FERGUSON • Amid the tear gas and tweets, armored vehicles and expletive-laced chants that followed the death of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer two years ago, a new generation of demonstrators embraced a different paradigm.
They shunned the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, speaking of rage and pain in place of love and unity.
Their chants were a reminder of the failures of the movement that preceded them, not its successes.
Their goal was to make you uncomfortable — if you weren’t already.
Two years later, the name of a once relatively unknown north St. Louis County suburb remains ubiquitous. It is invoked at dinner tables, in television newscasts and on the stages of political rallies. To some, it symbolizes lawlessness. To others, decades of racial inequality.
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In that debate is a question whose answer is still being determined: Has the Ferguson unrest produced change or division?
Or both?
The movement has spawned new legislation, police training, body cameras, use-of-force policies, civilian review boards and court reform. It also has instilled fears that have been feeding the campaigns of politicians pledging to restore law and order.
If anything, the unrest sparked by Brown’s death in August 2014 has revealed that a declaration of discontent — if it’s done forcefully enough — can become impossible to ignore.
Tension and turnover
Perhaps nowhere is the effect of Ferguson more evident than in the city itself:
A new police chief and city manager — both of whom are black. Four new City Council members. The resignation of the city clerk. The departure of more than 20 police officers.
The city’s Municipal Court revenue has plummeted from $2.7 million in 2014 to roughly $500,000 this year.
Voters have approved a sales tax and a utility tax to help offset a budget deficit and the cost of a 131-page agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to reform Ferguson’s criminal justice system.
Meetings have featured clashes between activists and some older — mostly white — residents who resent what has happened to their town.
In June, the City Council approved a three-page, 1,140-word law regulating conduct at public meetings. But during the first council meeting under the law, one council member presented a birthday card signed by city leaders to an activist.
Many protesters argue that some city leaders still cling to the past. Last spring, Ferguson City Attorney and Prosecutor Stephanie Karr, along with her colleague Pat Chaissang of the firm Curtis, Heinz, Garrett and O’Keefe, prosecuted people arrested at demonstrations even though a judge proclaimed that the city’s case was so weak in two trials that it had essentially argued that the defendants were guilty because they were arrested.
Karr resigned after several of the demonstrators were acquitted and protests were held outside her Ferguson home. The city is seeking replacements for the city attorney and prosecutor positions.
On Tuesday, voters approved a utility tax expected to generate $700,000 a year. City Manager De’Carlon Seewood said the additional revenue will allow the police department — now led by former Miami police Maj. Delrish Moss — to hire 16 officers, bringing the total up to 50. Ferguson had 54 sworn officers at the time of Brown’s death.
The path to racial equity
Three months after Brown’s death, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon formed the Ferguson Commission to study socioeconomic conditions highlighted by the protests and to recommend solutions.
Last September, the commission produced a 198-page report with 189 “calls to action.” Among them: ending predatory lending and poverty, improving training for officers, consolidating police departments and municipal courts, and providing equitable access to rigorous courses in high school.
As the commission wrapped up its work in December, five former members agreed to serve on an interim board of a nonprofit called Forward Through Ferguson to advocate for the changes put forth in the report. The group’s mission is to provide a vision for racial equity in the region.
“We define racial equity as a state in which outcomes can no longer be predicted by race,” said Nicole Hudson, one of two Forward Through Ferguson staff members.
Hudson acknowledges that it will take decades to fix problems that took decades to create. The key is getting others involved and educating people about what led to the disparities. “If you understand what’s happening to be about a kid getting shot, then you probably are going to be confused about why it’s still news,” Hudson said. “But if you understand our nation’s history with race and race relations and laws and policies that have do with housing and job access … It’s no surprise that after a certain amount of time, we are going to have to deal with them.
“… There’s an equation behind why there are so many pockets of poverty that are mostly African-American … I encourage people to pull apart that equation.”
Hudson said the group has spent the past eight months building a network with corporations, other nonprofits and philanthropic organizations. It expects to soon seat a more permanent board.
On Tuesday, Forward Through Ferguson announced plans to partner with dozens of entities to apply for a $100 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation to address racial inequality.
So far, a handful of the Ferguson Commission’s proposals have been adopted. In May, the Missouri Legislature updated the state’s use of force law. And St. Louis has established a Civilian Oversight Board to review complaints against police officers.
Municipal court reform
The Ferguson protests put a spotlight on St. Louis County’s 90 municipalities — a significant percentage of which rely on revenue from traffic tickets to fund their governments.
The nonprofit legal organization ArchCity Defenders published a white paper arguing that excessive ticketing in North County violated the Constitution, contributed to job loss and damaged confidence in police.
The paper, which described Ferguson as a “chronic offender,” helped explain some of the anger behind the protests and led to legislation banning St. Louis County municipalities from generating more than 20 percent of their general fund revenue from traffic fines and fees.
Legal battles involving the county’s municipal courts continue to play out. Last month, Jennings agreed to pay $4.7 million to an estimated 2,000 mostly poor, black residents it jailed for unpaid court debts, many of them for minor offenses such as traffic tickets.
Policing
As the debate about municipal court reform began to threaten the existence of some cities, a few began to voluntarily consolidate their services.
“All of us knew that this ticket-writing issue had to stop,” said North County Police Cooperative Chief Tim Swope. “No longer could there be writing tickets to protect your budget.”
The unrest in Ferguson helped accelerate the formation of the cooperative. It was established in June 2015 to provide policing for Wellston and Vinita Park, and has added contracts with Pine Lawn, Charlack, Beverly Hills and Velda Village Hills.
Those cities collectively include about 12,000 residents. Swope estimates the consolidation has saved taxpayers more than $1 million.
Swope says officers shouldn’t apply for jobs at the cooperative if they don’t want to be involved in communities they serve. He aims to establish relationships in the community before a crisis and says he can’t afford to have officers for whom police work is just a job. “There’s too much at stake if that’s what it’s about,” he said.
Protests
While the Ferguson demonstrations helped ignite protests in other cities, in Ferguson the actions have dwindled. About a dozen core activists are responsible for organizing protests that usually draw between 20 and 150 people.
They speak of the days when thousands gathered along West Florissant Avenue but realize those crowds weren’t sustainable.
Before Brown’s death, activist John Chasnoff spent years working on police reform as a community organizer. The increased interest opened a window for change, he said, but it won’t stay open forever.
From the beginning, confrontations arose between longtime civil rights leaders trying to take control and younger protesters resisting them, Chasnoff said.
“Right away, younger folks were saying, ‘We’re not following the old path. We are doing things a different way,’” Chasnoff said. “It was a very different new energy that broke through a lot of the complacency.”
But at the same time, he knew that disruption alone would only go so far.
“You can’t stay in the streets forever,” he said.
