Ten years after Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, the fight for social and racial justice in policing continues.
“We still continue to see so many cases of excessive unconstitutional force,” attorney Ben Crump told Scripps News.
On Aug. 9, 2014, a police officer got into a scuffle with the unarmed 18-year-old after telling him to stop walking in the street. The officer then shot Brown, saying he acted in self-defense.
Brown’s body remained in the street for hours, sparking protests and unrest.
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For days the demonstrations continued as police donned riot gear and a state of emergency was called. An autopsy carried out on Brown’s body offered little to the case, reports said, and it would lead to a series of other social and racial justice cases that Crump would come out publicly to work on.
“It’s not just the Michael Browns, the George Floyds, the Breonna Taylors — but, now, you, you’re adding Tyre Nichols, you’re adding Sonya Massey, and you keep thinking this is going to be the one that is finally going to have an impact, where we won’t keep having to talk about these tragic, senseless unjustified killings,” Crump said.
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For Crump, the cases show how far the country still has to go when dealing with social justice.
“You know, we were optimistic there — which is that, when Ferguson happened, and the uprising, when Congress was trying to pass systematic reform, just like they tried to with Rodney King. And, we thought that it was going to happen with President Obama, but it did not. And then, obviously we came to George Floyd in 2020, and we thought certainly, after seeing this … video, we have to pass systematic police reform, on the national level, and it did not,” he said.
In 2021, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, at least 30 states and Washington, D.C. enacted one or more statewide legislative policing reforms.
In 2020 President Joe Biden issued an executive order on “advancing effective, accountable policing and criminal justice practices” saying in the order’s release that the U.S. criminal justice system “must respect the dignity and rights of all persons and adhere to our fundamental obligation to ensure fair and impartial justice for all.”
For the full interview with Ben Crump, watch the above video.
