The NAACP's 130-mile march to Jefferson City concluded Friday, but the issues raised by those who marched and the organization itself have become a bigger cause relating to civil rights.
The march was a response to the St. Louis County grand jury's decision not to indict former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown Jr., a black teenager, on Aug. 9.
Along the Ferguson to Jefferson City route, many marchers told reporters the issues now are not specific to Ferguson and have grown much larger than the Brown case. Though the march's purpose was to call for new leadership for the Ferguson Police Department, it also called for new reforms in police practices and culture, both locally and nationally.
On Wednesday, marcher Krystina Poludnikiewicz of Toronto said: "This is the civil rights movement. People see this as an independent issue, but it's not.
"It's not about Mike Brown and the non-indictment. This is about the whole system being corrupt, and it favors those who have money, and it completely oppresses people of color."
A day later, marcher W.T. Edmondson of Jefferson City (and a past president of the local NAACP branch) said: "This is a new movement that is going to change this country, the way Martin Luther King's movement did.
"And to be alive now - and to see what is going on in this country - and not to stand up and speak out, is something I couldn't do."
Marchers' comments and suggestions seemed to envision three foundational changes in society.
Structural changes
The grand jury decision not to indict Wilson has caused many to question the established process and ask for legislative changes that crack down on practices like racial profiling.
Part of the NAACP's strategy during the march was to educate those taking part with nightly "teach-ins." The last teach-in, held Thursday at Jefferson City's Quinn Chapel AME Church, focused on explaining the grand jury process and giving people tools to monitor racial profiling in their local communities.
Mae Quinn, a law professor and director of Washington University's Juvenile Law and Justice Clinic, taught those at Quinn Chapel about how the grand jury process works and discussed how several states do not use a grand jury.
Carlton Mayers, a criminal justice specialist with the NAACP, told marchers about ways to monitor racial profiling practices and where to find form letters to demand action from state and federal offices.
Mayers cited and showed the audience a report by the NAACP titled "Born Suspect," which included many statistics regarding racial profiling across the country.
The report also included an anti-racial profiling model bill to send to state legislatures, a sample End Racial Profiling Act to send to Congress, a police misconduct incident reporting form and an outline to form an effective civilian review board for police misconduct and racial profiling. The report is free to view at naacp.org/pages/racialprofiling.
"I really believe that (Thursday's) teach-in is really an extraordinary moment," said Cornell William Brooks, the national NAACP's president and CEO. "We have a solid public policy case against racial profiling, whether it be based on race, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation, and we had a wonderful analysis of the grand jury process."
Cultural changes
Roslyn Brock, the national NAACP's chairman of the board, told reporters after Friday's Capitol rally: "African American communities want a good relationship with law enforcement. We want one that is open and honest and transparent.
"I would dare say there's not an African American or Latino community in America that does not want community-oriented policing."
But time and again, many communities complain they don't trust law enforcement.
Contacted by the News Tribune, four Mid-Missourians who are black - and are or have been in law enforcement - agree that makes an officer's job more difficult and makes it harder to recruit young people to the profession.
They also all agreed most of the people in law enforcement are "good" people - and many of today's problems have been caused by people who shouldn't be in law enforcement.
• Lt. Gary Hill, recruiting and internship program officer for the Cole County sheriff's office, got into law enforcement 17 years ago "because I wanted the work I did to make a difference."
A Muskogee, Oklahoma native who was a "military brat" and moved around a lot, Hill, 40, said his friends questioned his career choice because "they saw law enforcement as a profession that was treating African Americans as third-class citizens."
And the biggest problem with recruiting into law enforcement is the continuing feeling that "law enforcement is an arm of the government ... that enforces those laws they feel are unfair."
But it may remain a problem in outstate Missouri, he said, "because we do not have the minority population" found in the metropolitan areas.
• Jefferson City Police Lt. David Williams, 46, started his career as an undercover narcotics officer, as "a way to, specially, pick an area that I thought needed to be given some attention."
A 22-year veteran of Jefferson City's department, Williams agreed that many communities - even some of the people who live here - distrust police.
"I believe that it's more of a distrust of the position - not necessarily the person in the uniform," he explained. "I think we have, as a society, gone to not individualizing, "That's Officer Jones' or "That's Officer Smith.' I think we have gone to, "That's Officer Police.'"
And he agrees with Brock about the need for more regular contact between law officers and the communities they work for.
"I think a lot of it is that we have gone away from the old days of the "community policing' mindset, where you knew your community and the people in it," he said. And things like Jefferson City's Citizens Police Academy help improve the relationship, with more people understanding how police officers do their jobs.
• Charles Jackson, 62, retired from the State Highway Patrol when then-Gov. Bob Holden tabbed him to be Missouri's Public Safety director.
He was born in the state of Louisiana and lived in Evanston, Illinois as a teenager.
"In 1968, during the riots, I got stopped for driving too slow and being in the wrong area - they pulled their guns on me and stuff like that - and that stuff wasn't right," he recalled. "My main reason for going into law enforcement was, I wanted to make a difference - and you can't make a difference from the outside."
Jackson joined the patrol in 1975. In 1983, he was named the agency's equal employment opportunity and recruiting officer - with a special challenge to increase the number of qualified minorities. He did that by spending a lot of time visiting interested people in-person, and by developing partnerships with various agencies and groups that might recommend recruits.
He agreed that many African Americans distrust law enforcement because it "has been seen as a control-agency" - and some officers became abusers of the people they were assigned to protect.
"Law enforcement people need to realize they're the "adult' in a situation," Jackson said. "They need to do everything possible to diffuse a situation and bring it under control."
• Lincoln University Police Chief Bill Nelson, 63, was the fourth black officer to be hired in the Missouri Highway Patrol's history.
Nelson was 16 when his family moved to Kansas City from Northeast Arkansas, where he "started out in segregated schools (and) never had an experience of having "Officer Friendly' next door. The police in my neighborhood were viewed more as a "force to keep you in line.' You wanted to avoid them, if at all possible."
When his oldest brother encouraged him to apply to the patrol, Nelson recalled: "I talked to the recruiter, and the more I heard, the more interesting and intrigued I became." But he didn't sign up.
"Shortly after that, I got stopped by a Missouri State Trooper for the first time in my life," Nelson said. "This was in outstate Missouri and, frankly, I expected to be treated poorly and to be called something other than my name and to be treated with disrespect.
"And none of those things happened - he was a consummate professional."
Thinking "maybe this is what the face of law enforcement is supposed to be like," Nelson applied and "was fortunate enough to be selected." The choice turned into a 35-year career, he said.
One of the reasons for his success was wanting "to be someone the community respected, trusted and felt like they could call on in a time of need. One of the things I learned in my career is that, if the community perceives you as an officer who gets things done, then they will work through you to get things done."
Nelson said one way to improve relations between law enforcement and communities is to make sure agencies are more diverse.
"Diversity in policing is not an option anymore, if we're to be successful in providing service and protection," he explained, "because the population itself is diverse, and it's getting more so every day."
But, although great strides were made between 1975 and 1990, some law enforcement agencies have let that effort slide.
Students who want to become law officers need to "apply themselves academically and keep their nose clean," he said, since a crime in the background cancels a person's chances for a job.
But the biggest reason for success in law enforcement, Nelson said, is having people who want to serve and are willing to work with people even as they enforce the laws - "people who are willing to put themselves in harm's way, for the greater good."
Transparency and accountability
The march also sought to encourage more transparency and accountability from law enforcement agencies, specifically asking that all officers be required to wear body cameras. That message was emphasized last week when President Barack Obama proposed spending $75 million in federal matching funds to equip up to 50,000 police officers with body cameras.
But body cameras are somewhat of a newer law enforcement technology, and many organizations are struggling to fully understand what body cameras would entail for law enforcement agencies.
A Department of Justice report from this year, titled "Police Officer Body-Worn Cameras: Assessing the Evidence," looks at several studies in the area of body cameras, trying to determine whether claims, both positive and negative, have any truth to them.
Some of the perceived benefits, as they're called in the report, are listed as increasing transparency and "citizen views of police legitimacy," as well as improved behavior among both officers and citizens. But with each perceived benefit, the report states claims have not been sufficiently tested or the reasons for some of the results seen by departments using body cameras are unclear.
For example, three police departments in California and Arizona were studied for how body cameras affected the department and its interactions. According to a study from the Police Executive Research Forum, the department in Rialto, California, reported a 60 percent reduction in officer use of force incidents after officers began wearing body cameras. The department also reported an 88 percent reduction in the number of citizen complaints from the previous year.
But, as the Department of Justice report points out, "the behavior dynamics that explain these complaints and use of force trends are by no means clear. The decline in complaints and use of force may be tied to improved citizen behavior, improved police officer behavior, or a combination of the two."
And along with the benefits come the complicating issues. The use of body cameras has raised a number of issues, including privacy concerns, how data would be stored and retrieved, and financial concerns for the cost of acquiring and maintaining the needed equipment.
The study from the Police Executive Research Forum stated that of the 63 agencies surveyed that use body cameras, as of July 2013, "nearly one-third did not have a written policy governing body-worn camera usage. Many police executives reported that their hesitance to implement a written policy was due to a lack of guidance on what the policies should include, which highlights the need for a set of standards and best practices regarding body-worn cameras."
While Jefferson City and Cole County do not currently use body cameras, law enforcement in Columbia and Fulton have begun using the technology.