Persistent protests pushed year of national change
There’s been ‘seismic impact on policing ’
FERGUS ON, MO. The death of Michael Brown a year ago and the resulting outrage of protests has sparked a closer look nationwide at unarmed African Americans killed by police.
Brown’s violent death by a white police officer raises new questions about racial profiling, police brutality and the relationship between police officers and communities of color.
Other controversial deaths in the spotlight since Brown’s include Tamir Rice, 12, shot while playing with a toy gun on Nov. 22 by a Cleveland police officer.
Walter Scott, 50, was shot April 4 by a North Charleston, S.C., police officer while allegedly running away. And recently, Samuel DuBose, 43, was shot July 19 during a traffic stop by a University of Cincinnati police officer.
“Hearing statistics of police brutality incidents can be jarring, but seeing new cases every few days forces you to acknowledge the pervasiveness of police bru- tality,” said Keisha Bentley-Edwards, a professor at the University of Texas-Austin who studies race, adolescence and academic and social development. “Seeing the impact on an actual person, their families and their communities personalizes these incidents beyond numbers.”
In Ferguson, outside of St. Louis, the police chief, a judge and the city manager, who are all white, resigned after a Justice Department review found that the police department engaged in a broad pattern of racially biased enforcement that permeated the city’s justice system, including the use of unreasonable force against black suspects.
Two of the city’s new leaders, interim Police Chief Andre Anderson, who began July 22, and interim city manager Ed Beasley, who was hired June 9, are black. Ferguson is 67% black.
Police departments elsewhere have sought to buy body cameras, while other departments added training on diversity, community engagement, bias and how to deescalate tense encounters.
President Obama created a task force on 21st century policing and banned the sale of some types of military equipment to local law enforcement agencies.
“Policing has taken a hard look at itself,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. “There has been a renewed emphasis on looking at how we hire, how we train, how we investigate, how we release information to the public. All of these aspects have had a seismic impact on policing.”
Darrel Stephens, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs, said police departments are studying the findings of Obama’s task force and looking at ways to implement its recommendations.
“It’s safe to say police officers are a little bit more cautious about what they are doing and how they approach their work today,” Stephens said.
Fear of provoking the next Ferguson has made some officers unwilling to be aggressive at their jobs, said James Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police.
Darren Wilson, the white police officer in Ferguson who shot Brown, “will be forever scarred and forever affected by this, and so will every other officer every time they think of the event,” Pasco said. “It’s going to have a chilling effect on their willingness to undertake that kind of appropriately aggressive policing.”