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Protest and Policing: Conflict, Justice, and History in Ferguson, Missouri

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Leading Through Conflict

Part of the book series: Jepson Studies in Leadership ((JSL))

Abstract

On August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African-American youth, was fatally shot by Darren Wilson, a 28-year-old white Ferguson police officer. The circumstances of the shooting and the intensity of the protests that followed were front-page news in the United States and abroad. This chapter examines how conflict, justice, and history entwined in the period after the shooting, attentive to the history of housing segregation and aggressive policing in the region that shaped an exclusionary status quo. The chapter concludes by discussing the US Department of Justice (DoJ) investigation of the Ferguson Police Department released in March 2015. To rectify policing practices that violated the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution, the DoJ proposed reparative and inclusionary policies to bring Ferguson in line with federal standards for fair and effective policing.

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  1. Susan Opotow
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Dejun Tony Kong Donelson R. Forsyth

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© 2016 Susan Opotow

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Opotow, S. (2016). Protest and Policing: Conflict, Justice, and History in Ferguson, Missouri. In: Kong, D.T., Forsyth, D.R. (eds) Leading Through Conflict. Jepson Studies in Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-56677-5_8

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