Work to Do Still but the Ferguson Protests Made Change Happen
More cameras. If ordinary citizens can get caught up in “broken windows” policing, so can the police. Cops that lie, or even just stand by in the face of policy or law breaking simply must be punished.
St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar told The Huffington Post it was “a shame that we haven’t had the political will before 2014” to look at the municipal courts.
“If you went to a very affluent area in St. Louis County, how long do you think a program would last where speed cameras were put up on arterial roads coming into subdivisions, and people were given letters saying they were going to be arrested? It would last about five hours,” Belmar said. “You know that and I know that, and that’s part of the problem. Yet in areas that are not as affluent, and where folks really are struggling with issues of poverty and education and crime and everything else that goes along with it — unemployment — they don’t have the ability really to voice that opinion. They can’t leverage change. That’s a good thing that’s come out of all this.”
Ferguson’s protests spawned at least 40 state measures aimed at improving police tactics and use of force. The national conversation around race and policing has shifted so dramatically that the director of the FBI said law enforcement officials historically enforced “a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups” and discussed how unconscious racial bias affects police officers with no pushback from the law enforcement community.
“I don’t think there has ever been this level of attention being paid to communities all over the country,” Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a recent interview with The Huffington Post. “As a country, it will be shame on us for missing the opportunity … given the kind of elevated attention that is being paid to criminal justice.”