August 9, 2024, New York – Today, on the 10th anniversary of the police killing of Michael Brown that sparked the Ferguson uprising, the Center for Constitutional Rights issued the following statement:

A decade ago this week, a month after the NYPD killed Eric Garner in New York City, the police killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, setting off an uprising that turned Black Lives Matter into a national movement. It kept growing until 2020, when more than 25 million people took to the streets after the police murdered George Floyd – the largest protests in U.S. history. 

The movement changed the national conversation about race and led to numerous policing reforms at the state level. Grassroots groups across the country, like Communities United for Police Reform, led historic defund and budget justice campaigns –  calling for real public safety through investment in infrastructure and community safety solutions and reducing the reliance on police and criminalization. Despite efforts to bring about transformative change, structural problems that contribute to the dehumanization and deaths of Black people remained untouched. Elites fell over themselves to perform concern for Black lives, saying the words but dismissing the demands of the movement. Corporations pledged billions of dollars to combat racial injustice, but 90 percent was in loans or investments geared to benefit the corporations. In NYC, we saw the reintroduction of plainclothes NYPD street crime units whose unconstitutional and racist tactics have been under scrutiny for decades since the murder of Amadou Diallo in 1999. 

Now, ten years after Ferguson, police violence persists. Outrage is growing over the police killing of Sonya Massey, a Black woman who was gunned down, unarmed, in her kitchen in Springfield, Illinois, in July. A few months before Massey’s murder, on March 27th, the NYPD killed 19-year-old Win Rozario in Queens while he was suffering a mental health episode. Last year, the police killed more people in the U.S. than ever, 1163, and the rate is only slightly down this year. Every year, more than 20 percent of the victims are Black even though they account for only 14 percent of the population. 

Meanwhile, the movement born in Ferguson lives on and continues to organize in the face of repressive and brutal tactics, including surveillance from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of Movement for Black Lives (MBL) protesters.  Newly released documents reveal the broad surveillance of Stop Cop City activists by the Atlanta police, part of a multiyear crackdown that includes the killing of an unarmed protester. In Atlanta and elsewhere, activists fighting police violence see a link between their struggle and Palestinians’ fight for liberation. The link is more than moral: U.S. law enforcement from across the country train and have been trained by their Israeli counterparts, experts in maintaining a system of racist domination. 

This internationalism can be traced to the Ferguson uprising, when Palestinians expressed solidarity with the protesters, and may be one of its most important legacies. College students who came of age during the 2020 protests have mobilized against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as have Black activists and organizations. We’re proud to stand in solidarity with this global civil rights movement, fighting for justice from New York to Gaza to Atlanta. Social movements that transcend borders can transform the world. 

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