Opinion | 5 Years After Ferguson, We’re Losing the Fight Against Police Violence

The media also took a step backward. A 2016 empirical study measured the extent to which the movement changed how officer-involved deaths were reported in local news. It found that journalists’ reporting in the area “continues to reflect a troubling respectability politics that minimizes the lives lost and overstates the legitimacy of police use of deadly force.” The rise of the antagonistic phrase “Blue Lives Matter” — the retort to “Black Lives Matter” by those who resent complaints about police violence and demands for racial justice — is an unfortunate symptom of these misguided media portrayals.

White-supremacist infiltration of law enforcement has been documented, and the white-supremacist mentality of being under siege has permeated police departments and carried over to public attitudes about the police. By 2016, according to a poll by the Cato Institute, 61 percent of Americans believed there was a war on the police. The Blue Lives Matter Facebook page has over two million likes, while the Black Lives Matter page has under 400,000. The perverse conception of police officers as victims made its way into law when President Barack Obama signed the Blue Alert law in 2015. And in spite of the fact that the phrase featured prominently during the Charlottesville neo-Nazi march in the summer of 2017, the House passed the Protect and Serve Act in 2018, another law designed to entrench the Blue Lives Matter narrative in our legal system. No federal legislation was presented to act on any of the recommendations of the president’s task force on policing.

To be sure, the Black Lives Matter movement has made strides around the country. Important police reform victories have been won in Los Angeles and Chicago. After five years, the police officer who used a chokehold to kill Eric Garner — an unarmed man accused only of selling loose cigarettes — has been suspended from the New York Police Department and a judge has recommended his firing. The officer who was caught on video yelling “I will light you up!” as he violently arrested Sandra Bland during a traffic stop before she died in custody has been fired and agreed to never again seek work in law enforcement. Ms. Bland’s family reached a $1.9 million settlement in a wrongful-death civil suit. But these are independent victories fueled by local communities, not directly traceable to Ferguson, and most important, they have not resulted in national, fundamental change.

In the five years since the uprising, Ferguson activists have shifted from a demand to “ stop killing us” to calls for broader civil rights and human rights standards and appeals for the ultimate structural change — an abolitionist ethic that seeks to end policing and prisons altogether. This conclusion, dubious and far-fetched to many, is a response to the thoroughly credible and highly researched position that the use of the criminal justice system as a tool of racial control reflects its original design, making the complete dismantling of it a worthy alternative vision for the long-term future. But in the short term, what does the path to progress look like? How will the movement grow in political power so that it can reach its goals, abolitionist or otherwise?

Communities have continued to search for answers. A youth activist, Travis Washington, has created a petition for a Hands Up Act that would create a mandatory minimum sentence for the police killing of unarmed civilians. The Movement for Black Lives, a coalition that includes activist organizations from Ferguson, continues to call for federal and state budget divestment from the police and investment instead in the health and wellness of our communities, and has created an electoral justice project to train a generation of candidates committed to building more constructive ways of fostering public safety.

Neither of those proposals is revolutionary — they are short-term fixes. But they remind us that we don’t have to wait until the next election to use our political power. Signing the petition, organizing community members to work on the divestment campaign and even calling on presidential candidates and progressives in Congress to prioritize structural change toward ending police violence are all ways that can and will begin to make a difference.

On Aug. 9, 2014, Mr. Brown’s last words to his friend Dorian Johnson, fleeing the deadly encounter with Mr. Wilson, were “Keep running, bro!” I believe the people in his community have embraced a similar message. Holding steadfast to the principle that everyone deserves human rights and equal justice under law and freedom from racism, they have been running a race for liberation, for all of us, from that very moment. Unfortunately, five years later, the rest of the country has failed to keep up in the long race toward freedom and racial justice.

Justin Hansford (@Blackstarjus) is a professor at the Howard University School of Law and executive director of its Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center.

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