Outside agitators are old news, but should have been the story (op-ed)

In 2014 a white police officer shot and killed a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri.  The shooting wasn’t recorded, but eyewitnesses insisted that the black teenager was killed with his hands up, begging the white officer not to shoot. 

The “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative enraged the nation.  Before any official investigation got underway riots broke out in Ferguson.  Then it was revealed the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative was false.  The police officer and the teenager fought over the officer’s firearm and the teenager ended up dead.  If the rage over the teenager’s death was honestly produced by the belief that a cop gunned down a kid in cold blood, then the discovery of a false narrative should have altered the course of events, but the rage wasn’t generated by the situation in general, it was solely produced by race.  The details of the actual encounter were irrelevant because the white officer represented the power structure, the black victim represented historical injustice, and the entire scenario was indicative of systemic racism.   The black teenager’s death became a springboard for confronting “The System”. 

The event also attracted a subversive element.

After a week of violence, Capt. Ron Johnson, the highway patrolman in charge of security in Ferguson, told reporters the troublemakers were not from Ferguson.  Out of 51 people arrested (the day before the interview) only one person was from Ferguson.  The rest were from surrounding towns and faraway cities such as De Moines, Iowa, Chicago, and New York.  Capt. Johnson told reporters that community leaders have stepped in to weed out the bad actors. (Notice community leaders stepped in after the damage was done.)

The mainstream media missed the story within the story.  Who were these outside agitators, and, more importantly, who were behind them? 

Baltimore, 2015, a black man died in police custody.  The Baltimore police department failed to adequately explain how the black man died.  Protesters demanded answers.  Protests continued in a non-violent fashion up to the victim’s funeral.  After the funeral, it was reported that outsiders advocated for violence and rioting erupted in Baltimore.  The family of the victim condemned the violence and asked all participating parties to stop.  Baltimore’s police commissioner said “splinter groups” from outside the area smashed windows of restaurants and bars.  The police commissioner acknowledged most of the arrest made were of local residents, but he stressed “outside agitators continued to be the instigators behind the acts of violence and destruction.”

Following the Baltimore riots Cathy Lisa Schneider, a professor of sociology, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post called: 5 Myths about Riots.  The first thing she declared a myth was that riots were caused by outside agitators.  Schneider wrote, “New York blamed “outside agitators” for violence in 1964. Ferguson did the same in 2014. Now Baltimore … Is blaming non-locals for the riots … Riots, however, are almost always homegrown. In Ferguson, only 21 percent of those arrested in August were from outside Missouri, and 76 percent were from Ferguson or surrounding towns. And of the 31 adults arrested in Baltimore as of last Sunday, only three were not Maryland residents.  The main participants in riots … Are usually young people from disadvantaged neighborhoods.”

Schneider’s assessment is problematic because she localized both states.  According to her, if I left Pittsburgh and started a riot in Philadelphia the riot was homegrown because I’m from Pennsylvania. Schneider ignored the fact that Capt. Johnson didn’t just call the people from out of state outsiders he listed Missourians who weren’t from Ferguson as outside agitators too.   The other problem is the percentage of outsiders arrested doesn’t reflect the total number of outsiders involved nor does it measure their range of influence.

But the riots were blamed on disadvantaged youth, the police claim of outside agitators was labeled a myth, and the story within the story disappeared.

First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 6/3/2020