On Aug. 9, in Feguson, Mo., 19-year-old Michael Brown was shot. At 11:54 a.m., he allegedly stole a few cigarillos from a liquor store, and walked a few blocks away with his friend Dorian Johnson until he was stopped by police officer Darren Wilson. Speaking through his window, Wilson told the two teenagers to move to the sidewalk, and saw that Brown fit the description of a suspect in an unrelated convenience store theft. Wilson positioned his vehicle to block Brown and Johnson from leaving, but after a brief altercation with Brown, the officer fired two shots from his weapon. One missed entirely, while the other grazed Brown’s thumb. Brown ran. Wilson pursued on foot. Suddenly the teenager stopped, turned and began to move toward the police officer. At this time, Wilson discharged 10 more bullets from his weapon, killing Michael Brown.

The grand jury in Brown’s case, made up of nine white people and three African-Americans, decided last Tuesday that Wilson would not face criminal charges in this killing, and would, in fact, face no legal action whatsoever. This was due to their decision that Wilson had “objectively reasonable” fear for his life, a standard set in a 1989 Supreme Court ruling which holds that in situations where officers have such a fear, they can shoot first and ask questions later. 

The ruling set off an ongoing series of protests nationwide. Within Ferguson, a brief set of riots occurred on Tuesday night, including fires and the looting of some local businesses. Nationwide, protests have taken on various forms: in San Diego and Washington, D.C., predominantly college-aged individuals blocked traffic on busy highways for 15 and 20 minutes, respectively, including blocking ambulances on their way to hospitals. A movement called Blackout Black Friday urged Americans not to participate in the nation’s biggest shopping day, in order to pressure big businesses into using their lobbying power in the government to bring social change. And on Dec. 1, activists staged a nationwide walkout of schools and businesses called “Hands Up, Walk Out.” These are the few protests that made national headlines this past week. Nationwide, the majority of responses have taken the form of peaceful demonstrations, sometimes outside of law enforcement buildings or in public spaces. 

When asked why they have organized these various protests, many activists respond similarly. “I am really enraged,” said Californian highway protester Jazzalyn Livingston. “People of color, students of color, often times we don’t have a voice. This is our way of making y’all listen.” The Blackout Black Friday website notes “it’s become painfully clear that people of color, and Black people in particular, are still unjustly targeted by law enforcement and the criminal justice system.” These judgments are both true and tragic. Police profiling, targeting and brutality against people of color has become endemic in the United States, and too often, cops escape justice. Only 33 percent of police officers accused of violent crime are convicted, and of those 33 percent only 12 percent are incarcerated, according to FiveThirtyEight. FBI data shows that the less clear it is that a person “justly” killed by police officers was acting aggressively, the more likely that person was black. Perhaps most telling is that on Wednesday night, a nearly identical case to Brown’s came out of New York: a grand jury did not indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who, while arresting Eric Garner for selling illegal cigarettes, choked him to death alongside several other officers. Video evidence shows him clearly committing the action, even after Garner repeatedly stated “I can’t breathe.” Yet, Pantaleo went free.

Protesters have taken to the streets because systemic racism is wrong, and has cost the lives of far too many people. 

To me, these protests also recall the vigils in my home state of Connecticut shortly after the Sandy Hook school shooting. When faced with tragedy, people need to be around each other and share in their collective grief and anger. It is likely that the protests are as much for the benefit of the protesters themselves as for their goal of a more just judicial system.

But therein lies a problem. A vigil is an event specifically for the expression of grief and condolence, and has no other aim but to let people let out their feelings. 

A protest is supposedly an act aimed at achieving a tangible goal, using tactics and speech directed toward instituting some specific change. The protests in the wake of the Michael Brown ruling have an aim—to end racism in the justice system—but lack the guidance and nuance necessary to bring about that change. 

Much of the discourse has centered on the tagline “Black Lives Matter,” which though true, does nothing to address the legal grounds and justifications for why Wilson was allowed to walk free. No one in this case denies the equality of black and white life; the problem is why the law so often targets black lives to begin with, and why this discrimination is entirely legal. This tagline frames the discourse in a way that is both unproductive and unfocused on the true issue and allows easy accusations of racism against any who question the direction such a movement takes.

Worse, too many of these protests have wound up hurting people completely unrelated to the Brown ruling. Boycotting Black Friday in the vague hopes it will move corporations to vaguely use lobbyists to push lawmakers toward vaguely defined social justice laws is deeply naive. It speaks to the “slacktivism” that its millennial promoters are so often accused of. Worse than simple naivety was the active obstruction of traffic in California and D.C. This disrupted the lives of men and women whom the protesters had no reason to believe were not just as upset as they were at the ruling. How does one justify impeding ambulances, or even simple workers who may be fired or face pay cuts for this tardiness, when none of these men and women were on the grand jury? Saying people should be made angry so that they’ll get angry about the ruling is a horribly flawed argument. The only people these drivers have personal reason to be mad at are the protestors, thus earning them enemies instead of allies. In the words of Tyree Landrum, a convenience store clerk blocked by protesters in San Diego, “We ain’t got no justice either!”

Not all responses have been counter-productive. After the Ferguson Municipal Public Library remained open the day after the riots, a huge outpour of support earned the library donations from over 7,000 Americans. 

This generosity is a touching and productive response to tragedy. And of course, the dozens of local peaceful protests have given people a way of both expressing their anger and putting pressure on their local law enforcement to be aware of these issues. 

But the most newsworthy protests, and rightfully so, have been those more motivated by the emotional need to express outrage than the logical focus of knowing at whom to aim it. This leads to the media face of this movement being one of angry and debased Americans who don’t know what they’re angry about—people who want attention, but cannot think of what to do with it. This is an issue that deserves a better image, which means its promoters must have a better response. Identify your target, determine how you want it to change, and then develop a protest aimed at achieving that specific goal. Only then can an issue as complex as this one be fully and meaningfully addressed.