The officer who killed Michael Brown thinks police racism is a thing of the past

Darren Wilson
(Image credit: St. Louis County Prosecutor's Office/Getty Images)

Darren Wilson, the former Ferguson, Missouri, police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, in August 2014, believes systemic racism is a thing of the past. Wilson, who has been cleared of wrongdoing in Michael Brown's death, gave The New Yorker a rare interview in a profile published Monday:

"I am really simple in the way that I look at life. What happened to my great-grandfather is not happening to me. I can't base my actions off what happened to him. We can't fix in 30 minutes what happened 30 years ago. We have to fix what's happening now. That's my job as a police officer. I’m not going to delve into people's life-long history and figure out why they're feeling a certain way, in a certain moment." [The New Yorker]

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Julie Kliegman

Julie Kliegman is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, Paste, the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact. Her cats can do somersaults.