“Hands up! Don’t shoot!” “No justice, no peace!”

The first slogan was taken up by community protesters right after the murder of 18-year-old African American Michael Brown by police in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, on 9 August.

Brown had his hands raised in surrender and shouted “Don’t shoot!” when a white cop shot the unarmed teen six times.

 His body was left lying on the ground for four hours before the police had it picked it up. This callousness further angered the Black community, who make up about 70 percent of the population.

There have been massive demonstrations demanding justice for Brown and in opposition to the militarised police attack on the demonstrators.

Demonstrations in solidarity quickly spread across the country. The crowds were largely Black, but included whites and other supporters with their hands up carrying “Don’t shoot!” signs. In one photograph, hundreds of students at Howard University in Washington, DC, all had their hands above their heads.

Across the country, another manifestation of the protests has been the spread of Twitter messages with the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown. These posts document personal stories of young Blacks confronted by police. By 13 August, the hashtag had been used 168,000 times.

St Louis county police chief Jon Belmar denounced the protesters’ use of social media, complaining, “They [Black youth] have the ability to understand where they’re all going to be, and they can basically plan where they want to go next.”

‘Bring it on, you f…ing animals’

The second slogan, “No justice, no peace!”, was raised in Ferguson when militarised police in combat uniforms, accompanied by armoured vehicles, tear gas, stun grenades and US military rifles, assaulted the peaceful protesters.

News photographers captured a striking image of a team of cops dressed in military fatigues pointing high-powered guns at a young Black man who had his hands in the air.

There have been peaceful rallies during the day, but at night the police come out to smash the protests.

The result has been to galvanise the protests further. As Patricia Bynes, an African American Democratic Party committeewoman in the town, said, “The protesters and residents who support this cause are not going to be forced to stay in their houses when they want to show just how unjust this really, really is.”

The scenes on TV look like Cairo under Sisi’s military dictatorship. Hundreds have been arrested, beaten, gassed and shot with rubber-coated bullets.

A series of startling images were published on Twitter the night of 18 August. A human rights monitor from Amnesty International photographed a police armoured car charging through a crowd of protesters. He wrote, “Insanity as police armoured car charges through crowd.”

A reporter for the Wall Street Journal published a photo with the caption, “Just saw AR-style rifle with Harris bi-pod on top of armoured vehicle.”

An MSNBC reporter: “Riot police aiming guns at journalists who are on the ground holding their hands in the air.”

Journalists have been a special target (shades of Cairo). Some have been ordered to stop filming. Among the 11 arrested reporters were those from the Washington Post, Huffington Post, the Intercept and Getty Images.

Al Jazeera America reporters were hit by tear gas and rubber bullets. CNN cameras caught an officer yelling at a group of protesters, “Bring it on, you f…ing animals, bring it on!”

Outrage builds

Under the massive attacks designed to drive people off the streets, some young people fight back with whatever they have – bottles, stones, some Molotov cocktails – against vastly superior militarised police.

There has been some looting, blown out of proportion by the media and police, by unknown people, possibly including provocateurs. In one scene I saw on TV, young Black protesters, men and women, with red bandanas symbolising Brown’s blood, lined up to protect a store from looters. Later, witnesses reported, the police tear-gassed those protecting the store!

Further stoking community resentment was the fact that the police and town authorities have been holding back information while they concoct their defence of the murderer behind closed doors. It was only after massive demands that the cops released, after a week, the name of the killer, Darren Wilson. They simultaneously released a video purportedly showing Michael Brown stealing a box of cigarillos from a store.

This further outraged the community, who rightly saw this as a transparent attempt to divert attention away from the murder and to smear the victim as the criminal.

The protests demand that Wilson be arrested and charged with murder.

The cops have yet to release their autopsy of Michael Brown. The Brown family got a renowned expert to do an independent autopsy, which revealed that the teen was shot six times, and not at close range, a fact the cops tried to cover up.

Witnesses to the shooting are in remarkable agreement that he and a friend were walking down the middle of a street when a patrol car pulled up, and the cop we now know was Wilson shouted that they should “get the f… on the sidewalk”.

Some sort of scuffle ensued, and Brown and his friend ran away. Exactly when Wilson started shooting is unclear, but Brown was about 35 feet (10 metres) away when he turned with his hands up and the fatal shots were fired.

Institutionalised racism

The “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” reaction among young Black men across the country reflects the reality for them when they come in contact with the police. There is fear that any wrong move could lead to their death.

Racial profiling is commonplace in cities and towns large and small. Accountability for police violence is not.

Popular culture propagates fear of African American young men among whites. Since the murder, guns are flying off the shelves in the St Louis area as whites arm themselves.

The dehumanisation and disrespect that Black men suffer reflect a broad culture of institutionalised racism. It is not an accident that a white cop feels threatened by an unarmed Black teenager, so that portion of whatever concoction the police come up with is probably true. Whites, including white police, are saturated with the message that young Black men are to be feared.

Of Ferguson’s police force of more than 50, only three are non-white. As is true in many police forces in the country, many cops in Ferguson do not live in the town. Wilson reportedly drives 40 km from his home each day to report to his police job.

But there is a bigger problem than the racial composition of police forces. It is police training and policies. Racial profiling and targeting of minority communities are taught to all cops – white, Black, Latino, Asian, male or female.

New York City, for example, has a police force that is majority Black, Latino and Asian, and is notorious for its “stop and frisk” policies directed at racial minorities, as well as its own murders of young Black and Hispanic men.

Just a few weeks ago, a Black man was choked to death by NYC police. The murder was caught on video, and it became known. The person who took the video was arrested, while the cops involved were exonerated.

The scenes from Ferguson not only look like contemporary war zones. They remind me of the Black rebellions of 50 and 60 years ago that were suppressed by massive police and armed forces violence. (I’m old enough to retain vivid memories of them.)

After those uprisings, a special presidential commission was formed. One conclusion of the commission was, “Our nation is moving toward two societies – one Black, one white – separate and unequal.”

In spite of the great victory of the Black civil rights and liberation movement of that time in smashing legal segregation and winning other gains, Ferguson demonstrates that the commission’s conclusion is true today.

It is not only police violence that Black communities suffer. Racial segregation in housing remains for most working class Blacks. School segregation is worse today than in 1970. Unemployment for Blacks is double that for whites. Every other social statistic confirms the divide.

These facts, made worse by the Great Recession, also underlie the anger in Ferguson and throughout Black communities across the nation.