A decade after Mike Brown’s death, his family still calls for justice as progress toward ending police killings remains slow

(CNN) — When Michael Brown was shot and killed by a Missouri police officer on August 9, 2014, officers left the 18-year-old’s body lying in the street under the hot August sun for four and a half hours.

It was long enough for local children and his family to see him lying there. Long enough for the media to gather and the news to spread.

And long enough for a spark of rage over yet another unarmed Black man being killed by police to ignite and spread throughout the city of Ferguson.

Mike Brown’s killing – and the hundreds of days of sustained protest that followed – helped strengthen the Black Lives Matter movement and brought the issue of police use of force against unarmed Black Americans to the forefront of US policy and politics like never before. But a decade later, the nation’s progress toward preventing such a killing has remained frustratingly slow.

And for Brown’s family, the ensuing years have done little to transmute the pain of losing the brother and son they affectionally called “Mike Mike.”

On Friday, Michael Brown Sr., and his wife, Cal Brown, will walk the four and a half miles from the high school where their son graduated just days before he was killed through the streets of Ferguson to the place they call “ground zero” – the rugged patch of asphalt where the teenager laid that remains untouched despite the years.

“I am still struggling,” Mike Brown Sr., said during an appearance on a St. Louis faith leader and talk show host’s social media channel earlier this week. “I definitely get a lot of my justice through my work with my foundation, so that’s what keeps me uplifted.”

CNN has reached out to the Brown family for comment.

The march is meant to be a call to action to continue the fight against police excessive use of force and is part of the family’s weeklong tribute to the young man Mike Brown was and could have been.

“People overlook a grieving family,” Cal Brown said the appearance, “because death has become so normalized … Ten years ago, Mike Brown Jr., was not the first, nor was he the last.”

Say their names

Before Michael Brown, there was Eric Garner. Each name is added to an inauspicious roll call of the Black men and women killed at the hands of police that stretches back generations.

Sonya Massey’s name was added to that list in July. She’s among the more than 1,100 people who have been shot and killed by police in the last 12 months alone, according to a database of fatal police encounters created and maintained by the Washington Post.

The Post’s data relies on media reports, some law enforcement records and social media to aggregate the death toll because there’s no federal law requiring police departments report the number of encounters that end in fatalities to the government.

As a result, according to the Post, the death toll is widely thought to be undercounted.

“We’re in a moment where we’re seeing history repeat itself, or at least a rhyme, and rhyme and rhyme, and rhyme,” said Phillip Solomon, a professor of African American studies and psychology at Yale.

Solomon said he was inspired to study the issue of racism in policing in part because of the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo. The 23-year-old West African immigrant was shot 41 times by plainclothes New York City police officers while standing in the entryway to his apartment.

Diallo was unarmed. The officers who killed him were later acquitted.

“For a generation of folks, they grew up post-Trayvon, post-Mike Brown and Ferguson, and they saw what wasn’t working and they got frustrated and impatient,” Solomon said.

Calls to abolish or defund the police surged after the 2020 death of George Floyd, but they have since lost traction and Solomon said that same impatient generation has begun to ask, “What now?”

“That question to me is one of the most energizing, optimistic things that’s happening because there is moral certainty that if we want to call police ‘public safety,’ we’re doing public safety all the way wrong,” he said.

Solomon co-founded the Center for Policing Equity, which uses data and science to try find a way to make policing in America “less racist and less deadly,” according to the organization’s website.

But the weight of each person killed by police lands like a boulder, Solomon said. And making progress, he said, is like trying to tip the scale using only feathers – especially as the political will to pass legislation like the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act has dwindled over the years.

“As a nation, we’re not built for a long-term project of undoing the racism, not just in policing but in all the systems that end up in policing,” he said.

“I don’t see a point in my lifetime where there won’t be boulders,” he added. “I think what we can do is we can pay real close attention to the feathers.”

Some reason to hope, but progress is slow

The Ferguson Police Department no longer looks as it did in 2014.

Back then, the department had around 60 officers and fewer than five were African American, Ferguson Police Chief Troy Doyle told CNN.

“Now, as we sit here in August of 2024, we have right at about 50% African American representation and along with that we have about a 23% female representation,” he said.

Doyle said Brown’s killing and the ensuing protests have left a lasting impact on the department and their approach to policing.

The department remains under a 2016 federal consent decree that was put in place after the Department of Justice issued a scathing report that found the city’s officers and court system had engaged in a “pattern and practice” of discrimination against African Americans, targeting them disproportionately for traffic stops, use of force and jail sentences.

Under the decree, Ferguson officers have undergone trainings on implicit bias, crisis intervention and the use of force, Doyle said. Out of the more than 30,000 calls the department received in 2023, the police chief said fewer than 1% resulted in a use of force.

“Which tells me that the provisions in the consent decree, along with the training that my officers are receiving, that (the officers are) buying into this new form of policing, and it’s working,” Doyle said.

The consent decree also requires an independent monitoring team to issue reports on the department’s progress toward reform. According to the monitor’s most recent report, “the city’s progress toward compliance with the Consent Decree largely stalled during 2022 and into 2023,” due in part to turnover in the city’s police and fire department, but the department remains committed to complying.

Doyle said ultimately, his goal as chief is to engage with Ferguson’s community so his department is seen as a “legitimate, effective, professional law enforcement agency.”

“With that in mind, we also got to remember that police officers are hired from the human race,” Doyle said. “That means there are going to be occasions where mistakes are made and unfortunately, our goal and our job is to minimize those mistakes.”

A humble battle cry

Darren Wilson, the officer who shot and killed Mike Brown, never faced criminal charges for killing the teenager.

Solomon said he believes one the reasons the country has yet to meaningfully address the issue of police killings is because “we literally have not responded in the basic human way to the simple articulation: Please allow Black lives to matter.”

He said there are specific policies that could have been put in place to prevent the deaths of Brown or someone like Massey, but there’s a lack of political will.

“It’s the humblest battle cry and motto you could possibly imagine, ‘Hey, I’d like it if you treated me like my life mattered.’ But there is an entire political machine right now dedicated to … turning their activism into the most radical, seedy, violent criminal behavior,” Solomon said.

Shortly after his son’s death, Michael Brown Sr., started an eponymous organization called “Chosen for Change,” where he and his family have spent the last decade reaching out to fathers and families who have experienced traumatic loss.

Brown Sr., acknowledged the Ferguson police department has made progress over the years, but he compared the changes to a “rebrand.”

“They’ve tried to do different things, bodycams, don’t stop and frisk no more,” he said during the social media interview earlier this week. “It’s just a lot of cancer in this system that they can’t just change faces right now, they have to change the whole system.”

“You can’t erase what happened here. It’s history.”

CNN’s Evan Perez contributed to this report. 

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