• U.S.

Nobody Is Winning in Ferguson

8 minute read

FERGUSON, Mo. — The death of 18-year-old Michael Brown is above all a tragedy for his family. But in Ferguson, Mo., there is more than enough tragedy to go around. Virtually no one connected to the tumult in this St. Louis suburb—whether by proximity, profession, or ideology; by happenstance or choice—has escaped the nightly clashes without suffering in ways big or small.

When darkness falls, violence rips through a battered strip of downtown and forks into quiet neighborhoods. Families are trapped in their homes as gunshots ring out and cops fire tear gas into apartment complexes. It’s become enough that some people are ready to leave. Anita Matlock, a 20-year-old certified nurse assistant, is breaking her lease at Canfield Green, the beige-and-brown three-story apartment complex that fronts the street where Brown was shot. The early morning hours there are now pierced by volleys of gunfire. “It’s too disruptive,” says her mother, Yvonne Matlock. “She can’t get in. Can’t get out. Can’t sleep.”

Ron Henry, from the nearby town of Florissant, says his fiancée Clarissa and his 3-year-old son, Ron Jr., had automatic weapons pointed at them by police while trying to leave his grandmother’s apartment near the center of the conflict. Their car was swallowed by smoke. “Rioting,” Henry says, “is the voice of the unheard.” But that doesn’t mean he wants to raise his family among it. “Does my three-year old son need to get gassed?” he asked.

The tumult has closed local schools, sending working parents scrambling to make arrangements to watch and feed their children. Last year, 68% of students in the Ferguson-Florissant school district received meal assistance of some kind; this year the program was extended to everyone. The loss of the subsidy stings for residents of a city whose median household income is about $36,000.

It’s been no better for businesses. Stores along West Florissant Avenue, the Ferguson thoroughfare that has been the locus of the riots, have been torched and looted. Many others in town are boarded up; the owner of a fashion boutique spray-painted “OPEN! BLACK OWNERS” onto the wooden planks covering the shop to deter vandals. At the shopping center about a quarter-mile down the road—where Missouri National Guard tanks are arrayed in rows in the parking lot and military observers perch on rooftops— sales have plunged as stores close early to avoid the evening chaos.

For everyone in the area, unpredictable police roadblocks turn driving after dark into a maze without an exit. After midnight, residents can find themselves on the wrong side of police barricades, unable to get home or to work. Even on the most peaceful days since the shooting, the streets are still unruly and chaotic, a cacophony of honking horns, angry shouts and carloads of people hanging out of windows, slinging epithets at police.

The vast majority of the hundreds, sometimes thousands of people protesting each day are law-abiding. But the large community of peaceful protesters, who have thronged the streets for nine days in an effort to bring social change, have seen a heartfelt cause partially co-opted by a small band of what law enforcement officials have described as “agitators.” In the morning, the protesters show up early to sweep the streets of the previous night’s trash. Day and night, they tote signs and chant slogans. On Monday, to comply with a new police edict that prohibited crowds from congregating in one spot, they resorted to walking laps, looping up and down West Florissant for hours, carrying red roses handed out by volunteers and passing out free water when people flagged in the stifling August heat.

For much of the day, community leaders are able to steer protests into sanctioned areas and keep the crowd in check. The challenge comes after nightfall. That’s when a faction of agitators files into the streets. They are there not to protest but to fight. They can mingle with the protesters, cloaking themselves in the crowd and making it hard for police to distinguish the troublemakers from the rest. Many are not from Ferguson. At least 78 people were arrested Monday night, and while most were reportedly from Missouri, some were from places as far-flung as California, New York, and Washington D.C.

According to locals and local enforcement officials, the ranks also include multiple gang members from Chicago and East St. Louis who have forged an uneasy truce to pursue a common enemy. There are young gang members who wrap red bandannas over their mouths, gas mask-wearing anarchists, and communist revolutionaries.

The violent faction has repeatedly derailed the demonstrations, despite the efforts of peaceful members of the crowd. Each night the struggle starts again. On Friday, the peace held until the early morning hours, when the fighters began looting businesses, hurling Molotov cocktails and setting fires. On Saturday, as time ticked away toward a midnight curfew, the peacekeepers roamed the crowd, imploring people to go home. Those that stayed were bent on conflict. “We ready to die,” one shouted as the gas came out. “They armed. We armed. Let’s do this!” said another.

Monday night brought an eerie calm to the streets. It was shattered around 9:30 p.m., when a clutch of agitators surged toward a police line, hurling glass bottles and plastic containers of water at officers. Police gathered their riot gear and put on their gas masks, readying for battle. Community leaders pleaded for the cops to hold off and confronted the provocateurs, linking their arms to form a human barricade between the crowd and the police. “Why are you doing this to us?” one peacekeeper screamed. It was a remarkable scene that seemed to defuse the situation.

A few minutes later someone threw a bottle, and the ritual chaos was unleashed.

As difficult as it is for the peaceful protesters, the skirmishes are no easier for police. Flat-screens around the U.S. have been flooded with images of armored trucks, riot-gear-clad police toting rifles, and clouds of gas. But those images rarely capture the chaos that precedes it.

Surveilling the streets of Ferguson is a chaotic job, marred by the mismanagement of the city police, jurisdictional tangles, hostile crowds, and tactics that seem to change nightly. The cops have been thrust into the impossible position of trying to balance intense political scrutiny with their mandate for public safety—and they are forced to carry out under the klieg lights of the national media, amid chaotic street fights.

“The situation, as volatile as it is, it doesn’t make a difference what decision you make. It will be wrong,” says one St. Louis County officer, who was not authorized to provide his name, as he patrolled a darkened street on Monday night, past graffiti scrawled on cement blocks that read “NO MORE PIGS.”

After heavy criticism for the military-style response by local law enforcement, the Missouri State Highway Patrol took control of the scene Thursday and adopted a laissez-faire approach. Riots broke out the next night. Police did little to stop the looting—partly on the advice of community leaders, who believed interceding could result in more violence. The next day, many protesters said they believed the hands-off treatment that allowed the rioting was a set-up to sully the crowd’s image.

The police are “working valiantly to protect the public, while at the some time preserving citizens’ rights to express their anger peacefully,” said Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, a Democrat. “As we’ve seen over the past week, it is not an easy balance to strike. And it becomes much more difficult in the dark of night, when organized and increasingly violent instigators take to the streets intent on creating chaos.”

The protests are fueled by a deep distrust between the community and the cops. It is hard to find a black man or woman at the nightly gatherings who does not have a story about experiencing some manner of racial profiling, intimidation and even brutality at the hands of police. “Black people want retribution,” says James Davis, 45.

The police—most of whom had absolutely nothing to do with Michael Brown’s death—have their own loyalties and grievances. “We’re all gangs,” says one police officer of the factions in Ferguson. “We’re in a gang too, just because of the uniform we wear.”

Meanwhile, the residents of Ferguson, weary of the nightly battles, are starting to worry what it will all yield. “It would be an injustice in his name to go back to the violence,” says Lacy Raye of St. Louis. “We just have to turn it into a positive. I think this will change everything, if we can put it in a positive light. But I don’t know.”

Witness Tension Between Police and Protestors in Ferguson, Mo.

A man backs away as law enforcement officials close in on him and eventually detain him during protests over the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager killed by a police officer, in Ferguson, Mo.
A man backs away as law enforcement officials close in on him and eventually detain him during protests over the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager killed by a police officer, in Ferguson, Mo., Aug. 11, 2014. Whitney Curtis—The New York Times/Redux
Ferguson St. Louis Missouri Police Shooting Riots Protests
Riot police force protestors from the business district into nearby neighborhoods in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 11, 2014.Scott Olson—Getty Images
Ferguson St. Louis Missouri Police Shooting Riots Protests
A child uses a rag to shield his face from tear gas fired by riot police, who used it to force protestors from the business district into nearby neighborhoods in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 11, 2014.Scott Olson—Getty Images
Ferguson St. Louis Missouri Police Shooting Riots Protests
Police officers keep watch from an armored vehicle as they patrol a street in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 11, 2014Mario Anzuoni—Reuters
Ferguson St. Louis Missouri Police Shooting Riots Protests
Police officers ride an armored vehicle as they patrol a street in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 11, 2014.Mario Anzuoni—Reuters
Ferguson St. Louis Missouri Police Shooting Riots Protests
A demonstrator raises his hands in front of of a police officer in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 11, 2014.Mario Anzuoni—Reuters
Ferguson St. Louis Missouri Police Shooting Riots Protests
Riot police lock down a neighborhood in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 11, 2014.Scott Olson—Getty Images
Ferguson St. Louis Missouri Police Shooting Riots Protests
People raise their hands in the middle of the street as riot police move toward their position trying to get them to disperse, in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 11, 2014.Jeff Roberson—AP
Outrage In Missouri Town After Police Shooting Of 18-Yr-Old Man
Demonstrators raise their hands and chant "hands up, don't shoot" during a protest over the killing of Michael Brown on in Clayton, Mo. on August 12, 2014.Scott Olson—Getty Images
Outrage In Missouri Town After Police Shooting Of 18-Yr-Old Man
Civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton speaks about the killing of teenager Michael Brown at a press conference held on the steps of the old courthouse in St. Louis on Aug. 12, 2014.Scott Olson—Getty Images
Outrage In Missouri Town After Police Shooting Of 18-Yr-Old Man
Police take up position to control demonstrators who were protesting the killing of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 12, 2014.Scott Olson—Getty Images
Outrage In Missouri Town After Police Shooting Of 18-Yr-Old Man
Demonstrators protest the killing of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. on August 12, 2014.Scott Olson—Getty Images
Outrage In Missouri Town After Police Shooting Of 18-Yr-Old Man
Demonstrators protest the killing of teenager Michael Brown outside Greater St. Marks Family Church in St. Louis on Aug. 12, 2014.Scott Olson—Getty Images
Outrage In Missouri Town After Police Shooting Of 18-Yr-Old Man
Police stand watch as demonstrators protest the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 13, 2014.Scott Olson—Getty Images
TEAR GAS SHOT AT PROTESTORS
A demonstrator throws back a tear gas container after tactical officers worked to break up a group of bystanders on Chambers Road near West Florissant in Ferguson on Aug. 13, 2014. Robert Cohen—St. Louis Post-Dispatch/MCT/Zuma Press
Police Shooting Missouri
Police officers work their way north on West Florissant Avenue clearing the road of people in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 13, 2014. Robert Cohen—St. Louis Post-Dispatch/AP
Outrage In Missouri Town After Police Shooting Of 18-Yr-Old Man
Demonstrators protest the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 13, 2014.Scott Olson—Getty Images
Police Shooting Missouri
People run through smoke in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 13, 2014.Jeff Roberson—AP
APTOPIX Police Shooting Missouri
A protester takes shelter from smoke billowing around him in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 13, 2014.David Carson—St. Louis Post-Dispatch/AP
Police Shooting Missouri
An explosive device deployed by police flies in the air as police and protesters clash in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 13, 2014Jeff Roberson—AP
Police Shooting Missouri
Thousands of demonstrators peacefully march to the spot where Michael Brown was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 14, 2014. Jeff Roberson—AP
Outrage In Missouri Town After Police Shooting Of 18-Yr-Old Man
Demetrus Washington joins other demonstrators protesting the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 14, 2014.Scott Olson—Getty Images
Demonstrators protest outside of Greater St. Marks Family Church in Ferguson, Missouri
Demonstrators protest outside of Greater St. Marks Family Church in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 14, 2014. Lucas Jackson—Reuters
Protesters take part in a peaceful demonstration against shooting of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri
Protesters light candles as they take part in a peaceful demonstration in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 14, 2014. Lucas Jackson—Reuters
Missouri State Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson speaks to protesters as he walks through a peaceful demonstration as communities continue to react to the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson
Missouri State Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson (L) speaks to protesters as he walks through a peaceful demonstration as communities continue to react to the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 14, 2014. Lucas Jackson—Reuters
Outrage In Missouri Town After Police Shooting Of 18-Yr-Old Man
A young child looks out from a car as demonstrators drive down West Florissant Avenue protesting the shooting and death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 15, 2014.Scott Olson—Getty Images
Outrage In Missouri Town After Police Shooting Of 18-Yr-Old Man
A demonstrator walks through smoke launched by police after a skirmish in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 15, 2014Scott Olson—Getty Images
Ferguson Lowenstein
A demonstrator protests on Florissant Ave in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 16, 2014. Jon Lowenstein—NOOR for TIME
Ferguson Lowenstein
Children walk past police officers during a demonstration in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 16, 2014. Jon Lowenstein—Noor for TIME
Ferguson Lowenstein
Protestors help a man who was injured by tear gas thrown by police after refusing to disperse after the midnight curfew in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 17, 2014. Jon Lowenstein—Noor for TIME
Ferguson Jon Lowenstein Teargas
Protestors throw canisters in Ferguson, Mo. on August 18, 2014.Jon Lowenstein—Noor for TIME
Ferguson Lowenstein
Protestors demonstrate against the killing of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo. on August 17, 2014.Jon Lowenstein—NOOR for TIME
Ferguson Lowenstein
A protestor during demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo. on August 17, 2014.Jon Lowenstein—Noor for TIME
Ferguson Lowenstein
A protestor retaliates against police in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 17, 2014.Jon Lowenstein—Noor for TIME
Ferguson Lowenstein
A protestor throws a canister of tear gas back at police during demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 17, 2014.Jon Lowenstein—Noor for TIME
Police Shooting Missouri
Police wait to advance after tear gas was used to dispersed a crowd in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 17, 2014.Charlie Riedel—AP
Ferguson Lowenstein
A protestor holds a sign that reads "stop killing us" amid clouds of tear gas in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 17, 2014.Jon Lowenstein—Noor for TIME
Police Shooting Missouri
Police wait to advance after tear gas was used to disperse a crowd in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 17, 2014.Charlie Riedel—AP
Outrage In Missouri Town After Police Shooting Of 18-Yr-Old Man
Tear gas rains down on a woman kneeling in the street with her hands in the air during a demonstration in Ferguson on Aug. 17, 2014. The "hands up, don't shoot" pose became the defining gesture of the protests.Scott Olson—Getty Images
Protesters react to the effects of tear gas which was fired at demonstrators reacting to the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri
Protesters attempt to treat a woman who was in a cloud of tear gas thrown by police in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 17, 2014. Lucas Jackson—Reuters
Demonstrators march down West Florissant during a peaceful march in reaction to the shooting of Michael Brown near Ferguson, Missouri
Demonstrators march down West Florissant Ave. during a peaceful march in reaction to the shooting of Michael Brown near Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 18, 2014. Lucas Jackson—Reuters
REUTERS PICTURE HIGHLIGHT
Demonstrators march down West Florissant during a peaceful march in reaction to the shooting of Michael Brown, near Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 18, 2014. Lucas Jackson—Reuters
Police arrest two in front of McDonalds
Police tackle a man who was walking down the street in front of McDonald's in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 18, 2014.Laurie Skrivan—St. Louis Post-Dispatch/AP
US-CRIME-RACE-POLICE-SHOOTING
Law enforcement officers watch on during a protest on West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 18, 2014. Michael B. Thomas—AFP/Getty Images
National Guard Called In As Unrest Continues In Ferguson
Demonstrators cover their faces as tear gas fills the air as police fire the gas against an unruly crowd protesting the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug.18, 2014Joe Raedle—Getty Images
Violence between police and protestors erupts in Ferguson - again
A protestor wearing a gas mask stands with his hands up while facing armed police in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 18, 2014. Abe Van Dyke—Demotix/Corbis
Police fire tear gas in the direction of where bottles were thrown from crowds gathered near the QuikTrip on W. Florissant Avenue on Aug. 18, 2014.
Police fire tear gas in the direction of where bottles were thrown from crowds gathered near the QuikTrip on W. Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 18, 2014. David Carson—St Louis Post-Dispatch/Polaris
Demonstrators stand in the middle of West Florissant as they react to tear gas fired by police during ongoing protests in reaction to the shooting of Brown, near Ferguson
Demonstrators stand in the middle of West Florissant as they react to tear gas fired by police during ongoing protests in reaction to the shooting of teenager Michael Brown, near Ferguson, Missouri, August 18, 2014. Lucas Jackson—Reuters
Demonstrators protest against the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Aug. 19, 2014.
Demonstrators protest against the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Aug. 19, 2014. Joshua Lott—Reuters
A police officer in riot gear detains a demonstrator protesting against the shooting of Michael Brown, in Ferguson
A police officer in riot gear detains a demonstrator protesting against the shooting of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 19, 2014. Joshua Lott—Reuters
Police officers in riot gear watch demonstrators protesting against the shooting of Michael Brown from the side of a building in Ferguson
Police officers in riot gear watch demonstrators protesting against the shooting of Michael Brown from the side of a building in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 19, 2014. Joshua Lott—Reuters
TOPSHOTS-US-CRIME-RACE-POLICE-SHOOTING
Two protesters sit with their faces covered during a peaceful protest in Ferguson, Mo. early on Aug. 20, 2014. Michael B. Thomas—AFP/Getty Images
A man is doused with milk and sprayed with mist after being hit by an eye irritant from security forces trying to disperse demonstrators protesting against the shooting of Brown in Ferguson
A man is doused with milk and sprayed with mist after being hit by an eye irritant from security forces trying to disperse demonstrators in Ferguson, Mo. early on Aug. 20, 2014. Adrees Latif—Reuters
APTOPIX Police Shooting Missouri
In this photo taken with a long exposure, protesters march in the street as lightning flashes in the distance in Ferguson, Mo., Aug. 20, 2014.Jeff Roberson—AP

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Write to Alex Altman at alex_altman@timemagazine.com