In 1961, the Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow gave a historically noteworthy speech at the National Association of Broadcasters convention arguing whether or not the phrase “public interest” is synonymous with the “interests of the public.”
Last week, attorneys for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch petitioned the St. Louis Family Court for a copy of the juvenile records of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager from Ferguson, Mo., who was shot and killed by officer Darren Wilson, citing “heavy public interest in the details of Brown’s life.”
Thankfully, the request was denied by a judge of the St. Louis County Circuit Court Division 11 on Tuesday.
Perhaps the Post-Dispatch would have been better served to rearrange its wording to more accurately read, “the public has an interest in the details of Brown’s life.”
While the wording chosen by the attorneys for the Post-Dispatch to justify its request might sound judicious, the public’s preoccupation with certain events, specifically highly publicized trials, does not, in fact, warrant the dismissal of the public’s lurid curiosity in the event itself.
An attorney for the Post-Dispatch did concede a “general lack of transparency surrounding the police response to, and investigation of, the shooting.” Given this acknowledgement, does the Post-Dispatch not feel there is an equally “heavy public interest” in the actual details of the event?
The decision of the Post-Dispatch to expend resources to pursue the juvenile records of the victim in a case where so few details have been released about the actual event seems more like a witch hunt than an attempt to “impugn Mike Brown.”
If this was, in fact, the motivation behind the request, why not petition the court for any of the other numerous details of the shooting that have been held hostage by Ferguson Police Department for the past month? Why not pursue a comprehensive police report of the event to replace the half-redacted report originally provided by Ferguson police? Perhaps a report from the police department showing the number of times Wilson’s gun was discharged would be edifying for the public at large.
These types of requests would not be unusual and probably would not have required the need to petition the court. After all, the St. Louis Police Department released the number of times Kajieme Powell was shot within a few days of his shooting death involving two St. Louis police officers shortly after the shooting death of Brown.
Finally, is it possible that in its pursuit of a ratings-grabbing headline, the Post-Dispatch failed to recognize the number of questions its petition might raise about its own misplaced curiosity and St. Louis’ strategically created obsession with Brown’s past?
For outside observers, the pursuit of an unarmed, black victim’s juvenile records by a community which has failed time and again to acknowledge its checkered history of police brutality and racism, can only be perceived as the pursuit of a “gotcha” moment — an attempt to uncover past aggressive behavior of a young black man which might serve to provide the much desired justification for a white officer’s deadly actions.
More precisely, it is nothing more than a divided community’s continued refusal to accept the prospect that a white officer stereotyped a black teenager. Because the scary reality is that an indictment of Wilson would require Ferguson and communities all over St. Louis to acknowledge the issues of systematic racism and oppression plaguing the biggest small town you’ve ever seen.
Reach the columnist at dprobst1@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @DonnellProbst
Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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