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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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