Ferguson 10 Years On & The Future of Policing

Ferguson, Missouri recently marked the ten-year anniversary of the murder of Michael Brown and the subsequent uprising that was near the ground floor of the Black Lives Matter movement. Activists once again took to the streets a couple weeks ago to commemorate Michael Brown's death and the moment that sparked weeks of protest and brought police brutality into the forefront of the national conversation to this day. It should not be shocking that there was once again violence and unrest following that commemoration.

I'm bringing this up because what's happening in Ferguson today is indicative of how policing, and the carceral state in general, has adapted to the post-BLM world. There are changes that some would consider for the better, and there are changes that are decidedly worse. They tie back to the immediate wake of Michael Brown's killing and echo in the NoDAPL Standing Rock defenses, the George Floyd uprisings, and Cop City in Atlanta. For that matter, they reach across the world.

No one is going to reverse course on these things. We can't put this authoritarianism back in the bottle. Policing is getting more violent, more militarized, becoming a bigger cesspool of municipal funds, and finding new and more interesting ways to incarcerate people. Which can be, frequently enough, deadly on its own.

Ferguson, Then and Now

Ferguson, Missouri was a fairly typical city, in that the majority of its police force lived outside of city limits and they were majority white despite Ferguson being 66% Black. After the Michael Brown uprising, and years of grinding, the makeup of their police force is now about 50% Black. This should be as comforting as democratic arm sales to Israel bombing Gazans with non-racist munitions.

But beyond that landlord slapdash paint-over-an-outlet special, something far more disturbing happened in Ferguson: several activists and protestors central to the movement have been killed. By 2019, just five years after the uprising, six such men were dead. Two of them were found shot and burned in their cars. Three died by suicide, and one of a fentanyl overdose. Five were young Black men. To say they were all murdered is speculation–and moreso to say they were all killed by the police. But to see that number of activists dead in relatively short order after the uprising is shocking, and suspicious, and it would not be the first time that a police department has exacted revenge on the public or activists in particular.

Which brings us back to the present: following a violent night marking the anniversary, when protestors began tearing down a police fence and damaging property, Ferguson PD intervened and a protestor critically injured an officer. You can think of that what you want, but take umbrage with the coverage in this article, and the whinging tone of a police force that has killed its citizens and rolled military equipment down their streets.

To whit: what you won't see covered in these post-protest articles from the major outlets is that Ferguson PD has come out swinging the morning after. Inflated charges for protestors, massive bails, and the use of SWAT against suspects is, really, par for the course in 2024. This is not new behavior–it's just that behavior come home to roost.

Where Police Fail, The State Adapts and Punishes

We've learned from Atlanta's response to Cop City activists that the police aren't our only enemy; it's the entirety of the state. When Forest Defenders leveraged the support of allies from across the country, Atlanta sought to prohibit bail funds. When Forest Defenders occupied the Weelaunee Forest, cops shot and killed Tortuguita and tried to cover up his murder.

Cop Cities are now in the planning or construction phase in many more states. Police are being trained to occupy and disrupt, specifically, activist and protest spaces en masse. We've also learned that the state will swing the full weight of their police forces on us at a moment's notice if so inclined. In New York, following the pro-Palestine student activist occupation of Columbia University, the NYPD brutally arrested protestors, and the university itself harshly punished occupiers.

Another tactic we've seen, particularly following Israel's genocide of Gazans, is the use of counter-protestors to do the work the state can't openly condone. In California, counter-protestors attempted to disassemble occupied university zones and to assault protestors within. This isn't the first time police have stood by while those on the right commit crimes, but it was accomplished to particular violence recently, and we can count on that to continue.

What We Can Do

Our side is relentlessly innovative. Thanks to that, I have no doubt that whatever technique the state throws at us, we will develop counters. But that does not diminish the threat the state poses to us, or to any progress or justice we may attempt to claw away from the people in power.

One of the most important things we can do to combat this steepening drive toward militaristic, authoritarian police, is to stymy any progress in that direction. It will be much harder to gain this ground back than to simply keep it. As such, we need to create operations like Stop Cop City Atlanta and their Forest Defenders in any and all locations where these facilities are being planned.

Key features of Stop Cop City are:

-Diversity of tactics: the efforts in Atlanta have encompassed everything from traditional protests and flyering to straight up burning and sabotaging construction equipment. This makes their resistance hard to predict and harder to respond to by a large organization (such as APD).

-Bail funds: now much harder to organize for Atlanta itself, but such legislation has not yet been established across the country. Bail funds help spread out the cost of supporting these causes, and ensure that activists who are arrested have the consequences of that arrest made as light and brief as possible.

-Fearless participation: activists in Stop Cop City (and very much NoDAPL) gave themselves over to the cause. Activists literally lived at the sites of their protest, whether in the Weelaunee Forest or in front of pipeline construction. When state pressure mounted, these activists did not balk. Now, this does not mean that only those without jobs or kids can help–but people without obligation, who can commit themselves fully, are invaluable.

These ideas aren't the end-all be-all of protest. We have absolutely got to shake off some outdated concepts about what protest looks like and how protestors behave, because we're wasting energy and time. No one, for instance, should be complacently waiting for arrest at an action anymore. Unless you are actively being detained and have had your information taken, you should be trying to get the fuck away from the police and disappearing–either into the crowd or just plain away from the cops.

Static marches need to be eschewed for most protests; unless it's a simple "awareness" type of action, we can be more disruptive and more effective by behaving like comrades overseas who move proactively, dispersing away from heavy police presence and reappearing at secondary locations. These types of behaviors lessen the need for bail funds, as we're not being arrested en masse, and they fatigue police response much more quickly.

Occupations, as we've seen, are far more effective than transient marches as they remove capital from the playing field for a considerably longer duration. This pisses off the state, gets headlines, and is safer than marching where cops can charge at you with horses or tanks. They will inevitably come, but before they breach, you and fellow activists are holding powerful ground.

Lastly, opposition to the genocide of Gazans has proven that we can be much, much more antagonistic than we usually are and achieve meaningful results. The occupation and demolition of Elbit properties has diminished stock prices and literally prevented weapons from reaching Israel. Likewise for Maersk, one of the world's largest logistics companies.

The state has been on the offensive basically since its inception. It may be time that our actions begin to try and push them back onto their heels.