I work with teens Michael Brown's age and the number one rule is

[JDPriestly]

279. I don't think I answered you very well.

If a person grows up in a sector of society in which the police are the folks you call when you are in trouble, the folks who are going to help you out and be on your side, then that person will respect the police and respond "appropriately" to the police (except when mentally ill, drunk or extremely angry).

But if you grow up in a sector of society that is not protected by the police, that is if the police come to your door to arrest your brother or to ask questions about things you did not do or if they stop your "kind" all too often for doing petty things like walking in the middle of a street in a residential area, then you don't trust the police, you don't like the police and you are unlikely to respect or trust the police.

So that is what I mean by culture. It is not a criticism of black or hispanic culture. Because the culture is not created within the black or hispanic communities. The culture is created within our society overall.

I recall living in a poor neighborhood when my children were young. One day I got a knock on the door. When the police officer saw me, he looked a little surprised but he pulled himself together and without any sort of courteous preface (the kind of gentile treatment I was used to), he said to me -- voice gruff as a bear, "Do you know where your children are?" My children, two girls, 7 and 9 were, I thought sleeping in a tiny bedroom maybe 18 feet from the front door. (Poor neighborhood, very small house.) But a chill went through me. Were they kidnapped? Had someone stolen them? How could that have happened when I was sitting right there at home with them. I said, "Yes. I think they are asleep in their bedroom." The officer looked utterly shocked. And then finally, he treated me like a person and started asking the ages of my children, etc. Seems he had knocked on the wrong door. He was looking for my neighbor's house, the (also white) guy next door with the sticker on the back of his truck saying "God made man, Smith & Weston keeps them equal" or something to that effect.

I got a taste of what it was to be treated like one of them, one of the easy arrests, one of the points for efficiency and success down at police headquarters, one of the "suspects." I got a taste of what it must be like to be a member of a suspect minority in America when it comes to being harassed by a police officer. And that part of my encounter was brief -- really only a few seconds or a couple of minutes. Once the officer realized what "kind" I was, he backed off. And it made sense that he did.

The officer assumed that I was a perpetrator of something or that my children were. Brown was assumed to be a perpetrator and would have been even if he had done nothing wrong.

There is a deep social problem in our society when skin color and neighborhood are bases for deciding whether to treat a person as a suspect or not. And that is the case in many urban areas of America. It may be different in small towns where the police kind of know the troublemakers.