Michael Brown

Michael Brown was an 18-year-old resident of Ferguson, Missouri, who was shot and killed by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson at approximately noon on August 9, 2014. The protests that followed produced two federal Justice Department investigations, a federal consent decree governing Ferguson’s police department and municipal court, and one of the largest sustained political conversations recorded on Twitter to that date.

What the Federal Investigation Found

The Criminal Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri and the FBI opened a criminal civil rights investigation on August 11, 2014. Investigators interviewed more than 100 purported eyewitnesses and other people claiming relevant information, canvassed more than 300 residences, and reviewed physical, ballistic and forensic evidence, three autopsies including one by the Armed Forces Medical Examiner Service, dispatch recordings and store surveillance video.

The Department’s March 4, 2015 report describes an encounter lasting about two minutes. Wilson fired 12 shots, two from inside his vehicle and ten on the roadway, striking Brown as few as six or as many as eight times; the fatal wound was to the apex of the head. Brown ran at least 180 feet from the vehicle before turning and moving back toward Wilson.

On the question that drove much of the public argument, the report is explicit and does not support the account most widely repeated at the time. It states that several people said Brown held his hands up in an unambiguous sign of surrender, but that some of those accounts were inconsistent with the physical and forensic evidence, some were materially inconsistent with the same witness’s earlier statements, and certain witnesses who had originally described a surrender later recanted, acknowledging they had not seen the shooting or parts of it. Credible witnesses gave varying accounts of what Brown was doing with his hands, but the report says they all placed him moving toward Wilson when he was shot.

The Department concluded that Wilson’s uses of force were not “objectively unreasonable” as the Supreme Court defines that term, that his account was corroborated by physical evidence, and that there was no credible evidence he acted with the willfulness that 18 U.S.C. § 242 requires. The report closes: “this matter lacks prosecutive merit and should be closed.”

Separately, a Missouri grand jury had considered whether probable cause existed to indict Wilson. As the Eighth Circuit later recounted, on November 24, 2014 that grand jury “returned a ‘no true bill’ of indictment and was discharged from service.” St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Robert McCulloch announced the decision at a press conference that evening and released transcripts, reports, interviews and forensic evidence from the proceeding.

What the Ferguson Police Department Investigation Found

The Civil Rights Division opened a separate pattern-or-practice investigation of the Ferguson Police Department on September 4, 2014. Its report, issued the same day as the shooting report, found a pattern of conduct violating the First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.

The report ties that pattern to the City’s use of enforcement as a revenue source. It quotes the City Finance Director writing to the police chief in March 2010 that “unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year,” and to the City Manager in March 2013 that he had asked the chief whether the department “could deliver 10% increase.” In 2013 the municipal court issued more than 9,000 arrest warrants, largely on cases stemming from parking infractions, traffic tickets and housing code violations.

Ferguson’s own data for 2012 through 2014 showed African Americans accounting for 85 percent of vehicle stops, 90 percent of citations and 93 percent of arrests, while comprising 67 percent of the city’s population. African Americans were more than twice as likely as white drivers to be searched during vehicle stops after controlling for non-race variables, but were found with contraband 26 percent less often.

The report also documents interference with civilian recording of police, an issue central to how Ferguson was covered. It cites a November 2014 federal consent order barring Ferguson officers from interfering with lawful, peaceful recording of public police activity, and describes arrests of people filming a protest outside the police station on February 9, 2015, the six-month anniversary of Brown’s death.

The Consent Decree

The United States sued the City of Ferguson in the Eastern District of Missouri on February 10, 2016. District Judge Catherine D. Perry entered a consent decree on April 19, 2016, granting the parties’ joint motion. An Amended and Restated Consent Decree was filed in November 2018.

Social Media and the Ferguson Coverage

The Justice Department’s separate after-action assessment of the police response, conducted for the COPS Office, found that social media was “the key global driver of the Ferguson demonstrations,” providing the communication channels that facilitated crowd building and movement and serving as the primary source of information and opinion. It records that in the five days after the shooting, Twitter users shared 3,648,032 tweets using the single hashtag #Ferguson, and that “New era Internet journalists were on scene, sometimes streaming live video long before more traditional TV, cable, or print journalists revealed the same information.” The assessment’s finding is that the four core responding agencies underestimated social media’s impact and the speed at which facts and rumors spread, and had no social media strategy.

A later academic study of 40,815,975 tweets, purchased directly from Twitter and covering June 2014 through May 2015, gives the scale. #Ferguson appeared in 21,626,901 of them, more than half the dataset and far ahead of any other keyword; Michael Brown’s name appeared in 9,360,239. Tweet volume peaked between August 13 and 14, 2014, which the authors attribute in part to police detention of prominent information sources, including reporters Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post and Ryan Reilly of the Huffington Post, Antonio French, and an al-Jazeera television crew. The COPS assessment records the same August 13 arrest of the two reporters in a restaurant near the protests, noting that its visibility “drew more negative attention toward police practices.”

The single largest day in the dataset was November 24, 2014, the day of the grand jury announcement, with 3,420,934 tweets; the nine days beginning that date carried 8,528,144 tweets from 1,966,447 unique users.

The Hashtag and the Movement

The study is precise about the relationship between Ferguson and #Blacklivesmatter, and it cuts against a common shorthand. The hashtag was created in July 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin, but it was used in only 48 public tweets in June 2014 and 398 in July 2014. In August 2014 that rose to 52,288, which the authors attribute partly to the slogan’s use in the Ferguson protests. Their conclusion is that the hashtag “was rarely used through the summer of 2014 and did not come to signify a movement until the months after the Ferguson protests.” Black Lives Matter as a chapter-based organization was established later.

Police Militarization

The COPS assessment made militarization one of its principal findings. It concluded that “the use of military weapons and sniper deployment atop military vehicles was inappropriate, inflamed tensions, and created fear among demonstrators”; that the highly elevated initial tactical response was not justified during daytime hours and “served to escalate rather than de-escalate the overall situation”; and that in the first several days armored vehicles were staged visibly in a way perceived as threatening and were at times used absent danger to citizens or officers. The assessment also found that the unified command’s “keep moving” order, a five-second rule derived loosely from Missouri’s failure-to-disperse statute, violated rights of assembly and free speech as determined by a federal court injunction, and that no clearly marked First Amendment zone was established until August 19, 2014.

Brown’s Body at the Scene

The four-hour interval before Brown’s body was removed is documented in both federal reports. Wilson shot Brown at about 12:02 p.m.; crime scene detectives and the medical examiner’s investigator completed processing at approximately 4:00 p.m., at which point the body was transported. The COPS assessment records that standard homicide protocol left the body unmoved for four hours, that cell phone videos and interviews showed anger growing at the scene, and that investigators and patrol officers did not at the time recognize how their protocols were being interpreted by the crowd. Crime scene processing was interrupted more than once by reports of gunfire in the area.

What Is Not Established Here

The page previously asserted a birth year of 1996. The federal record establishes only that Brown was 18 on August 9, 2014, which does not fix the year, so birthYear has been removed rather than guessed.

The primaryPlatforms field listing Twitter, Vine and Facebook, and a followerCount field repurposed to hold a sentence about posthumous hashtag volume, have both been removed. Neither describes a presence Brown himself had; the schema fields are for a person’s own platform accounts.

Claims about Vine have been cut entirely. The page asserted that six-second clips from Ferguson “circulated rapidly” and that Vine “played a notable role in Ferguson coverage.” Neither federal report nor the 40.8-million-tweet study mentions Vine at all in connection with Ferguson, and no source was found that supports the claim.

Also removed for want of a source: that the hashtag #Ferguson “quickly trended nationally” within hours; that #MikeBrown and #HandsUpDontShoot were “some of the most widely used hashtags on Twitter” in August and September 2014 (the study ranks them within its own 45-keyword dataset, not against Twitter as a whole); that “Hands up, don’t shoot” was among the first protest symbols distributed primarily through social media; that citizen journalism “challenged traditional media’s control of narrative framing”; that the events “demonstrated how social media could sustain public attention on local incidents and escalate them into national policy discussions”; and that “social media pressure contributed to the DOJ investigation and subsequent reforms” — a causal claim neither report makes.

The characterization of the shooting as one where “accounts of the incident differed significantly between witnesses and the officer involved,” left unqualified, has been replaced with what the Department actually concluded about those accounts. The report’s own assessment of the surrender accounts is stated above and is not softened here in either direction.

The page previously said the two reporters were “briefly detained.” The COPS assessment says they were arrested and the Twitter study says detained; neither states what became of them afterward, so no disposition — release, charge, or dismissal — is asserted here. The word “arrested” is used because that is the federal report’s word.