Illustration by Tom Bachtell

History may or may not repeat itself, but crisis-stricken politicians certainly do. Two weeks ago, Governor Jay Nixon, of Missouri, announced the swearing in of sixteen members of a commission to examine police procedures and community relations in Ferguson. The announcement was made in advance of the grand-jury decision in the death of Michael Brown, which resulted in renewed rioting in the city and demonstrations across the country. Nixon, whose handling of the situation had already been severely criticized, holds the distinction of creating a commission whose existence preceded the unrest that it will presumably be charged with addressing. This was a sign of either governmental prescience or resignation—or, possibly, both. A defining achievement of American bureaucracy is that even assaults on its authority wind up generating more bureaucracy.

In 1967, in the wake of riots that had scorched several American cities, Lyndon B. Johnson authorized the creation of the Kerner Commission, to examine the roots of the conflicts. The commission’s report is best known for its conclusion that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” but it also included a more granular examination of the issue. It stated:

Today, whites tend to exaggerate how well and quickly they escaped from poverty. The fact is that immigrants who came from rural backgrounds, as many Negroes do, are only now, after three generations, finally beginning to move into the middle class. By contrast, Negroes began concentrating in the city less than two generations ago, and under much less favorable conditions. Although some Negroes have escaped poverty, few have been able to escape the urban ghetto.

This view is notable insofar as the problems in Ferguson stem from an opposite dynamic: it is a suburb with a majority-black population, something that the Kerner Commission would almost certainly have regarded as progress. Yet white flight to outer suburbs and to gentrifying cities left behind diminished tax bases, and helped create conditions once thought to be confined to urban communities. The Kerner report recommended that local governments develop neighborhood task forces to facilitate communications, create better channels for registering and responding to grievances, and take steps to involve residents in the formulation of public policy. Before the efficacy of those ideas could be tested, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, sparking a new round of fire and bedlam in American cities.

Twenty-four years later saw the Los Angeles riots, which came in response to the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, and culminated in more than sixty deaths and more than a billion dollars’ worth of damage to the city. That beating had also prompted the formation of the Christopher Commission, assigned with, among other things, examining police brutality within the L.A.P.D. That commission’s report held that the use of excessive force was a significant issue, but it also noted that, of the eighteen hundred complaints lodged between 1986 and 1990, fourteen hundred were made against officers who had just one or two allegations against them. A hundred and eighty-three officers had four or more complaints against them. Forty-four officers were subject to six or more complaints, but their superiors generally reviewed them favorably. The report conveyed the impression that the trouble within the L.A.P.D. was isolated to a small number of bad apples, to superiors who rewarded their behavior, and to an institutional culture that hadn’t rooted them out. It prescribed essential but far from sweeping changes for the department.

Whatever the findings of Governor Nixon’s commission, they will be complicated by the question, typically unspoken by public officials but prevalent nonetheless, of whether a single officer—in this case, Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Michael Brown—or even a local official authority, is ever ultimately to blame. Rudolph Giuliani voiced it, amid a heated exchange with Michael Eric Dyson, on “Meet the Press,” charging that the real problem is “black-on-black” crime. “White police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other,” he said. This argument may sound familiar to those who lived in New York City during Giuliani’s tenure as mayor. His administration witnessed several racially charged incidents in which police used lethal force, the most notable being the death, in 1999, of Amadou Diallo, the unarmed twenty-two-year-old Guinean immigrant who was shot nineteen times, in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building. Giuliani defended the police, arguing, in effect, that, since minorities are disproportionately the victims of crime, they were protesting the very policies that were saving their lives. He also disparaged a U.S. Civil Rights Commission report that suggested that New York police officers were racially profiling people, saying that it bore “no relation to reality.”

Giuliani’s argument is a curious, if durable, one that would seem to suggest that the members of a community should themselves be responsible for correcting the behavior of other members of their demographic. (Nobody asks the same of the white population.) Eighteen per cent of the serious crimes reported in Ferguson between 2010 and 2012 occurred in a small area around the Canfield Green complex, where Michael Brown lived. The residents of that neighborhood understand this fact intuitively, but that knowledge leaves them no better equipped to change it. For them, crime is not a statistic: it has a face, a particular corner it favors, an address, uncomfortably close to your own, where it opts to reside.

Forty-seven years ago, the Kerner Commission looked at the smoldering landscape of American cities and asked three questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?” These questions will no doubt animate Ferguson’s official inquiry. In 2010, blacks, who make up thirteen per cent of the nation’s population, composed fifty-five per cent of shooting homicide victims. By contrast, whites, who make up sixty-five per cent of the population, accounted for just twenty-five per cent of victims. This is not news to anyone, least of all to African-Americans, but its implications go unnoticed: effective policing is even more crucial to people who live in the Canfield Greens of this country. In the months leading up to the riots of Thanksgiving week, the plea from Ferguson was not for less policing but for more professional—indeed, more democratic—policing. The anger that spilled into the streets reflected not only the devaluing of black life but the grim recognition that African-Americans find themselves hemmed between the dangers of crime and the perils of those whom other communities can trust to protect them from it. ♦