Michael Brown graduated from high school eight days before a Ferguson police officer shot and killed him in the street.
The 18-year-old’s killing — 10 years ago today — put the St. Louis suburb in the national spotlight after images of people protesting in the streets, buildings burning and his dead body lying in the street for four hours were shared widely on social media and broadcast on national television.
The protests spurred the Black Lives Matter movement, born a year earlier.
The official report from the Department of Justice found no credible evidence to dispute officer Darren Wilson’s claim that Brown reached for the officer’s gun, and all the credible testimony from the day suggests that Brown was neither holding his hands up nor turning away from Wilson when he was shot.
Wilson was never charged, and many in the community and around the country maintain that justice was never served. But the events from 10 years ago still served as a catalyst for change in Ferguson — and beyond.
“What made me think it could and would change was the people in the streets in Ferguson in 2014,” Blake Strode, the executive director of ArchCity Defenders told Morning Edition.
Ferguson isn’t the same place it was 10 years ago, and many people who call it home are trying to make it better.
Systemic problems plagued the city 10 years ago. Have they been fixed?
Michael Brown’s killing led to a Department of Justice investigation of the shooting and Ferguson’s police department.
The DOJ found that the Ferguson police department was incentivized and encouraged to lobby municipal fines and fees on individuals to generate revenue for the city and that these fines disproportionately were issued to Black people in the city.
“Even relatively routine misconduct by Ferguson police officers can have significant consequences for the people whose rights are violated,” the 100-page report read.
“I think what people here have known to be true for a very long time is that the institutions like the police and surveil, arrest and target people. I think they knew that on Aug. 9, 2014, and they know that now,” said Strode of ArchCity Defenders. This legal advocacy organization was the first to raise the alarm about the fines and fees system in Ferguson.
ArchCity Defenders has seen a significant decrease in the amount of fines and fees issued to residents in Ferguson and the surrounding municipalities. In 2013, municipal court revenues in the St. Louis region were about $61 million in 2023.
Last year, that figure was $17.8 million.
“When we talk to our clients, many of them talk about the night and day experience of moving, working and traveling through their neighborhoods, their municipalities, their hometowns,” Strode told Morning Edition.
The DOJ issued a federal consent decree in 2016 to the Ferguson Police Department after its investigation, requiring the department to adhere to mandates in order to reform their police system. Those included police training for officers, more community engagement and performance evaluations for officers.
“When I got here, officers were still walking around with their heads down, because they felt like just over the years, they continue to get beat up, you know, in the public in regards to what took place in 2014,” Ferguson Chief of Police Troy Doyle told NPR’s Michel Martin in his office.
Doyle became Ferguson’s police chief last year. The city has had a string of police chiefs since former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in 2014.
Before he was named police chief, Doyle spent 31 years in the St. Louis County Police Department. He retired from his position as Lieutenant Colonel two years after filing a racial discrimination lawsuit against another officer at the St. Louis County police department.
Doyle points to programs he’s implemented when talking about how the police department has improved. There have also been significant changes in the racial makeup of the police department: 10 years ago, there were only three Black police officers in Ferguson. Now, roughly half the police force in Ferguson is Black, he said.
Even the police uniforms have changed.
“When you see the old Ferguson police cars or uniforms and also get out of the car, trigger some people in our community, "Doyle said. “So I wanted to get totally away from that.”
Doyle is hoping that the police department will be completely compliant with the federal consent decree in the next two years.
“When you're in the position I am as a chief of police, I am the final decision here at this police department,” Doyle said. “So that's where my optimism comes from, because I can set the tone in the practices that would take place here at this police department.”
But activists like Strode think that no matter how much police reform is done, there are systemic problems in St. Louis that prevent meaningful change. One of the biggest issues is that the county is composed of small municipalities, some of which have their own police forces, courts and standards for operating. Some municipalities contract with St. Louis County Police, while others have banded together to form the North County Police Cooperative.
“It's just a system that no one would design unless you were actually trying to profit from poor people,” Strode said.
Strode believes that consolidating the municipalities under one court system and police force would greatly reduce the amount of over policing in these areas by forcing the system to stop focusing on generating revenue. There were at least 90 municipalities in 2014, though some have dissolved or joined with other towns.
“People would live much better, freer lives if we didn't have this kind of petty policing of their activities day in and day out,” Strode said.
But Doyle thinks smaller police departments are an advantage.
“Some cities like to have a smaller police department because they feel more intimate with the officers that work there,” Doyle said.
How a burned down QuikTrip shows change in Ferguson
The day after QuikTrip, a gas station less than a mile away from where Michael Brown was killed, burned down, Michael McMillan, the president of the Urban League in St. Louis called Michael Johnson, the only Black person on the board of directors at QuikTrip.
“I said, Michael, you can't just let this be vacant, abandoned, derelict. This is going to be an eyesore and it's going to be a source of decay,” McMillan said.
McMillan recalls talking to Johnson every day about what could be done with the empty lot. QuikTrip didn’t plan to rebuild the gas station, so it decided to donate the space to the Urban League and Salvation Army, who were interested in opening a community center. It was the first time ever the Urban League, which is over 100 years old, had ever taken on owning and building a center.
“It pushed me and the team at the Urban League to do things that we had never done before because they needed to be done,” McMillan said.
The Urban League’s headquarters are in East St. Louis, closer to the heart of the city. McMillan says that the Urban League never thought a lot about poverty in the suburbs of the city until the death of Michael Brown, which brought attention to the high amounts of poverty in suburban areas near the edges of cities like St. Louis.
“If you look at the inner city, there's a huge amount of non-profit social service agencies," McMillan said. “And people didn't really think that you needed to expand that much into north county.”
NPR met McMillan in his office at the Ferguson Community Empowerment Center, which opened in 2017 on the site of the QuikTrip that burned. The center is a multipurpose facility that serves as the headquarters for things like workforce programs for Black men, emergency assistance services and after school programs for kids.
“The center is for opportunity and new beginnings,” said LaKeysha Fields, the St. Louis Regional Social Services Director for the Salvation Army.
And it’s not the only new nonprofit in the area: there’s also a senior living center where an AutoZone once stood, and a Boys and Girls Club less than a mile away from where Michael Brown was shot. The Urban League also broke ground on another project recently: it plans to turn two vacant lots into a plaza, anchored by a bank and a small convention center.
Still, many lots sit vacant, as do abandoned apartments and boarded up buildings all throughout West Florissant Avenue, one of the city's main thoroughfares.
“I'm very hopeful that we can kind of plateau and rebuild and bring more businesses, institutions, you know, commercial activity on this major corridor,” McMillan said. “And then as a result, maybe people see the revitalization and want to rent in some of these apartment complexes and buy homes.”
None of these new organizations had a large presence in the Ferguson area before 2014, but now they are some of the first things people see when they drive down West Florissant Avenue.
“I don't know that this building being here would have prevented what happened. Hopefully there would have been some buffer, less likelihood,” Fields said.
What’s left to be done beyond Ferguson
NPR spoke to some Ferguson residents and asked how they feel their city has changed.
Henry Jones, Ollie Brown and Willy Powell, whom NPR met at a city park, all said they feel like things have especially improved in Ferguson’s police department.
While they might feel safer than they did a decade ago, all three of them agreed that there was more to be done, specifically for kids in the area who can often be victims and perpetrators of violence.
“We’re watching them and they are like a train out of control,” Brown said.
But they don’t think that’s a change that can happen with more policing.
“Police can’t control them,” Powell said. “It starts in the home.”
The point that reform goes beyond policing is what activist DeRay Mckesson, who became a well-known figure after the Ferguson protests in 2014, has argued for years. Mckesson now runs Campaign Zero, a social justice organization that works to reduce the power and reliance on police.
The group, he said, is working to highlight and change laws that can lead to more encounters with law enforcement and to reduce ways that formerly incarcerated people can get tangled up with the legal system again.
He pushes back against the notion that some reform hasn’t happened.
“I do think there's a weird thing that happened where there are people who want this narrative that nothing has changed,” Mckesson said.
He points to the attempt to pass the George Floyd Policing Act in Congress, new state laws prohibiting police from executing no-knock raids in Pennsylvania and new requirements for police departments to hand over data as signs of progress in police reform.
Though national scale reform for the nearly 18,000 police departments in the United States hasn’t happened, McKesson doesn’t feel like solutions to issues in policing can come from the federal government.
“I think that people have been looking for something like a national silver bullet as opposed to understanding that the best version of the change will be a 50-state strategy,” McKesson said.
Transcript
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This week, our team in St. Louis, Mo., has been bringing you stories from a city you might not have even heard of 10 years ago - Ferguson, a suburb about 20 minutes north of St. Louis. Our final story begins with a fire.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: QuikTrip is on fire.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Burning up.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: It's on fire.
MARTIN: About a week after Michael Brown Jr., an 18-year-old Black man, was shot by a white Ferguson police officer, the QuikTrip gas station was set on fire, apparently because a confrontation between Brown and a clerk there led to the police call. Michael McMillan made a call that night to a director on QuikTrip's board.
MICHAEL MCMILLAN: And I told him - I said, you can't just let this be vacant, abandoned, derelict. This is going to be an eyesore, and it's going to be a source of decay and just really to remind everyone about all of the ills of St. Louis. I said, we've got to do something positive with it.
MARTIN: McMillan is the president and CEO of the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis, a century-old civil rights group that focuses on economic advancement. And don't let his Southern accent fool you. McMillan was born and raised in St. Louis and got started in the Urban League a long time ago.
MCMILLAN: So I joined on my 16th birthday...
MARTIN: Oh. Oh, my goodness. OK. So you're definitely in the mix.
MCMILLAN: ...Been involved with 37 years.
MARTIN: Those talks during the protest led to the Ferguson Community Empowerment Center, a collaboration between the Urban League and the Salvation Army. The building stands on the very spot where the QuikTrip used to be. It's where we met McMillan and some of the other people in this story. And a lot of the programs offered in the new space come directly from what leaders like McMillan heard during the Ferguson protests.
MCMILLAN: The staff at the Urban League - we would change every night at 5 o'clock. And we would come out and walk the streets and just ask people and talk to folks and be there for them.
MARTIN: There's a lot of technical ability in this organization - always has been - right?
MCMILLAN: Sure.
MARTIN: So why not? Why did it take Michael Brown's death to get the Urban League to kick it into gear in this area?
MCMILLAN: This was viewed as an area where there were not nearly as many needs. So if you have St. Louis city, with this enormous concentration of poverty, East St. Louis that has one of the highest concentrations of poverty in the country - so those were our top priorities, not the suburbs. And so this changed that. It had us to evolve and really take a hard look at, there's more poverty in the county than you thought.
MARTIN: The Urban League wasn't the only organization that turned its attention to Ferguson after Michael Brown's death. The Department of Justice conducted an official review of the Ferguson Police Department. In 2015, they found that police in the area had been encouraged to find residents to generate revenue for the city, one of the factors leading to a culture of heavy-handed policing and onerous fines for things like - and I quote - "manner of walking in roadway."
Blake Strode is the executive director of ArchCity Defenders, a legal advocacy organization that had been sounding the alarm for years. He says there has been significant progress on the issue of excessive fines and fees.
BLAKE STRODE: Municipal court revenues in 2013 - just in the St. Louis region - were over $60 million. In 2023, that figure is $17.8 million. So that's a huge decrease. You're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars not being extracted disproportionately out of poor Black communities. So that's a big deal. And when we talk to our clients, many of them talk about the night-and-day experience of moving and working and traveling through their neighborhoods, their municipalities, their hometowns.
MARTIN: What would make a real difference so that, you know, if you and I talk again 10 years from now, we're not having the same conversation?
STRODE: Well, the thing that would make the biggest difference is actually to realize that these municipal courts aren't necessary at all. Realistically, do we think they're going to disappear? No, we don't. But we do think that an obvious and very achievable outcome is to consolidate all of those operations and take them out of municipal governance.
If this is a court operation, it should be operated by a professional court in a consolidated way without the embedded conflicts of interest, where you have judges moonlighting as prosecuting attorneys here and defense attorneys there and city attorneys over there. It's just a system that no one would design unless you were actually trying to profit from poor people.
MARTIN: Our producers went to a park in Ferguson to see if residents have felt a change. They met Henry Jones, Ollie Brown and Willy Powell, who all said they did.
HENRY JONES: The police department has changed a lot.
MARTIN: For one thing, they noticed the number of Black police officers now in Ferguson. In 2014, there were only three Black officers on the force. Now more than half the department's officers are Black.
JONES: Mostly now - it's mixed now, yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED BYLINE, BYLINE: Does that make you feel safer?
JONES: Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED BYLINE: Does that make you feel - how does that make you...
JONES: A lot safer, yeah.
OLLIE BROWN: I mean, it does. So, I mean, especially as - at our age, we hear. I mean, we see what's going on. We see the change. We scared for the kids.
MARTIN: Meaning while they feel safer as older adults, they worry that younger people are still at risk as victims, but also as perpetrators.
BROWN: Some young guys and these young kids be right here where we are. But majority of the time, we watch them. And we're watching them like a train out of control. Just - they just got in they head they want to be against them, you know?
WILLY POWELL: Police can't change it. It got to start from home first.
JONES: Got to start from home.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHAIRS MOVING)
MARTIN: Hey.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Hello, how you doing?
MARTIN: How are you doing today?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: All right.
MARTIN: Back at the community center, we met LaKeysha Fields. She's trying to help the kids and families the men at the park were talking about. We met her in a room filled with colorful chairs.
Oh, I guess these are kind of more kid-sized...
LAKEYSHA FIELDS: Yes.
MARTIN: ...For a...
FIELDS: Yes.
MARTIN: ...Not little-little...
FIELDS: But fifth - fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders.
MARTIN: Fourth, fifth and sixth, OK.
FIELDS: Yeah.
MARTIN: LaKeysha Fields is the regional social services director for the Salvation Army that works out of the community center.
FIELDS: So...
MARTIN: What - so what's going on here?
FIELDS: So a lot actually goes on in this building. We have our emergency social services. So families who need financial assistance - they come in and we - rent, utilities, mortgage - any kind of assistance like that. And then this space you see is for our youth. It's Spark Academy. And that's for kids - third-, fourth- and fifth-graders. During the school year, it's an after-school program. In the summer, it's a full summer immersion, all day.
MARTIN: Do you think it's making a difference?
FIELDS: I do think it's making a difference. It's a positive presence in the community, right? People know they can come here. They know if - it's a safe space. They know that they can receive help.
MARTIN: The Salvation Army estimates they serve about 14,000 people in the area. But despite all these efforts, people in Ferguson are leaving, while elsewhere in the state, the population is going up. So to keep people here, investments in the community are essential. Here's the Urban League's Michael McMillan again.
MCMILLAN: There's no part of this whole state that has been stigmatized in such a negative way like Ferguson. So there's been a lot of different reasons why people would leave. But, you know, I'm very hopeful that we can kind of plateau and rebuild on these major corridors and then, as a result, make people see the revitalization and want to go rent in some of these apartment complexes and buy homes and stabilize and rebuild to where we were before, and then hopefully better.
MARTIN: Hopefully, setting off a different kind of light in Ferguson and beyond. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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