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80 Mo. L. Rev. 1077 (2015)
Ferguson and Police Use of Deadly Force

handle is hein.journals/molr80 and id is 1085 raw text is: Ferguson and Police Use of Deadly Force Richard Rosenfeld I. INTRODUCTION The killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by Darren Wilson, a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked widespread protests in the St. Louis area and across the nation.' Protests and civil unrest resumed after a St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict the police of- 2 ficer. Protesters and commentators raised several issues related to the Fer- guson incident and police use of deadly force. This Article addresses four of those issues: (1) Why Ferguson? (2) Did the Ferguson killing and ensuing civil unrest increase crime rates in St. Louis? (3) What is known about police use of deadly force? (4) What additional information is needed to understand and respond effectively to police use of deadly force? These are certainly not the only issues provoked by the Ferguson events, but they have both research and policy significance, and they have also been raised in response to other controversial police use-of-force incidents in Cleveland, New York City, Baltimore, and elsewhere. The report by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on the Ferguson Police Department (FPD) offers several reasons why Ferguson was ripe for protests and civil unrest over police practices in the city's African-American community, including aggressive enforcement of municipal ordinances to generate revenue, inadequate training and supervision related to police use of force, and a pattern of racial bias in policing that eroded trust in the police by • 3 African Americans. Yet, such practices are clearly not unique to this small suburban community, and the DOJ report also notes that many Ferguson • Richard Rosenfeld is the Founders Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri St. Louis. He is a Fellow and former President of the American Society of Criminology. 1. See Michael Brown's Shooting and Its Immediate Aftermath in Ferguson, N.Y. TIMES (Aug. 25, 2014), http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/12/us/ 13police-shooting-of-black-teenager-michael-brown.html? r=0#/#time348 10366. 2. Latest Updates: Protests Nationwide as More Troops Are Called to Fergu- son, N.Y. TIMES (Nov. 25, 2014), http://news.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/live- updates-grand-jury-decision-darren-wilson-ferguson/. 3. CIVIL RIGHTS DIv., U.S. DEP'T OF JUSTICE, INVESTIGATION OF THE FERGUSON POLICE DEPARTMENT 2 (Mar. 4, 2015), http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press- releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson~police department report.pdf. 4. See, e.g., Joel Rose, Despite Laws and Lawsuits, Quota-Based Policing Lin- gers, NPR (Apr. 4, 2015, 4:47 AM), http://www.npr.org/2015/04/04/395061810/ despite-laws-and-lawsuits-quota-based-policing-lingers; Jaxon Van Derbeken & Viv- ian Ho, S.F. Police Chief: 8 Officers Deserve Firing Over Text Messages, S.F.

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