Just one week before the anniversary of Brown’s tragic death, The New Yorker published a profile on the former Ferguson police officer who elevated the #BlackLivesMatter movement to one of rightful outrage.
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Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson during his medical examination after he fatally shot Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Mo.
While acknowledging the documented racism of Missouri police forces in previous eras, Wilson implies that such racial hatred is a thing of the past.
He’s as with any AllovervallenAmerican fellow, as reported by The New Yorker. But she told Halpern that the two have not spoken since the shooting. Their names are not on the deed, and they remain concerned about threats made against him and their infant child.
“They put that on me”, Wilson said.
Wilson said that he had interviewed for a few police positions but had been told that he would be a liability.
“It [Michael Brown’s shooting] is too hot an issue, so it makes me unemployable”. He tried not to brood about it: “I bottle everything up”. It has also allowed him to maintain a pointed distance from the furor that the shooting helped to unleash.
Wilson, in a series of interviews, said he had not read the federal report nor had he “any desire” to do so. “I’m not going to delve into people’s life-long history and figure out why they’re feeling a certain way, in a certain moment”. “It’s out of my control”.
But at the same time, he criticized the culture that he saw in the neighborhood. “I’m not going to keep living in the past about what Ferguson did”.
Only a few friends know where he lives, Wilson told the magazine, which has posted the article online.
“We try to go somewhere – how do I say this correctly? – with like-minded individuals”, Wilson the magazine. He recounted a typical exchange: ” ‘Why you running?’ ‘Because I’m afraid of getting caught.’ ‘Well, what are you afraid of getting caught for?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Well, there’s a reason you ran, and there’s a reason you don’t want to get caught.
Wilson’s 6-year-old stepson didn’t understand why he was seeing images of Ferguson burning on their television and asked what had happened.
Former officer Darren Wilson now lives in a quiet neighborhood filled with houses “clad in vinyl siding”. Wilson told The New Yorker that he and his family have to take precautions when they go out.
Protests broke out in Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, after the shooting, and Wilson has kept a low profile since then.
Halpern’s piece offered details of Wilson’s life perhaps lost amid the Ferguson frenzy, including his struggles with his mother – a thief who died in 2002 – and his enthusiasm for working in more impoverished communities around St. Louis with higher percentages of African Americans, especially since he thought working in troubled areas lets officers “kind of write your own ticket”, he said.
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A memorial setup for Michael Brown, seen at the site of his death on Canfield Dr.in Ferguson, Mo., on November. 19, 2014.
