FERGUSON, Mo. — The protesters who spent eight months pressing for changes in Ferguson’s police practices after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown take credit for this week’s resignations of the city manager and the police chief.
And they insist they still have unfinished business, with many planning to stay in the streets until the mayor of the St. Louis suburb is forced out and the entire police force dissolved.
“We will protest until we see everything in our favor. This movement has legs,” Derrick Robinson, a protest organizer, declared Friday. “We’re out here fighting for justice and equality, and that’s what we’ll continue to fight for.”
Part of the movement has also been channeled into legislative change. On Wednesday, about two dozen people from the Don’t Shoot Coalition and the American Civil Liberties Union traveled to the Missouri Capitol in support of the “Fair and Impartial Policing Act,” a measure that would strengthen state laws about racial profiling by police and require law officers to undergo “anti-bias” training.
The Justice Department fueled the sense of achievement among activists, announcing in a scathing report last week that it had found widespread racial bias in the city’s policing and in a municipal court system driven by profit extracted from mostly black and low-income residents.