Michael Brown Shooting Changed Everything
Days after Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, chaotic protests there captured the national spotlight. The attention was earned not just for demonstrators’ emotional “hands up, don’t shoot” chant, but also the militarized law enforcement response to protester violence. Activists in Missouri and elsewhere called for officer diversity for communities of color, police body-worn cameras for accountability, and independent review of fatal police shooting cases for transparency.
Brown’s death sparked a national discussion around policing that forced law enforcement leaders to begin a soul searching process that continues today, experts said. An earlier incident in New York City, which had been captured on video, also paved the way for several months of nationwide demonstrations.
The summer 2014 death of Eric Garner, a 43-year-old New York City man who suffered a fatal heart attack after police officers in Staten Island, New York, placed him in a chokehold for resisting arrest, brought global attention to the issue. Cell-phone video footage of the encounter – Garner’s reported last words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry of protesters – went viral within hours of its public release by the New York Daily News on July 18.
Bayetti Flores, the New York City activist, said the year of action for the cause nationally -- a White House-convened task force on policing, increased use of body-worn cameras by street officers, and other criminal justice-related reforms -- has been encouraging. Last month, Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order that requires a special prosecutor in cases of police-involved deaths. Otherwise, the impact of protests locally have been lackluster, Bayetti Flores said.
“We have yet to see anything that really matches the demands of the crisis that we’re facing,” she said. Despite pledges of reform from Mayor Bill de Blasio and William Bratton, the commissioner of the city’s 34,500-strong police force, many in New York fear that brutality allegations still aren’t speedily investigated and officers are rarely made accountable for improper or illegal conduct.
Former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Brown, an 18-year-old unarmed resident whom he confronted on Aug. 9. There was no video of the encounter, but several witnesses eventually corroborated the officer’s story that Brown charged at Wilson when the confrontation escalated to violence. A grand jury last November decided against indicting Wilson, the white policeman whose story galvanized pro-police groups to raise tens of thousands of dollars to support his defense against criminal charges. Wilson was cleared of any wrongdoing by state and federal probes in March.
The Eastern Missouri Coalition of Police, the union for officers in departments of northern St. Louis County that helped establish Wilson’s trust fund, did not respond to interview requests.
The U.S. Department of Justice in March released a damning report from its investigation in the Ferguson Police Department, which had engaged in a discriminatory practice of stopping and ticketing blacks for traffic violations and other minor municipal offenses to help balance city budgets. The DOJ report prompted resignations of the city’s police chief and other local officials. Weeks of protests helped bring about local and state legislation to stem certain law enforcement abuses, said participant Marcus Stewart, a resident of a town that borders Ferguson.
“I think the protests allowed them to see how angry the community actually was,” said Stewart, 40, who cited the Missouri legislature’s May passage of a bill limiting fines and prohibiting incarceration for those who fail to pay them. Stewart added that officers lately seemed less aggressive about making traffic stops, but other changes in police behavior weren’t as evident.
In the 10 months that followed Brown’s shooting, reports of deadly police encounters or uses of brute force, several of which were captured on video by civilians, public surveillance systems, body-worn cameras or dashboard-mounted camcorders, incited protests similar to those after Brown’s and Garner’s cases. Consequences for the involved officers varied greatly.
Those other cases included the deaths of Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina; Freddie Gray in Baltimore, as well as the police response to a pool party largely attended by black teens in McKinney, Texas. Some of the involved officers have been terminated, resigned and/or faced criminal charges over their conduct.
‘Make It Clear They Will Face Consequences’
So what will bring about changes that activists and police officers can live with? Gregory Thomas, president of NOBLE, or the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, said it should begin with how police leaders reform their forces.
He said chiefs must track who they hire, for the sake of officer diversity that matches the community being served. Leaders must also thoroughly vet candidates, train them better on uses of force, supervise them throughout their tenure and discipline them when they screw up.
“How are you invoking some consequences, if they are caught committing a grave offense or lying about their conduct?” Thomas said. “You’ve got to hit them hard and make it clear that they will face consequences, if not termination. That tells [residents] that you aren’t putting unqualified people in their community.”
NOBLE, which represents several thousands of African-American law enforcement professionals at the federal, state, county and municipal levels, has been outspoken in the wake of fatal police encounters. Last month, the group hosted Attorney General Loretta Lynch at its national convention, where she pushed for an increase in officer-community dialog. Lynch in May launched a Justice Department investigation of the Baltimore police force, over a long history of abusive policing complaints in the majority-black city.
Community policing, or the embedding of officers on foot patrols in high-crime neighborhoods, for the purposes of building trust between officers and residents, might have prevented Brown’s death and reduced the likelihood of violent unrest seen in Ferguson and Baltimore, Thomas said.
“With more community policing, residents will trust you because they’ll see [a police shooting] as a one-off incident,” said Thomas, who is also a senior executive of law enforcement operations in the Office of the District Attorney in Brooklyn, New York. “They’ll trust you to get to the bottom of it.”
Chris Dunn, an associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said it’s too soon to tell if recent changes in New York City -- an end to police “stop and frisk” strategies and the special prosecutor policy -- are having the desired effect. Any increased transparency in law enforcement “helps people understand the truth of police misconduct,” Dunn said.
“I think the last year served as a wake-up call for police executives around the country,” Thomas added. “It’s my hope that they don’t hit the snooze alarm and are not conscious of the need to make changes.”
