By Alexandra Brodsky • @azbrodsky • 10 years ago

The man who killed Mike Brown is named Darren Wilson

This morning Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson finally named the officer who shot and killed the unarmed Mike Brown: Darren Wilson. Wilson had been with the force for six years and had no disciplinary record — whatever that means when the people judging your behavior also think it’s fine to respond to protests with tear gas, rubber bullets, and dogs.

In a move as infuriating as it was unsurprising, Jackson tried to cast aspersions on the 18-year-old victim’s character with a convoluted and seemingly unrelated story about a “strongarm robbery” that occurred around the same time. The victim-blaming tactic is cruel and dishonest; it’s clear the Chief sees police brutality as a PR problem to be spun away, rather than a crisis of justice. This goes without saying, but despite Jackon’s attempts to subtly link the two events, there isn’t any reason to think Brown was involved in the robbery — but even if he were, execution isn’t the punishment for stealing.

Alexandra Brodsky is an editor at Feministing.com, student at Yale Law School, and co-director of Know Your IX.

Alexandra Brodsky

Washington, DC

Alexandra Brodsky was a senior editor at Feministing.com. During her four years at the site, she wrote about gender violence, reproductive justice, and education equity and ran the site's book review column. She is now a Skadden Fellow at the National Women's Law Center and also serves as the Board Chair of Know Your IX, a national student-led movement to end gender violence, which she co-founded and previously co-directed. Alexandra has written for publications including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the Nation, and she is the co-editor of The Feminist Utopia Project: 57 Visions of a Wildly Better Future. She has spoken about violence against women and reproductive justice at campuses across the country and on MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, ESPN, and NPR.

Alexandra Brodsky was a senior editor at Feministing.com.

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