10 years after Michael Brown’s death, police killings are not going down

Annissa McCaskill remembers exactly where she was when she heard about Michael Brown.

“I was home on a Saturday folding laundry and I opened up Facebook and I saw an image of a body laying,” she says. She was about a 15 minute drive away from the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Mo., but the news hit close to home for a different reason.

“Being a parent of a 10-year-old boy who looked very similar to Michael, being big for his age, hearing terms like ‘he’s intimidating,’” she says. “Those are the same things that I heard were being said about Michael.”

It was a decade ago this week that police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Brown, a Black teenager, after a confrontation.

Brown’s body, although eventually covered, lay on the street for around four hours on a summer day. That image has stuck with Christopher Phillips, a filmmaker who lived in the apartment complex where Brown died and later made a documentary about the unrest.

“It was the lack of respect for his humanity,” says Phillips.

Ferguson erupted in the days that followed. What began as peaceful protests ended with smashed windows and a convenience store in flames. Police in armored vehicles and military gear responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. A grand jury chose not to indict Wilson.

Brown’s death helped launch the Black Lives Matter movement into the national spotlight, and sparked a national conversation about police brutality in America. But as high-profile police killings have continued to amass, some organizers moved from a message of police reform to one that shifts away from police altogether.

“The foundations are cracked”

In the aftermath of Brown’s death, former President Obama set up a task force to examine the state of policing nationwide.

“The philosophical orientation of that task force was that police were facing a legitimacy crisis and something had to be done to restore public trust in the police. And the way they decided to attempt to accomplish that was through what are called procedural justice reforms,” says Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College.

Essentially, procedural justice is the idea that when police and others in the criminal justice system follow proper protocols and have good communication, people feel better about the outcome, even if they get a ticket or a sentence handed down to them.

“The emphasis on things like training, tweaking the policies, creating some oversight mechanism through things like body cameras and civilian review boards, were designed to get police to follow the law properly, to follow the procedures properly,” Vitale says.

Many reforms the task force recommended were adopted. Police departments began training officers on implicit bias. Just a few years after Brown’s death, 80% of large police departments were using body-worn cameras.

In the years after Ferguson, Minneapolis became a poster child for police reform, Vitale says, until George Floyd was murdered in 2020 by police officer Derek Chauvin.

Officers in the city, for instance, had undergone implicit bias training, wore body cameras and were operating under a more restrictive use-of-force policy.

Michelle Phelps, a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, says that led to a key shift among some organizers.

“That really was a blow to liberal police reformers,” she says. “There was the sense, ‘If it has failed in Minneapolis, it will fail everywhere. And so what can we do instead?’ And that is really why you saw so much attention and energy around police defunding and police abolition and people trying to shift towards these more radical approaches because of the perceived failures of reform across the country.”

Data backs up the ways reform efforts have failed over the past decade. Nationally, police officers killed the most people last year than any other year since 2014, and Black and Hispanic people are still killed at a disproportionate rate compared to white people, according to data from the Mapping Police Violence project, which tracks police killings.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Black and Hispanic people in 2020 were more likely to experience the threat of force or the use of nonfatal force during contact with police than white people. That was true in 2015 too.

What’s more, data on the effectiveness of specific police reforms is mixed: Studies show implicit bias training doesn’t necessarily change officer behavior, the benefits of body-worn cameras are inconsistent; and the number of officers facing charges for killing people has more or less held steady.

McCaskill now leads Forward Through Ferguson, a nonprofit set up in the St. Louis region after Brown’s death. She says locally there’s been reform in the last decade, including internal use-of-force databases and increased training hours. But when her organization conducts surveys, she says most people don’t believe much has changed.

“The foundations are cracked,” she says. “How do you really change unless you go back and you do something with those foundations?”

Phillips, who still lives near Ferguson, says he doesn’t feel the relationship between police and residents there has deepened, despite an emphasis on community policing.

“Some of them now may wave when they’re passing by,” he says. “But they’re still disproportionately pulling over black drivers. So for me, it’s like, what is that wave? To the point where I still know that you’re going to stop me 1.5 to two times more than a white driver, that wave don’t mean nothing.”

“You do the best you can to make sure that everybody is following policies”

Proponents of reform say changes have made policing better in some cities.

Baltimore, for instance, started a peer support program to deal with officer trauma and an early intervention system to address problematic officer behavior. Prosecutors have praised the city for progress on its consent decree, which began after the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, who died from spinal injuries after police transported him handcuffed in a van without a seatbelt.

DeRay Mckesson, an activist who rose to national prominence in Ferguson and is now executive director of the advocacy group Campaign Zero, says there doesn’t have to be a tension between advocating for police reform and advocating for investment elsewhere.

“What happened in 2020 is I saw people pit the two strategies against each other. So it was, ‘how could you introduce a ban on neck restraints? We need to get rid of [police],’” he says. “We do need to think about safety beyond policing, I agree. And if the police don’t choke somebody out tomorrow, that is a good thing. It might not be a good thing for you, but it is certainly a good thing for the person that is not choked to death.”

There are around 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the country. Charles Ramsey, a retired Philadelphia police commissioner who was co-chair of the Obama task force, says change will vary by city, and progress isn’t going to happen everywhere all at once.

“Nothing’s going to be 100%. You do the best you can to make sure that everybody is following policies, procedures and so forth,” Ramsey says. “But you’re going to get an outlier every now and then, and somebody does something that is totally inappropriate, wrong, in some cases even criminal.”

Last month in Springfield, Ill., Sean Grayson, now a former deputy with the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office, shot and killed Sonya Massey in her home after she called 911 for help when she believed someone was prowling outside her home.

“Now, 15 years ago, I think the public would still be waiting to hear what happened,” says Sean Smoot, chairman of the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board and also a member of the Obama task force.

“We knew almost immediately what happened because the officers were wearing body-worn cameras. There was immediately an outside police agency, the Illinois state police, that came in to investigate,” Smoot says. “Their investigation immediately went to a prosecutor, and that officer, within an hour and a half of being indicted, was in jail.”

Smoot says that all occurred because of police reforms centering around accountability and transparency.

And yet none of that undoes what can’t be undone, Massey’s death.

“This is the way that movements make progress”

Deva Woodly, a professor who studies social movements at Brown University, says that is why activists have pushed to invest in other support systems, like alternative response models where mental health workers respond to some calls rather than police.

More than half of the 50 largest U.S. cities now have an alternative response to the police. Woodly says that is evidence that even though the slogan ‘defund the police’ became politically charged, the logic behind it has gained traction.

“This is the way that movements make progress, is that they actually put new ideas and new policy ideas forward and then they get tried,” she says. “I do think that there has been progress made. Not because policing is better – policing is not better – but because people are thinking more and more about safety in more holistic ways.”

McCaskill, of the Forward Through Ferguson group, is marking the 10 year anniversary of Brown’s death with a heavy heart.

“There are families that are missing, children that are missing, spouses and loved ones, and moms and dads, sisters and cousins and grandchildren, right now, because we are still not being honest with what we need to do in this country,” she says. “I ask people to support and to think of them not just this week, but ongoing. And to think of all the others. There’s a roll that could be called. We have all of these names.”