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

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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.
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St. Louis Public RadioFilmmaker Chris Phillips on Friday, Aug. 9, 2024, before a unity march commemorating a decade after Michael Brown Jr.’s police killing in Ferguson. Phillips has been documenting the Ferguson community since 2014.
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.
Scott Olson / Getty Images North America
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Getty Images North AmericaDemonstrators protest the killing of Michael Brown on Aug. 12, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo.
“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.
Stephen Maturen / Getty Images
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Getty ImagesA memorial made to look like a cemetery stands in a grassy field near the intersection where George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, Minn.
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.”
MANDEL NGAN / AFP via Getty Images
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AFP via Getty ImagesAfter Michael Brown’s death, former President Obama — seen here with former Philadelphia police commissioner Charles Ramsey, center, and former New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio — convened a task force to address policing in the country. Ramsey co-chaired the task force and told NPR he found the variety of voices brought together to be remarkable.
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.”
Copyright 2024 NPR
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Poll: Support for Missouri abortion rights amendment growing

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A proposed constitutional amendment legalizing abortion in Missouri received support from more than half of respondents in a new poll from St. Louis University and YouGov.That’s a boost from a poll earlier this year, which could mean what’s known as Amendment 3 is in a solid position to pass in November.SLU/YouGov’s poll of 900 likely Missouri voters from Aug. 8-16 found that 52% of respondents would vote for Amendment 3, which would place constitutional protections for abortion up to fetal viability. Thirty-four percent would vote against the measure, while 14% aren’t sure.By comparison, the SLU/YouGov poll from February found that 44% of voters would back the abortion legalization amendment.St. Louis University political science professor Steven Rogers said 32% of Republicans and 53% of independents would vote for the amendment. That’s in addition to nearly 80% of Democratic respondents who would approve the measure. In the previous poll, 24% of Republicans supported the amendment.Rogers noted that neither Amendment 3 nor a separate ballot item raising the state’s minimum wage is helping Democratic candidates. GOP contenders for U.S. Senate, governor, lieutenant governor, treasurer and secretary of state all hold comfortable leads.“We are seeing this kind of crossover voting, a little bit, where there are voters who are basically saying, ‘I am going to the polls and I’m going to support a Republican candidate, but I’m also going to go to the polls and then I’m also going to try to expand abortion access and then raise the minimum wage,’” Rogers said.Republican gubernatorial nominee Mike Kehoe has a 51%-41% lead over Democrat Crystal Quade. And U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley is leading Democrat Lucas Kunce by 53% to 42%. Some GOP candidates for attorney general, secretary of state and treasurer have even larger leads over their Democratic rivals.
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St. Louis Public RadioHundreds of demonstrators pack into a parking lot at Planned Parenthood of St. Louis and Southwest Missouri on June 24, 2022, during a demonstration following the Supreme Court’s reversal of a case that guaranteed the constitutional right to an abortion.
One of the biggest challenges for foes of Amendment 3 could be financial.Typically, Missouri ballot initiatives with well-funded and well-organized campaigns have a better chance of passing — especially if the opposition is underfunded and disorganized. Since the end of July, the campaign committee formed to pass Amendment 3 received more than $3 million in donations of $5,000 or more.That money could be used for television advertisements to improve the proposal’s standing further, Rogers said, as well as point out that Missouri’s current abortion ban doesn’t allow the procedure in the case of rape or incest.“Meanwhile, the anti side won’t have those resources to kind of try to make that counter argument as strongly, and they don’t have public opinion as strongly on their side,” Rogers said.There is precedent of a well-funded initiative almost failing due to opposition from socially conservative voters.In 2006, a measure providing constitutional protections for embryonic stem cell research nearly failed — even though a campaign committee aimed at passing it had a commanding financial advantage.Former state Sen. Bob Onder was part of the opposition campaign to that measure. He said earlier this month it is possible to create a similar dynamic in 2024 against Amendment 3, if social conservatives who oppose abortion rights can band together.“This is not about reproductive rights or care for miscarriages or IVF or anything else,” said Onder, the GOP nominee for Missouri’s 3rd Congressional District seat. “Missourians will learn that out-of-state special interests and dark money from out of state is lying to them and they will reject this amendment.”Quade said earlier this month that Missourians of all political ideologies are ready to roll back the state’s abortion ban.“Regardless of political party, we hear from folks who are tired of politicians being in their doctor’s offices,” Quade said. “They want politicians to mind their own business. So this is going to excite folks all across the political spectrum.”
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Democrat Mark Osmack makes his case for Missouri treasurer

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Mark Osmack has been out of the electoral fray for awhile, but he never completely abandoned his passion for Missouri politics.Osmack, a Valley Park native and U.S. Army veteran, previously ran for Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District seat and for state Senate. Now he’s the Democratic nominee for state treasurer after receiving a phone call from Missouri Democratic Party Chairman Russ Carnahan asking him to run.“There’s a lot of decision making and processing and evaluation that goes into it, which is something I am very passionate and interested in,” Osmack said this week on an episode of Politically Speaking.Osmack is squaring off against state Treasurer Vivek Malek, who was able to easily win a crowded GOP primary against several veteran lawmakers including House Budget Chairman Cody Smith and state Sen. Andrew Koenig.While Malek was able to attract big donations to his political action committee and pour his own money into the campaign, Osmack isn’t worried that he won’t be able to compete in November. Since Malek was appointed to his post, Osmack contends he hasn’t proven that he’s a formidable opponent in a general election.“His actions and his decision making so far in his roughly two year tenure in that office have been questionable,” Osmack said.Among other things, Osmack was critical of Malek for placing unclaimed property notices on video gaming machines which are usually found in gas stations or convenience stores. The legality of the machines has been questioned for some time.As Malek explained on his own episode of Politically Speaking, he wanted to make sure the unclaimed property program was as widely advertised as possible. But he acknowledged it was a mistake to put the decals close to the machines and ultimately decided to remove them.Osmack said: “This doesn’t even pass the common sense sniff test of, ‘Hey, should I put state stickers claiming you might have a billion dollars on a gambling machine that is not registered with the state of Missouri?’ If we’re gonna give kudos for him acknowledging the wrong thing, it never should have been done in the first place.”Osmack’s platform includes supporting programs providing school meals using Missouri agriculture products and making child care more accessible for the working class.He said the fact that Missouri has such a large surplus shows that it’s possible to create programs to make child care within reach for parents.“It is quite audacious for [Republicans] to brag about $8 billion, with a B, dollars in state surplus, while we offer next to no social services to include pre-K, daycare, or child care,” Osmack said.Here’s are some other topics Osmack discussed on the show:How he would handle managing the state’s pension systems and approving low-income housing tax credits. The state treasurer’s office is on boards overseeing both of those programs.Malek’s decision to cut off investments from Chinese companies. Osmack said that Missouri needs to be cautious about abandoning China as a business partner, especially since they’re a major consumer of the state’s agriculture products. “There’s a way to make this work where we are not supporting communist nations to the detriment of the United States or our allies, while also maintaining strong economic ties that benefit Missouri farmers,” he said.What it was like to witness the skirmish at the Missouri State Fair between U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley and Democratic challenger Lucas Kunce.Whether Kunce can get the support of influential groups like the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which often channels money and staff to states with competitive Senate elections.
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As Illinois receives praise for its cannabis equity efforts, stakeholders work on system’s flaws

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Medical marijuana patients can now purchase cannabis grown by small businesses as part of their allotment, Illinois’ top cannabis regulator said, but smaller, newly licensed cannabis growers are still seeking greater access to the state’s medical marijuana customers.Illinois legalized medicinal marijuana beginning in 2014, then legalized it for recreational use in 2020. While the 2020 law legalized cannabis use for any adult age 21 or older, it did not expand licensing for medical dispensaries.Patients can purchase marijuana as part of the medical cannabis program at dual-purpose dispensaries, which are licensed to serve both medical and recreational customers. But dual-purpose dispensaries are greatly outnumbered by dispensaries only licensed to sell recreationally, and there are no medical-only dispensaries in the state.As another part of the adult-use legalization law, lawmakers created a “craft grow” license category that was designed to give more opportunities to Illinoisans hoping to legally grow and sell marijuana. The smaller-scale grow operations were part of the 2020 law’s efforts to diversify the cannabis industry in Illinois.Prior to that, all cultivation centers in Illinois were large-scale operations dominated by large multi-state operators. The existing cultivators, mostly in operation since 2014, were allowed to grow recreational cannabis beginning in 2019.Until recently, dual-purpose dispensaries have been unsure as to whether craft-grown products, made by social equity licensees — those who have lived in a disproportionately impacted area or have been historically impacted by the war on drugs — can be sold medicinally as part of a patient’s medical allotment.Erin Johnson, the state’s cannabis regulation oversight officer, told Capitol News Illinois last month that her office has “been telling dispensaries, as they have been asking us” they can now sell craft-grown products to medical patients.“There was just a track and trace issue on our end, but never anything statutorily,” she said.
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Capitol News IllinoisThe graphic shows how cannabis grown in Illinois gets from cultivation centers to customers.
No notice has been posted, but Johnson’s verbal guidance comes almost two years after the first craft grow business went online in Illinois.It allows roughly 150,000 medical patients, who dispensary owners say are the most consistent purchasers of marijuana, to buy products made by social equity businesses without paying recreational taxes. However — even as more dispensaries open — the number available to medical patients has not increased since 2018, something the Cannabis Regulation Oversight Office “desperately” wants to see changed. Johnson said Illinois is a limited license state, meaning “there are caps on everything” to help control the relatively new market.Berwyn Thompkins, who operates two cannabis businesses, said the rules limited options for patients and small businesses.“It’s about access,” Thompkins said. “Why wouldn’t we want all the patients — which the (adult-use) program was initially built around — why wouldn’t we want them to have access? They should have access to any dispensary.”Customers with a medical marijuana card pay a 1% tax on all marijuana products, whereas recreational customers pay retail taxes between roughly 20 and 40% on a given cannabis product, when accounting for local taxes.While Illinois has received praise for its equity-focused cannabis law, including through an independent study that showed more people of color own cannabis licenses than in any other state, some industry operators say they’ve experienced many unnecessary hurdles getting their businesses up and running.The state, in fact, announced last month that it had opened its 100th social equity dispensary.But Steve Olson, purchasing manager at a pair of dispensaries (including one dual-purpose dispensary) near Rockford, said small specialty license holders have been left in the lurch since the first craft grower opened in October 2022.“You would think that this would be something they’re (the government) trying to help out these social equity companies with, but they’re putting handcuffs on them in so many different spots,” he said. “One of them being this medical thing.”Olson said he contacted state agencies, including the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, months ago about whether craft products can be sold to medical patients at their retail tax rate, but only heard one response: “They all say it was an oversight.”This potentially hurt social equity companies because they sell wholesale to dispensaries and may have been missing out on a consistent customer base through those medical dispensaries.Olson said the state’s attempts to provide licensees with a path to a successful business over the years, such as with corrective lotteries that granted more social equity licenses, have come up short.“It’s like they almost set up the social equity thing to fail so the big guys could come in and swoop up all these licenses,” Olson said. “I hate to feel like that but, if you look at it, it’s pretty black and white.”Olson said craft companies benefit from any type of retail sale.“If we sell it to medical patients or not, it’s a matter of, ‘Are we collecting the proper taxes?’ That’s all it is,” he said.State revenue from cannabis taxes, licensing costs and other fees goes into the Cannabis Regulation Fund, which is used to fund a host of programs, including cannabis offense expungement, the general revenue fund, and the R3 campaign aiming to uplift disinvested communities.For fiscal year 2024, nearly $256 million was paid out from Cannabis Regulation Fund for related initiatives, which includes almost $89 million transferred to the state’s general revenue fund and more than $20 million distributed to local governments, according to the Illinois Department of Revenue.Medical access still limitedThe state’s 55 medical dispensaries that predate the 2020 legalization law, mostly owned by publicly traded multistate operators that had been operating in Illinois since 2014 under the state’s medical marijuana program, were automatically granted a right to licenses to sell recreationally in January 2020. That gave them a dual-purpose license that no new entrants into the market can receive under current law.Since expanding their clientele in 2020, Illinois dispensaries have sold more than $6 billion worth of cannabis products through recreational transactions alone.Nearly two-thirds of dispensaries licensed to sell to medical patients are in the northeast counties of Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake and Will. Dual-purpose dispensaries only represent about 20 percent of the state’s dispensaries.While the state began offering recreational dispensary licenses since the adult-use legalization law passed, it has not granted a new medical dispensary license since 2018. That has allowed the established players to continue to corner the market on the state’s nearly 150,000 medical marijuana patients.But social equity licensees and advocates say there are more ways to level the playing field, including expanding access to medical sales.Johnson, who became the state’s top cannabis regulator in late 2022, expressed hope for movement during the fall veto session on House Bill 2911, which would expand medical access to all Illinois dispensaries.“We would like every single dispensary in Illinois to be able to serve medical patients,” Johnson said. “It’s something that medical patients have been asking for, for years.”Johnson said the bill would benefit patients and small businesses.“It’s something we desperately want to happen as a state system, because we want to make sure that medical patients are able to easily access what they need,” she said. “We also think it’s good for our social equity dispensaries, as they’re opening, to be able to serve medical patients.”Rep. Bob Morgan, D-Deerfield, who was the first statewide project coordinator for Illinois’ medical cannabis program prior to joining the legislature, wrote in an email to Capitol News Illinois that the state needs to be doing more for its patients.“Illinois is failing the state’s 150,000 medical cannabis patients with debilitating conditions. Too many are still denied the patient protections they deserve, including access to their medicine,” Morgan wrote, adding he would continue to work with stakeholders on further legislation.Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service covering state government. It is distributed to hundreds of newspapers, radio and TV stations statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, along with major contributions from the Illinois Broadcasters Foundation and Southern Illinois Editorial Association.
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