Remembering Ferguson, 10 Years Later
By Elda Abayneh
The stench of spilled, innocent blood suffocated Canfield Drive on August 9, 2014. Left on the street for four and a half hours in the summer heat laid the murdered body of 18-year-old, unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown, his skin maliciously impaled with six bullets that stole his life away. A white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri — Darren Wilson — shot the teenager twice in his head and four times in his right arm, robbing Brown of his future. Dorian Johnson, Brown’s friend and witness of the shooting, said that Brown was attempting to surrender when Wilson fired the shots that pierced him to death. The killing of Michael Brown became one of the most inciting events in our nation’s history. Following Brown’s death, “hands up, don’t shoot” became the rallying cry of an ongoing movement.
Michael Brown’s murder ignited an uprising in Ferguson, as the community demanded justice and protested in the streets. The grand jury for the police officer’s case found Wilson not guilty. The U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation into the Ferguson Police Department and found that law enforcement regularly infringed upon Black Americans’ First, Fourth, and 14th Amendment rights: stopping people without reasonable suspicion, arresting them without probable cause, and using unreasonable force. The lack of accountability for the death of Michael Brown catalyzed the Black Lives Matter movement throughout the nation. Protests in the streets nationwide called for reforms to policing. Efforts across the country were seemingly fruitful, as 34 states introduced and passed about 80 bills, executive orders, or resolutions in 2015 and 2016 to address policing. There was also an urgent call for police officers to use body worn cameras to document use of force to increase transparency and accountability.
Despite attempts to reform policing after Michael Brown’s death, America is still reeling from harmful police practices. Ten years after Ferguson, so many of the proposed policing reforms have fallen short of their stated goals. Police departments spent millions of dollars on body cameras, only to result in shaky and low-quality footage that can help justify the use of force. In many cases, like in Minneapolis and South Bend, Indiana, officers even failed to turn them on before they shot someone. Even though efforts were made to hold training sessions in implicit bias and de-escalation and to revise use-of-force policies, there are still few national guidelines for police recruitment, training, or use of force.
After the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in May 2020, public outrage and protest helped to spur additional efforts for reform. President Biden’s May 2022 executive order on policing was the most substantial federal action on police reform since Floyd’s murder, and the Department of Justice’s National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), released in December 2023, will provide a centralized internal method of tracking federal police discipline. While these efforts are a step in the right direction, there is significantly more work to be done to reform the institution of policing. Lives are still being lost to police violence. In 2023 alone, police killed 1,161 people. The number of fatal police shootings has persisted in the last decade: Since 2015, police have killed at least 9,929 people in the United States. And while Black Americans account for 14 percent of the population, they are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans.
Policing and carceral systems for public safety have been in place for decades, yet many communities still feel unsafe. Violence is geographically concentrated in the United States, disproportionately occurring in neighborhoods experiencing chronic disinvestment. Low incomes, lower educational attainment, densely crowded housing, and high unemployment rates are common in these under-resourced neighborhoods. These areas with structural disadvantages have the highest numbers of Black and Brown people who become targets for over-policing, a strategy that does not result in sustained changes in public safety. Investment in communities will decrease rates of violent crimes. Communities will be safest when we prevent harm before it arises and invest in resources that help people thrive.
Though policing is just one type of public safety response, it receives the vast majority of available funding. It is past time to start investing in public safety approaches that actually work. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights takes part in the Community Safety Working Group, a coalition of nearly 90 civil rights and justice organizations advocating for policies that strive for public safety. The group released the 2024 Community Safety Agenda in April, which calls for investing in under-resourced and overpoliced communities to actually create safe communities without violent, biased policing. Investing in community health and prevention programs is the most effective and long-lasting way to promote community safety.
The community safety agenda includes the People’s Response Act, which would create a “Division on Community Safety” in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to fund systems that advance safety outside of the policing institution, bolster preventative, non-carceral safety programming, and treat safety as a public health issue. The Mental Health Justice Act provides programs that train and dispatch mental health professionals, rather than police officers, to respond to mental health crises. And the Break the Cycle of Violence Act would create a new ”Office of Community Violence Intervention” at HHS to support community violence intervention programs nationwide.
In April, The Leadership Conference published an updated policy platform and recommendations, call “Vision for Justice,” which further envisions a new approach to public safety. The platform offers concrete solutions that honor the dignity and human rights of all people.
As we remember Michael Brown and the many other victims of police violence, we must commit to continuing the fight for policies that might have saved their lives — no matter how long it takes us.
Elda Abayneh is a summer 2024 undergraduate intern at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.