Boston, like the rest of the nation, braced itself Monday night for the grand-jury decision in the police killing of an unarmed black youth in Ferguson, Mo.
The Pleasant Cafe and Bar in Roslindale is popular with Boston police and firefighters, and the portions served here are described as "man-sized." On multiple TV screens, hockey and Fox News compete with Monday Night Football for the attention of diners — and on this night, Fox News wins.
Bob McCulloch, the controversial St. Louis County district attorney, had just announced that a grand jury has declined to indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, in the August shooting death of Michael Brown. Tony Caggiano, in between bites of french fries, watches and listens, and says the jury has spoken.
"A lot of people made up stories and changing stories and the thing is that the grand jury hears that, and I tell you that I saw and blue car and I come back the next day and say it was a red car, then they obviously know that either I wasn’t there or I lied," Caggiano said. "So that is going to hurt the Brown case."
His brother Chuck nods in agreement.
"The grand jury, they heard the evidence," Chuck Caggiano said. "It’s unfortunate what happened, so you’ll never know what really happened, but you have to go with what they saw and the evidence is too murky."
"I think this situation has been mishandled by the Ferguson Police Department and pretty much all of the law enforcement involved with it since the very beginning,” said Michael McCosky, a paralegal.
McCosky listens to McCulloch's rationale on the TV set above the diner and tries to make sense of the grand jury’s decision not to indict.
"And certainly what the public has been given over the months by the media, like Mr. McCulloch said, the media is interested in having something to say," he said. "They’re not terribly interested in its accuracy. But I can’t really find any evidence myself to say that they’ve done the right thing or they didn’t do the right thing."
"If they had a lot of people who came up with that information, well that didn’t favor the prosecution," Tony Caggiano added. "What I heard tonight sounds like a defense attorney."
The grand jury’s decision, reached over a three-month period, came as no surprise to Daunasia Yancey a youth worker who heads up a chapter of the national advocacy group Blacks Lives Matter in Boston. Yancey says she had zero faith in the process to begin with.
"[An indictment] wasn’t something I expected to hear from a prosecutor," she said. "And I think the point that was raised about discrepancies, witnesses said to me that a trial is necessary, so those details need to be parsed out by a jury."
A CNN Gallop poll released before the decision was made public found that nonwhites and whites have polar opposite views on Ferguson. Fifty-four percent of nonwhites — including blacks, Latinos and Asians — said Wilson should be charged with murder, while just 23 percent of whites agreed. But it may not as bi-chromatic as it seems. White individuals have taken part in the demonstrations in Ferguson, and Yancey says they are among the protesters expected this week in Boston as well.
“And I think we can expect to see folks coming out and expressing grief, mourning this loss and rightful outrage at a system that does not protect and serve black people in America,” she said.
What’s next? More Ferguson protests are planned this week and organizer Jamarion Oliver says they may take their grievances back to Newbury — as they did weeks ago — to press their message that black lives matter.
“As we did with the Newbury rally and shutdown, we will continue to bring it to neighborhoods and communities that don’t have to face these discriminatory practices on a daily basis," Oliver said. "We’re going to make them uncomfortable. We’re going to continue to act with civil disobedience but we’re going to continue to bring awareness to communities that are not faced with the same troubles that we have to face as people of color."
Meanwhile, just a few blocks away at the Pleasant Cafe, some patrons sipped beers and silently cheered the TV screen with a lift of the glass. The Baltimore Ravens were in good field position. The urgent Ferguson developments on Fox News moments earlier were being overtaken by Monday Night Football.
And for patron Tony Caggiano life goes on. And he said protesters’ time would be better spent focusing attention on crime in America’s toughest inner cities.
“I mean, things happen every single day in this world and in this country," he said. "But I understand things go on in every city. You can’t pick and choose, say we’re going to zoom in on Ferguson. This stuff goes on in Boston. I mean, there’s kids getting killed every single weekend. Find those kids. Find out what’s going on there.”
That’s an issue Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, of the First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain, addresses on a regular basis. He says violence of all sorts should be dealt with and said Ferguson had become a rallying cry for confronting what he called "institutional police violence." He was returning to Boston from a nonviolence workshop in California in August when he got word of the shooting.
"So I got on a plane and flew from Stanford to St. Louis and I flew back in time," he said.
He became emotional at that point in the interview, reflecting on multiple police killings across the country in recent years, including the shooting death of Danroy “DJ” Henry of Easton.
“Our democracy is betraying our children — all of our children," he said. "Every time a police officer kills an unarmed black or brown child they are bleeding out the promise of American democracy.”
Sekou has been in Ferguson since that time and it’s not clear when he’ll be coming home to Boston. He says that the killing of Brown was symbolic of far too many similar incidents to move on.
