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Howard Husock talks with Shelby and Eli Steele about their new documentary, What Killed Michael Brown?, and Amazon’s refusal to make the film available on its Prime Video streaming platform.
The documentary is written and narrated by Shelby Steele, a scholar at the Hoover Institution, and directed by his filmmaker son, Eli Steele. It is available through their website, whatkilledmichaelbrown.com.
Over the last two years, much of the national conversation has focused on problems in policing. The basic assumption is that use of force is grossly excessive and frequent. It’s not: Barely one percent of officers use deadly force annually – 80 percent never do.
When I hit the bricks as a new police officer, I wanted to help good people and arrest bad ones. Sometimes, helping people is giving them directions to a particular location; other times, it’s taking them to a particular destination, like booking, which certainly helped the people in a neighborhood that could behave themselves.
The only thing that seems to be multiplying faster than the national debt, Donald Trump’s audacious comments, or the left-wing punditry’s gasps of horror over the death of what was apparently the globe’s favorite mammal, is Hillary Clinton’s accumulation of prevarications about … well, nearly everything she’s ever said for the past generation or so.
As a theologically liberal clergy person, I receive a lot of drivel masked as thoughtful, contemporary writing addressing the most urgent issue of our day: How can we make life better for nice, middle-class white people? These things come with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, and are often written by black people, but they are really about white folk (and people “passing for white,” which I think includes people like Condi and Ben?)
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is as obtuse as ever. Addressing the sharp decline in arrest numbers from the Baltimore Police Department, Rawlings-Blake told a reporter for the 
Journalism is pretty much dead in the United States. Most of the newspapers that used to do the basic work of looking into things have folded, and most of those that remain are, for the most part, in the disinformation business. Do you remember the coverage of the Duke Lacrosse Case? Of the George Zimmerman – Trayvon Martin case? Of the events in Ferguson? Of the Eric Garner case in New York City? And of the recent events in Baltimore?
We know well from the media the tired Baltimore narrative: widespread prejudice and callous indifference, now and in the distant past, built the socio-economic bomb that racist police gratuitously set off, leading to regrettable — but in a sense also justifiable — “rebellions” and “uprisings” marked by cri de coeur looting and arson. “Riot” and “thug” are coded racist words, at least if not spoken by the mayor of Baltimore and the President of the United States. The narrative is usually punctuated by melodramatic warnings from elites of “more to come.” I suppose the subtext is that unless, in our era of $18 trillion in federal debt, more federal money is borrowed and redirected into Baltimore—or unless more resources are devoted to the often personal or careerist agendas of elite critics—then the violence of the underclass may well become endemic and perhaps hit the Upper West Side, Palo Alto or Chevy Chase (though perhaps not Utah, Montana or Texas).
Though it has scarcely garnered the attention it deserves, the U.S. Department of Justice has released a report exonerating Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown last year in Ferguson, Missouri. As I note in