PUTNEY — I grew up white in a suburb of St. Louis that's just a few miles from Ferguson, where on Aug. 9 a policeman shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager.
Forty or so years earlier, police killed a teenage neighbor of mine with what they claimed was only a warning shot - though it seems to have been aimed at my neighbor's head.
And a few years before that, police across the river in East St. Louis, Ill., killed my cousin with a volley of shots - to the back, mind you - and then claimed they thought he was pointing a gun at them.
Of course, no gun was found at the scene. But marijuana was.
And so, just as the Ferguson police this month smeared Michael Brown's name by announcing that he might have stolen some cigars, my cousin was smeared as a pot smoker, which, in the '60s in the Midwest, was enough to terrify most full-fledged adults.
I hate to make generalized statements like “white people don't riot,” but maybe we are just a tad too well-mannered.
There was no upheaval at all after the death of either my neighbor or my cousin. As far as I know, nobody even wrote letters to the editor.
And so “white people let their children go like sheep to the slaughter” might also be a statement I shouldn't make, though I think it's what our families did. We mourned privately and in deep shame.
And all these years later some of us are still seething.
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While I don't like the violence at all, I'm glad and grateful that Michael Brown's death was followed by angry protests. If I still lived in St. Louis, I would be on the streets - not as a journalist, but as a mother of two screaming in solidarity with Michael Brown's mother.
Cops can be brutes. Cops can be mad effing dogs. I do know, though, that some police are truly on the job to protect and serve. Cops can be as traumatized by violence as anyone. And because they encounter more violence, some are more shaken.
In the 1990s, I wrote a book, Unspeakable Truths and Happy Endings, about psychological trauma. I profiled people who had witnessed or been on the receiving end of astonishing cruelty, and one of them was a cop.
He had spent about a decade on the police force of a high-crime Eastern seaboard city. He'd held the hand of a woman as she died after her husband beat her in the head with a hammer.
It's not an experience easily shaken off.
He dealt with victims of violence again and again, and didn't want to see or respond empathetically anymore, but he kept doing it because it was important to the public he served.
This man's biggest source of trauma, though, was a fellow cop whose actual nickname was Mad Dog because he joyfully brutalized people under arrest.
Meanwhile, the code among cops was mutually protective silence. It was a perilous code to break for police officers who worked in a violent city and depended nightly on fellow cops for backup.
If that backup for some reason didn't materialize or if one of his armed fellows arranged to catch him in “friendly fire” ... well, we've all seen the movie Serpico.
The cop I interviewed broke the code of silence. Then stuff happened.
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This week, I'm thinking of this good cop, and of my neighbor with the warning shot to the head, and of my cousin killed by bullets to his back. I'm also thinking of my niece's fiancé, who was killed about 10 years ago in Montana by police for being a belligerent drunk who refused to be handcuffed.
Yes, it looks like my family has a significant history. But we're respectable people, just like almost everyone we know. It's just not true that only the bad die young. The sword of Damocles that fell on Michael Brown is hanging over your head, and your teenagers' heads, too.
Of course, not every cop is bad. Not even every cop who hesitates to speak up about Mad Dogs in their midst is bad. It's a dangerous job policing city streets, and sometimes the danger comes from within the force.
Trigger-happy cops don't just threaten the public at large.
They threaten good cops, the ones who witness and help and take the emotional hit of knowing the damage that prejudice and complacency can do.
Those cops know what most of refuse to acknowledge: No family will be safe until everyone's family is.