Repentance, Resistance, Revolution

Last updated on: November 1, 2014 at 7:10 pm by Guest Contributor

Repentance, Resistance, Revolution 2014-11-01T19:10:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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“Officer, you are part of a sinful system that is responsible for the death of Mike Brown. I have come to take your confession.”

These words, uttered by multi-denominational clergy from near and far as they stood in a deluge of rain at the Ferguson Police Department, challenged police to acknowledge systemic wrongdoing, seek forgiveness and set the necessary pre-conditions for healing.

Ferguson police officers are overwhelmingly white civil servants, in stark contrast to the community they are charged with serving. One of their number shot and killed Michael Brown Jr., then left his lifeless body in the street for over four hours.

They are a department who – by their own numbers – are more than twice as likely to pull over blacks than whites in traffic stops, despite a far lower rate of contraband found on those black drivers. Ferguson numbers among the St. Louis County municipalities that derive nearly half their revenue from fines for petty infringements of the law. Ferguson police issue an average of three arrest warrants for every Ferguson household, despite comparatively low crimes rates. Led by St. Louis County Police, they viciously – and frequently illegally – repressed peaceful protest in the wake of Brown’s killing.

The call for police repentance was not about extracting an apology from individual officers for bad behavior, but rather an acknowledgment of complicity in an evil system of policing.

Having been properly and profanely chastised the night before, the Moral Monday clergy gathered at Wellspring Church that morning of October 13. Our first act was one of repentance. The church, particularly the black church, had betrayed black youth. We had to repent, and repent we did.

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