As most people in North America know, on August 9, 2014 an unarmed male, Michael Brown, was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. These facts are not in dispute. Almost everything else is. Although investigations are now concluded, many beliefs have remained so I refer to those in the present tense. Without question, this was a horrible incident from which have sprung several big pictures, some spoken of and some not.

 

On their face, these facts look very bad on the officer involved. He has since voluntarily left his job and currently lives in hiding, in large part due to death threats. Legions of people rushed to judge him guilty, and those people may be absolutely correct, or not. Sadly, I realize how upsetting those last two words may be to some readers and plenty of others.

 

Without sufficient information, how could I truly know at that time what happened or form reasonable opinions about that? Two large investigations since concluded with no charges being laid against Wilson. The first saw the local grand jury decline to indict the officer, but many if not most people rejected that process as racist or rigged by the district attorney’s presentation to the jurors. Many legal commentators criticized that process. Months later, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released their own findings on the case as well as their review of the Ferguson Police Department. They too found there are insufficient grounds to charge Wilson in the death of Michael Brown, stating that Wilson was legally justified in believing he had to use lethal force to avoid death or grievance harm from Michael Brown.

 

It is more difficult to dismiss the DOJ findings as racist or rigged because they simultaneously released a scathing report of racial bias, including blatantly racist emails, within the Ferguson PD and local justice system. Those findings of systemic racism led some people, including some high-profile legal contributors on cable news shows, to say that systemic racism must mean Wilson was guilty of something.

 

The simple and largely-ignored fact is that thousands if not millions of people reached their decisions about Wilson’s actions, most against him and a small minority for him, within hours or a few days of the incident itself. The first big picture here, and a troubling one, is that many people in both groups formed their beliefs through bias.

 

In a previous post on this blog, I addressed the general concept of bias. I drill a bit deeper into that here, if only so we can collectively lose the belief that bias is only something held by those with whom we disagree.

 

In his ground-breaking book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman examined two vastly different thinking systems he referred to, for simplicity, as Systems 1 and 2. System 2 is the slow kind where reasoning and internal considerations affect our decisions. Using this system requires deliberation, cognitive self-discipline, a reigning in of emotion, and considerable learning (formally or informally), none of which are as common as we may like to believe. System 1 is the fast kind informed by our previous knowledge and experiences, our interpretations of those, and often affected by what we have heard about other people’s experiences. Much of this influence is subconscious. This is the common type of thought everyone engages in, Kahneman included, and which some people almost exclusively engage in.

 

As Kahneman explained, System 1 can make the right choice in many circumstances, often without conscious thought. Our instincts and intuitions and automatic responses are from System 1. They often help us and sometimes save our lives. For example, many drivers automatically react to immediate road hazards by steering around them, often without recognizing any thought process whatsoever despite those thoughts happening in an instant. This type of thought was also the basis of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking.

 

The trouble is that decisions produced by System 1 are ill informed and not always correct, even when they feel very correct. As both Kahneman and Gladwell pointed out in different ways, fast thinking is the source of our biases. Since everyone engages in fast thinking, everyone has biases, some which are very helpful in many circumstances but certainly not all. That principle applies equally to police officers and to their critics, and to everyone else with a brain.

 

Looking back at the Ferguson shooting, you and I first heard about it within hours or a few days. The initial information was very limited about an incident perhaps one minute long with a young person dying as a result. To thousands or millions, deadly actions against an unarmed person in such a short time must have resulted from racial or professional or class biases. Accordingly, the actions of Officer Wilson were and still are viewed by many people as being biased and, therefore, wrong. Issues of contention in this matter even included whether the 18-year-old victim should be referred to as a ‘child’, as many vehemently professed, or as a ‘man’, which others equally professed. That’s why I earlier referred to Michael Brown as “an unarmed male”, to be as neutral and precise as possible.

 

If you formed a belief against or for the officer, how long did it take you to reach it? If it happened in minutes or even a few days, it was likely anchored in bias simply because there was insufficient information to accurately assess the truth of that matter, and not because I say so but because the investigating authorities did.

 

Ambiguity is difficult for some people to live with. Many people faced with insufficient or conflicting information will pick the interpretation of an event most consistent with their previous beliefs, thereafter accepting as further proof any information that bolsters their beliefs and rejecting as nonsense any information that conflicts with those beliefs. This practice, often subconscious, is what confirmation bias refers to. This leads to the second big picture: many people viewed events in Ferguson through a lens of confirmation bias, but not all of them.

 

Avoiding bias and confirmation bias are the hallmarks of reasonable people and reasonable professionals. The second post-mortem of the victim was done at the Brown family’s request by renowned New York medical examiner Michael Baden. In a press conference following his examination, Dr. Baden referred to a wound at the top of Brown’s head: “It can be because he’s giving up, or because he’s charging forward at the officer”. Baden went on to say, “We need more information”. One of the Brown family’s lawyers, Benjamin L. Crump, soon after said, “The sheer number of bullets and the way they were scattered all over his body showed this police officer had a brazen disregard for the very people he was supposed to protect in that community”. Crump may be right but his comments contradicted the ambiguous preliminary findings of the medical examiner he or the Brown family chose, at the same podium and press conference.http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/18/us/michael-brown-autopsy-shows-he-was-shot-at-least-6-times.html?_r=0

 

In fairness to Crump and the other lawyers assisting the Brown family, his job and his inclination were to fiercely advocate for a family who endured a terrible loss. Still, few pundits were as closely associated to the emotions and stresses of this terrible incident as Crump was yet many were no more unbiased in voicing their opinions. This leads to the third big picture, that experts are not necessarily immune from bias or confirmation bias.

 

To repeat, what author and researcher Kahneman referred to as System 2 (thinking) requires deliberation, cognitive self-discipline, and considerable learning. Such thinking is known as reasoning or critical thinking in other contexts and is basis for science and law among other fields. Hence, reasoning is the foundation of the adversarial legal system in countries like United States so every law student in the U.S. undergoes significant training in it. The news networks have law professionals trained and experienced in the business of reasoning yet some of them demonstrated considerable bias, and confirmation bias, in their legal commentaries. One could argue that these are academic exercises of little import. Public outcry, demonstrations, and outright violence in places from Ferguson to Seattle to Toronto, and regardless of skin colour and the issue, suggest otherwise.

 

As a fairly decent human being, I want the truth of what happened in Ferguson, Missouri to be out for all to see. If racist or otherwise bad practices contributed to Brown’s death, that needed to be exposed. The DOJ report certainly accused the Ferguson PD of both, and that needs to be effectively addressed. As with many massive investigations, ambiguities were revealed in the death of Michael Brown, primarily in the form of differing and often contradictory eye witness accounts. Some of those accounts were likely affected by bias. Some may have been fabrications. The physical evidence, however, clearly supported a version of events favouring Officer Wilson as per the DOJ investigation. Some accounts to the media differed from what those same people later told investigators and/or a grand jury. This leads to the fourth big picture, that some people make honest mistakes.

 

Professor Elizabeth Loftus and other researchers previously demonstrated that human memory is malleable, easily influenced by outside input such as hearing other people’s accounts of what happened. This unconscious process causes some people to process aspects of other people’s accounts as their own memories. Anecdotal experiences led police investigators, lawyers, and judges, decades ago, to the same conclusions as demonstrated by their long established preferences for witnesses to not speak to one another about their recollections, or hear each other’s recollections in any forum prior to providing those for the record.

 

Where the accounts of dozens of people were widely reported in the media long before witnesses were interviewed or examined, unintentional errors were bound to mix with what may have been intentional efforts to mislead. That scientifically demonstrated principle no doubt applied to some witnesses whose versions changed on small details between earlier and later versions, and whether their evidence favoured Wilson and not. That may also have applied to small differences between Wilson’s initial interview and his grand jury testimony much later. This isn’t favouring one version over another. It is merely applying a principle fairly on both sides of an issue. That too, will be upsetting to some people and it forms the fifth big picture: some people view as fair only those practices that result in what they want to hear or want to see happen.

 

To my point, many people hailed the accuracy and fairness of the DOJ report on systemic racial bias in Ferguson while also ignoring or rejecting the same organization’s findings on Darren Wilson’s lack of criminality in the death of Michael Wilson. In my view, people should reject or accept both findings since they came from the same investigative agency if not some of the same investigators too. The Ferguson administration has thus far refused to fully accept the DOJ findings about them, so far at least. Similarly, many have refused to accept the DOJ findings on the death of Michael Brown.

 

Then there is the issue of statistical analysis. Disproportionate representations of some groups within criminal justice systems has been revealed in many places over the last ten or fifteen years, yet the Ferguson numbers are so lop-sided that they seem to paint a truly damning picture. Putting the Ferguson numbers aside, which are hopefully anomalous in their extremes, racial disproportionalities still exist elsewhere and not just in the United States. More than a decade ago, the largest Toronto newspaper ran a series of articles on the issue, and public policies are still changing in response to those numbers. This reveals the sixth big picture, one rarely spoken of, that there can be more than one cause for trends occurring.

 

In Toronto and elsewhere, there exists an implied presumption that where the numbers of police contacts of any racial group are higher than their proportion of the population, the sole cause for such differences is racial bias by police officers. Reasonably speaking, that possibility cannot be rejected; however, reason also obligates us to look for other possible causes. What could possibly be a cause of racially disproportionate police contacts other than racially biased police? Perhaps details from individual incidents, or crime trends in certain areas, or a host of other variables.

 

It would be ludicrous to suggest that every police contact between them and disproportionately represented groups was perfectly above board and justified by the individual circumstances. There are more than enough individual examples spanning decades to suggest otherwise, in many places. The wrongful conviction of Rueben “Hurricane” Carter comes to mind for me. To me, though, it seems equally ludicrous to suggest that no contact between police and certain racial groups has been legitimate.

 

If some of those contacts were legitimate, how many were? What proportion of the disproportionality was legitimate? These are not rhetorical questions. They may not realistically be answerable either. Still, they matter because they involve the truth, and the best policy decisions are based on truth as best as that can be reasonably and reliably determined.

 

This brings us back to the original incident, the killing of Michael Brown. Is it possible that racial bias or other bad influences affected the actions of Darren Wilson? In light of recent DOJ findings about the Ferguson Police Department, it seems reasonable to consider that as a possibility. Is it probable that Wilson’s actions were racially motivated? The DOJ investigators, who had more access to the information than anyone, do not seem to believe so. The questions get tougher from here.

 

It is possible than some of the contacts between the Ferguson PD and racial minorities there were lawful and fair? Is it possible that contact between Wilson and Brown was lawful and fair? And, is it possible that Brown’s actions precipitated and caused the end result? I have insufficient information to assess those questions. The DOJ findings certainly imply that the last answer is “Yes”. Nevertheless, how you may have just answered those in your head your have demonstrated one or more of the big pictures I explained above. The same applies if you believe there was absolutely no way Wilson or any other officer anywhere else could have done anything wrong.

 

In my first post on this blog, I cautioned against buying into absolutes because they can be misleading. I didn’t say all absolutes are wrong because that would itself be an absolute. If or when you find yourself thinking there is absolutely no way that this happened or that didn’t happen the way you believe, especially when all evidence is not in complete agreement, that can be a sign of trouble. It is also a fallacy known as generalizations. Such instances of flawed thought can be largely mitigated, though, by asking uncomfortable questions, by honestly trying to prove your beliefs wrong. This is an approach largely known as the scientific method. On the Brown killing, crime statistics, and a host of other issues big and small, I suspect very few people use that approach, in part because it is uncomfortable, inconvenient, and potentially-unpopular to name just three.

 

Former U.S. President James A. Garfield was quoted thusly: “The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.” We all need to be prepared to be proven wrong no matter how miserable that may initially make us. That’s what the best scientists and investigators and journalists do, even when the results contradict what they first suspected the truth of their matter was. Without a willingness to accept that what we believe right now may be incorrect, a lot of nice people will be in a lot of trouble, in Ferguson and many other places, on their issue and a host of others. That is the biggest of the six big pictures here.