justice Department found that the officer who shot Michael Brown acted in self-defense, there are a series of background factors that led to protests throughout the city, according to Harold Pollack, a professor at the The University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and co-director of The University of Chicago Crime Lab.
“In the case of Ferguson, the systematic predatory practices of the police department there had undermined community trust in the police,” Pollack said.
Pollack said Milwaukee and Ferguson share, “high levels of segregation and failure to attend to deep social-economic challenges in the community.”
In 2015, the Justice Department wrote in a scathing report that leading up to Brown’s death police and municipal court practices were found to “disproportionately harm African Americans.”
Attorney General Eric Holder said in 2015 the relationship between police and the African-American community was a "highly toxic environment, defined by mistrust and resentment, stoked by years of bad feelings."
“It is not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident [Brown’s death] set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg,” Holder said.
Following Brown’s death, Milwaukee Alderman Milele Coggs said Milwaukee was “just a death or two away from being Ferguson."
She told USA TODAY in a phone interview that she knew in 2014 that Milwaukee had all ingredients for the "recipe for what happened in Ferguson."
"There are definitely similarities [between Milwaukee and Ferguson,]" Coggs said. "What's going on in Milwaukee now is not about this one shooting, it’s about years of inequity, segregation, and years of racial disparity in this city."
Kumanyika noted that in communities like Milwaukee and Ferguson, people are frustrated with the consistent attempt to frame police violence and brutality as the result of a few problem officers who may have been racially motivated, and not deeper systematic problems of everyday policing.
“If the problem was limited to a few racist white officers, that would actually be an easier problem to solve,” he said.
Kumanyika pointed to the case of Philando Castile, a Minnesota man who was shot by police during a traffic stop.
Castile was pulled over at least 49 times, often for minor infractions, during a 13-year-span, The New York Times reported.
He said pointing the blame at one officer glosses over the economic issues and the historically untrustworthy relationship between low-income minority communities and the police officers who are supposed to be serving them.
Pollack noted that the situation in Milwaukee points to the need for police forces to build positive relationships with the communities they are involved in, so when tragedy occurs, dialogue, instead of violence, can happen.
"Public safety is the joint product of the police department, local communities and all the different constituents involved — that partnership requires a level of trust and legitimacy on both sides,” Pollack said.
