Abstract
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 officer.2 Protesters and commentators raised several issues related to the Ferguson 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.
Recommended Citation
Richard Rosenfeld,
Ferguson and Police Use of Deadly Force,
80 Mo. L. Rev.
(2015)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/mlr/vol80/iss4/11