Friday marks a decade since Michael Brown was killed in a Ferguson, Mo., police shooting that led to crucial conversations about transparency and reform while helping spark a global Black Lives Matter movement.
The anniversary will likely reignite debates about criminal justice reforms, coming just weeks after the fatal shooting of Sonya Massey by an Illinois deputy, which was caught on video and generated national outrage, Axios reports.
Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights attorneys are presenting the Brown case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of Brown's mother, Lezley McSpadden on Friday to bring more attention to the case and pressure the U.S. to reopen it.
Brown, a Black 18-year-old, was shot and killed on Aug. 9, 2014, by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, who had stopped the high school graduate for walking in the middle of a quiet residential road in the St. Louis suburb. A confrontation followed.
A struggle at Wilson's police vehicle turned into a street pursuit that ended with Wilson fatally shooting Brown. Witnesses said Brown had his hands up when he was shot, but federal and local investigators later disputed that.
The shooting led to outrage in Ferguson, resulting in burned buildings from demonstrations and violent police responses to protestors. A grand jury and an Obama administration federal investigation cleared Wilson, writing that "this matter lacks prosecutive merit and should be closed."
Federal policing reform has stalled in Congress amid partisan bickering, and conservative backlash against discussion on systemic racism has taken the focus off police violence after the 2014 death of Brown and the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
Efforts at police reforms since their deaths have been mixed. Some states and cities passed major initiatives, and others faced resistance to any change.
The advocacy group Campaign Zero pushed for 24 states, including Louisiana, Maryland, Nevada and Virginia, to pass legislation to reduce police violence.
Six states and two cities adopted more restrictive no-knock raid laws. At least five states passed bills that end or study the end of qualified immunity for police officers.
President Obama and the two presidents who followed him have faced criticism for not doing more.
Obama said in 2021 that "institutional constraints" stopped him from speaking out against the killings of Black Americans when he was in office, an excuse some advocates dismissed.
Rashad Robinson, president of Color Of Change, told Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing that Ferguson "created openings to talk about systemic barriers and activism." Now, he said, "When you get to Sonya Massey, which is such a horrific story, and you see this video, and you're like, 'Did anything change?' It calls into question all of the work that needs to be done in the systemic nature of policing."