A.G. Gancarski
Gov. Ron DeSantis is reiterating his strong stand on an incident in Missouri more than a decade ago.
During a speech Saturday night to the South Florida Police Benevolent Association, DeSantis talked about the “hoax” of the “hands up, don’t shoot” outcry after a police officer shot Michael Brown.
But whether he framed the executive branch’s reaction in 2014 properly is a matter of subjective interpretation, given that just as was the case when he pontificated about the Ferguson incident in 2023, he left out important context from the then-Attorney General.
“And [the Barack Obama Justice Department] eventually did exhaustive investigations, said the officer acted appropriately, but the media created a hoax. ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’. They were telling people that this guy put his hands up, said, ‘Don’t shoot,’ and somehow this cruel officer just gunned him down in cold blood. That was false. That was a hoax. That was a narrative that was done because you have people in the media that care more about desperate attempts to generate clicks or ratings, and they get that by creating conflict. They get that by sowing division,” DeSantis said.
“Well, what does that do? That puts a target on the back of the people that wear the uniform, because people, there are some elements of society that will believe, ‘oh, these police officers can just go gun someone down and nothing happens to them,'” DeSantis said.
“And so when you see these phony narratives, people like me have a responsibility to speak out. Most people don’t speak out. I do speak out because I understand how destructive the lies can be, and you want to know that you’re putting on the uniform, you never know what’s going to call,” he said. “Your life is in jeopardy at a moment’s notice.”
DeSantis has spoken out on this issue before, most recently back in 2023 when Florida sheriffs were endorsing his presidential run.
He credited former Attorney General Eric Holder with having “said that was a lie, there was no ‘Hands up, don’t shoot.’” and “that the officer acted responsibly given the circumstances of the case and yet the media took it” and “ran with it.”
That’s part of the story.
It leaves out important context about the relationship between law enforcement and citizens, though.
While AG Holder contended that “facts (did) not support the filing of criminal charges against Officer Darren Wilson in this case,” falling short of “prosecutable conduct on the part of Officer Wilson,” his remarks couldn’t be confused with exoneration of the Ferguson police department. Indeed, Holder alleged that “deep distrust and hostility often characterized interactions between police and area residents” amid a use of aggressive police tactics for “revenue generation.”
“But seen in this context — amid a highly toxic environment, defined by mistrust and resentment, stoked by years of bad feelings, and spurred by illegal and misguided practices — it is not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg,” Holder wrote.
“In a sense, members of the community may not have been responding only to a single isolated confrontation, but also to a pervasive, corrosive, and deeply unfortunate lack of trust — attributable to numerous constitutional violations by their law enforcement officials including First Amendment abuses, unreasonable searches and seizures, and excessive and dangerous use of force; exacerbated by severely disproportionate use of these tactics against African Americans; and driven by overriding pressure from the city to use law enforcement not as a public service, but as a tool for raising revenue.”
