They were four words that became the national rallying cry of a new civil rights movement: “Hands up, don’t shoot.”
Protesters chanted it, arms raised, in cities across the country in solidarity for Michael Brown, the black teenager who some witnesses said was surrendering when he was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo.
The slogan was embraced by members of Congress, recording artists and football players with the St. Louis Rams.
It inspired posters and songs, T-shirts and new advocacy groups, a powerful distillation of simmering anger over police violence and racial injustice in Ferguson and beyond.
But in its final report this week clearing the police officer, Darren Wilson, of civil rights violations in Mr. Brown’s death, the Justice Department said it may not have happened that way. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. cast doubt on the “hands up” account even as he described Ferguson as having a racially biased police department and justice system.
Document: Justice Department Report on Shooting of Michael Brown
“It remains not only valid — but essential — to question how such a strong alternative version of events was able to take hold so swiftly, and be accepted so readily,” Mr. Holder said Wednesday.
For many, the answer to that question was contained in a second Justice Department report released on Wednesday that described in blistering detail how Ferguson had used its police department and court system as moneymaking ventures that disproportionately targeted African-Americans and routinely violated their constitutional rights.
As the nation digested the two federal investigations into Ferguson, police groups that are often sharp critics of Mr. Holder found vindication in the report on Mr. Brown’s death, seeing in it a final rebuttal to a narrative that demonized Mr. Wilson. They called the shooting a tragedy, but said it had never been a crime fueled by racial bias.
“The lie got repeated over and over again,” said Ron Hosko, president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, which supports officers accused of crimes in the course of duty. “It was the headline in major newspapers and other major media publications all summer, all fall. And the subtext was: Racist rogue cop kills innocent black teen. And it was a lie.”
But protest leaders who marched through streets around the country with their arms raised and founded groups such as Hands Up United or the Don’t Shoot Coalition said the report did not undercut their efforts to push for police reforms and advocate for victims of law enforcement violence.
And they, too, found vindication for their protests in the second Justice Department report on Ferguson’s criminal justice system, which Mr. Holder described as having created “a highly toxic environment, defined by mistrust and resentment, stoked by years of bad feelings, and spurred by illegal and misguided practices.”
Report: What Is Wrong With the Ferguson Police Department?
In a scathing report released Wednesday, the Justice Department concluded that the Ferguson Police Department had been routinely violating the constitutional rights of its black residents.
“While there is an issue as to whether his hands were up, the bigger question is whether we as a nation are going to step up to try to bridge this gap of distrust between police and those who they are sworn to protect and serve,” said Representative Elijah E. Cummings, a Democrat of Maryland, who appeared on the steps of the Capitol with other black members of Congress, all posing with their hands up.
Others rejected the Justice Department’s conclusions entirely, and said they still believed Mr. Brown was trying to surrender when he was killed.
They said they did not trust an earlier state grand jury process that had cleared Mr. Wilson, who left the Ferguson police force late last year, of state criminal charges in November, and had no faith in the federal investigation or the high bar set to find a law enforcement officer responsible for civil rights violations.
“To me, he had his hands up,” said Michael T. McPhearson, co-chairman of the Don’t Shoot Coalition in St. Louis. “It doesn’t change it for me.”
Protest organizers said that no matter what Mr. Brown had been doing with his hands when he was shot — balling them, holding them out or pulling up his pants, according to various witness accounts outlined by the Justice Department — he had still been shot at least six times, and his body had been allowed to lie in the street for hours.
They said that “hands up, don’t shoot” had taken on a power of its own that arced beyond Ferguson, becoming a broader evocation of anger and injustice that now stood with earlier protest calls like “si, se puede,” “we shall overcome” or “I can’t breathe,” one of the last things said by Eric Garner, a black man who was killed in a chokehold by a white New York police officer on Staten Island.
Document: Ferguson Police Department Report
“ ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ has become a larger symbol of the desire to prove one’s innocence,” said Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist who is African-American and has spoken out forcefully about police practices in Ferguson, in an email message. “In many ways, it will always resonate as a symbol of an unarmed dead teenager lying for hours on the street. Just like ‘I can’t breathe’ will never go away. They are forever etched in the complicated story of racial bias in our criminal justice system.”
But many law enforcement officials and supporters of Mr. Wilson said they had long disliked the slogan and its implicit assumptions about what had happened during the brief confrontation between him and Mr. Brown. Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee, who has been an outspoken critic of Mr. Holder and the demonstrators in Ferguson, said the talk swirling around Ferguson had veered away into irresponsible hyperbole long before investigators had offered a full accounting of the shooting.
“Let’s let the standard be facts, evidence, the rules of law,” said Sheriff Clarke, who is black. “Not hype, emotion and mob rule.”
In November, Jeff Roorda, a spokesman for the St. Louis Police Officers Association, condemned the Rams players who strode onto the field and raised their gloved hands. He said he had been deluged with hate mail because of it, and said he still blamed the news media and politicians for creating a “rush to judgment” that may indelibly harm Mr. Wilson.
“I worry that he’ll still be a casualty of history,” Mr. Roorda said in an interview on Thursday. “Fifty years from now, he’ll still be the white police officer who shot an unarmed black teen.”
But Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York, said he had no regrets about making the “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture in a speech on the House floor last year as part of a series of speeches by Congressional Black Caucus members.
GRAPHIC
Report: What Happened in Ferguson?
The Justice Department cleared Officer Darren Wilson of civil rights violations in the shooting death of Michael Brown. Here is the sequence of events as described in the department’s report.
“If I had to do it again, I would proceed in exactly the same way,” he said. “I made clear in my remarks that ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ is a rallying cry for people all across America who want to see the constitutional promise of equal protection under the law brought to life.” He added, “At no point in that speech did any member of the black caucus indicate that that’s what occurred between Mr. Wilson and Mike Brown.”
Activists said “hands up, don’t shoot” would still echo through rallies and protesters would continue to raise their hands when they encounter the police. But eventually, another fatal, galvanizing confrontation between a police officer and a resident is likely to create a new catchphrase of outrage, said Phillip Agnew, one of the leaders of the Dream Defenders, a young activists group that formed in Florida after the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012.
“It will continue to be a rallying cry until, unfortunately, something happens again, and there’ll be another rallying cry,” he said.
The expression emerged quickly in the aftermath of Mr. Brown’s killing as Ferguson residents began to demonstrate and anger over his death coursed across social media. Morgan Paar, a filmmaker in New York who was an early user of the hashtag #handsupdontshoot, did not know who first came up with the phrase, but said it developed a life of its own.
“It has more to do with people’s feelings than it does with a single person and what happens on a single day,” he said.
