Violence begets violence - but it does not solve crime

I was tasked last week with showing short excerpts of “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (which just the night before had taken the Oscars for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role and Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role) to our class. The movie lends itself to discussion vis-a vis working class whites for various reasons. But, our topic for the seminar was “Working Class Whites and the Criminal Justice System,” and as someone who studies criminology, some aspects (aside from the relentless violence) of the film did not sit well with me.

The film tells the story of Mildred Hayes, who is grieving the unsolved rape and murder of her teenage daughter. The film is set in a (fictional) poor/working class, mostly white, rural town in Missouri. Frustrated with the circumstances of her daughter’s death Mildred erects three billboards that read: “Raped while dying”, “And still no arrests?”, and “How come, Chief Willoughby?” Mildred targets Willoughby because, as the chief of police, “the buck stops” with him.

Here and here are some responses from other reviewers that resonated with me:

"Three Billboards” is about a mother determined to humiliate and harass a small-town police force into solving the months-old rape and murder of her teenage daughter... This is a revenge movie that’s also a dead-child tragedy that’s also a local-law-enforcement comedy... Mildred seems desperate to believe in the power of the billboards as a shaming vehicle for justice

and,

Much of the story involves the ripples of outrage, confusion and buffoonery that the billboards inspire and that soon envelop almost everyone Mildred knows. Months after her daughter’s death, grief has walled her in... The billboards turn that grief into a weapon, a means of taking on the law...

I am rarely one to stand up and defend the police, but nothing in the film convinced me Willoughby and the Ebbing Police Department needed to be humiliated, or harassed, or taken on. Whether the Police Department was “torturing black folk” as Mildred claims is another (important) matter. However, it does not seem that the department failed to solve her “actual crime” due to lack of trying. Chief Willoughby claims,

I’d do anything to catch the guy who did it, Mrs. Hayes, but when the DNA don’t match no one who’s ever been arrested, and when the DNA don’t match any other crime nationwide, and there wasn’t a single eyewitness from the time she left your house to the time we found her, well... right now there ain’t too much more we could do.

To me, Mildred’s actions were irresponsible and selfish. Not to discount her grief or the death of her daughter, but murders go unsolved all the time. This is not always because police are lazy or corrupt, but simply because the evidence is not there and the trail goes cold. In fact, I would think pressure such as that exerted by Mildred might lead to more false arrests than accurate ones, as police try to appease the community and close the case. Unsolved murders in small (white?) (working class?) towns get enough attention as is. Perhaps Mildred feels her white privilege being threatened because an institution (the police department) that is supposed to be there for her has failed her, and other groups are getting more undeserved attention.

Although this work is fictional, director Martin McDonagh may well have been inspired by true events. In 2016, the New York Times ran this article about the unsolved murder of a 12 year old boy in St. Lawrence County, New York;

a rural and job-challenged region where 94 percent of the population is white.

On the outskirts of town there was a billboard with a picture of the boy one the left and the words “Unsolved Murder” on the right. The case caught the public’s eye because it involved

a gruesome murder of a child, hints of a love triangle and faded affairs and a small town on the edge over the idea of a coldblooded killer living in its midst or still on the run. Amid all that is an unsettling undercurrent of racial tension, at a time of simmering national debate over racial bias in law enforcement.

It took prosecutors 30 months to charge a black man who previously dated the boy’s mother. From the start the case drew criticism because police attested to a lack of hard evidence and the first indictment had to be thrown out for prosecutorial misconduct.

The county prosecutor who tried the case allegedly ran on a promise that she would focus the energies of her office on the boy’s murder. She criticized the incumbent for not doing more to solve the murder; the incumbent had refused to make an arrest because there was too little evidence. The billboards and the community pressure may not have led to the arrest of the actual guilty party, but the humiliation and harassment led the district attorney to politicize the crime, use it as a successful campaign platform, and indict a man despite there being little evidence against him.

In my opinion, allowing grief to be used as a weapon and a means of taking on the law, especially when in relation to an isolated incident, hurts the criminal justice system and undermines criminal justice policy.