This was not a racial issue between Wilson and Brown, the media portrayed it that way and these riots are completely on the media. They fed the anger with their headlines "white officer shoots and kills unarmed black teenager" From there in spiraled into what it is now.......
There's no way to be able to say the bolded as a matter of any certainty. It was likely not racial in the sense of a conscious decision to confront and/or kill Brown because of his skin color, as if Wilson said to himself, "If he was white I would let him go!" No of course not. Nobody is saying that, even though there are reports of evidence forthcoming linking Wilson to the KKK.
It's racial because, first of all, Michael Brown was black. Our country has a history of disproportionate violence by police officers against black people than against whites. Regardless of if Wilson had any thought towards that, it's the reality of our country as a whole.
Further, it could also be racial in nature because studies have shown that there is a possibility that police officers may have implicit and subconscious bias against African-Americans, which makes sense, because our country in general has a bias against African-Americans (see Jon Stewart's example of his white producer dressed homeless and his black correspondent dressed in a tailored suit, walking into the same building to record an interview, with the black man being stopped).
It's racial because there is a compelling argument towards a possibility that Wilson, and other police officers, and other Americans in general, would act differently towards the same person in the same situation if the only changed was the other person's skin color, and it is racial because disregarding Wilson and Brown specifically, minorities in this country are persecuted socially and prosecuted legally to an amount that is higher than a fair representation.
http://www.colorlines.com/archives/2007/11/killed_by_the_cops.html
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/police-shootings-michael-brown-ferguson-black-men
http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=display_arch&article_id=1798&issue_id=5200
The geographic diversity of these tragedies suggest that the problem is not centralized to one area of the country, but rather a widespread issue of concern. In 2007, a joint effort by ColorLines and the Chicago Reporter examined police shootings in the 10 largest cities in the U.S., and in every city, African Americans comprised a disproportionately large percentage of those killed.
The cities with the greatest racial disparity in these shootings were New York, San Diego, and Las Vegas —
in each of these cities, the percentage of black people killed was at least twice that of their percentage of the city’s population.
In Ferguson, where blacks outnumber whites two to one, they were arrested at a rate of eight to one during the first four months of this year.
Nationally, African Americans are arrested three times more frequently than their white counterparts, although African Americans make up only 12 percent of the population.
"Since 2000, investigators in the Stereotyping and Prejudice Research Laboratory in the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago have been working to develop and refine a first-person-shooter video game, which presents a series of images of young men—some armed, some unarmed—set against realistic backgrounds such as parks or city streets.3 The player’s goal is to shoot any and all armed targets but not to shoot unarmed targets. Half of the targets are black, and half are white. The laboratory is using this game to investigate whether decisions to shoot at a potentially hostile target can be influenced by the target’s race.
This community study has been ongoing since 2000, and the participants are college students or residents in Illinois and Colorado. In the study, participants are instructed to press one of two buttons whenever a person appears on the screen. Participants are instructed that if the person, or target, is armed, they should press a button labeled “Shoot.” If the target is unarmed, they are told to press a button labeled “Don’t shoot.” In either case, participants are instructed to respond as quickly as possible. To increase participants’ attention during the task, and to motivate appropriate behavior, participants earned points for correct responses and lost points for errors.
The results of this ongoing community study show clear patterns of racial bias by college students and community residents. First, community participants showed bias in the speed with which they could respond correctly to the targets. Community participants were faster to press “Shoot” in response to an armed target if that target was black rather than white, whereas they were faster to press “Don’t shoot” in response to an unarmed target if that target was white rather than black. Second, community participants showed bias in the nature of the mistakes they made. In response to an armed target, community participants occasionally made a mistake by pressing “Don’t shoot.” They were more likely to make such a mistake if the armed target was white rather than black. By contrast, the community participants were more likely to mistakenly shoot an unarmed target if he was black rather than white. In essence, community participants were faster and more accurate when responding to targets that fit the kinds of stereotypes that the authors believe are prevalent in U.S. society (armed blacks and unarmed whites), but they were slower and more likely to make mistakes in response to targets that deviated from these stereotypes (unarmed blacks and armed whites)."
Reaction Time Index: The study found that all three groups—Denver police officers, national police officers, and members of the Denver community—showed significant bias in their reaction times, and the groups did not differ in terms of the magnitude of that bias. The groups were uniformly faster to shoot an armed black target, relative to an armed white target, and uniformly faster to press the “Don’t shoot” button for an unarmed white target, relative to an unarmed black target. Officers and community members alike, it seemed, responded more quickly to targets that conform to stereotypes.
Figure 2. The criterion to shoot white and black targets is depicted. Community
members showed significant bias: a lower, more lenient criterion
for black targets than for white targets. Police did not show significant bias:
they used statistically equivalent criteria for both whites and blacks.
Error Index: The second index of performance concerned the likelihood of an error. As with the reaction times, the frequency with which each participant made a mistake—either shooting an unarmed target or choosing not to shoot an armed target— was examined. An analytic technique called signal detection theory allowed researchers to calculate the criteria used in this study.6 Lower criteria suggest that participants are more willing to shoot (favoring the shoot response), whereas higher criteria suggest an unwillingness to shoot (favoring the don’t-shoot response). Figure 2 provides the results of this analysis.
The Denver community members showed pronounced racial bias: they set a much lower criterion for black targets than for whites. But critically, neither the Denver nor the national officers showed evidence of such a bias. The officers set statistically equivalent criteria for both white and black targets—they were no more likely to shoot a black target than a white target.
Follow-up Study
In a follow-up study (Denver study 2), which investigated only Denver community members and Denver police officers, the task of deciding whether to shoot was made more difficult by forcing participants to respond more quickly. In this study, participants had only 630 milliseconds (a bit over half a second) to react to the targets. This change was designed to reveal whether the police officers in the first study demonstrated an apparent lack of bias only because the video game was simply too easy for them.
By making the task sufficiently challenging, researchers hypothesized that police might show racial bias, just like the community. A group of 31 officers and a group of 45 community members were recruited to perform the computer task. Bias was assessed by examining the criterion for the decision to shoot. Interestingly, the second study yielded results similar to the first: although community members showed clear evidence of bias, setting a much lower criterion for black targets than for white targets, police showed no evidence of bias in their criteria to shoot.
Additional analyses, based on Denver studies 1 and 2, revealed that police outperformed community members in a variety of ways. First, police were faster to make correct decisions (shooting armed targets or choosing not to shoot unarmed targets). Second, they were more likely to make correct decisions. Third, police were generally more conservative in their decisions to shoot. Whereas community members were rather trigger-happy, police were relatively cautious.
