While searching us, one of the officers said, cynically, “It ain’t legal yet,” though the “it” was not found on us.

It was around 10 p.m. and I was too tired to assert my rights or to say that I was in a meeting with their commissioner earlier that week about NYPD’s plans to build community-police relations. We accepted the harassment, survived the interaction, and went to our respective homes to smoke our blunts in peace, like most white people who now claim Crown Heights as their home.

Police murders of unarmed people in America sprout from seemingly benign harassment like that which happened to me and my friend, a military veteran — like what happened to Eric Garner, who was strangled to death for bootlegging cigarettes.

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In August, California passed a law making it less legal for law enforcement to kill Black and Brown people such as Eric Garner. California’s recently passed Assembly Bill No. 392, described by some as one of the toughest standards in the nation for when law enforcement officers can kill, is progress. Known as the “Act to Save Lives,” the law removes barriers to prosecuting officers who unlawfully use lethal force. The new law also redefines when a peace officer’s use of deadly force is deemed justifiable, based on the totality of the circumstance.

The LAPD alone killed 172 people in 2017. This new law would presumably decrease that number because police will be able to use deadly force only when, based on the perspective of the officer, it is necessary in defense of human life.

Advocates such as Cat Brooks at the Anti Police-Terror Project are the architects of this new law, potentially setting a legal precedent to be replicated across the country.

Acknowledging the success of the efforts of these advocates can occur while we also question whether substantive progress has been made. Five years ago, more than 500 journalists, lawyers, medics, organizers, pastors, students, tech experts and videographers participated in what would be called the “freedom rides,” which were response to the murder of unarmed Mike Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.

The group of freedom riders, along with the local residents of Ferguson, had a list of demands, including: “a decrease in law-enforcement spending at the local, state and federal levels and a reinvestment of that budgeted money into the black communities most devastated by poverty in order to create jobs, housing, and schools. This money should be redirected to those … departments charged with providing employment, housing, and educational services.”

California’s new law doesn’t address that concern.

Rightfully, the Act to Save Lives regulates policing with impunity. Police will no longer easily get away with the “I feared for my life” script; they will have to prove after the murder or assault that a “reasonable officer in the same situation would believe that a person has the ability…and intent to immediately cause death or serious bodily injury to the peace officer or another person.” All of this substantiation would be done after the hashtag for this person is created and goes viral.

What is still to be tackled is the oversaturated deployment of police into communities of color.

Which brings me back to Brooklyn. This fall in the East New York section of Brooklyn, less than a mile from where I was harassed, the NYPD is opening its first stand-alone community center — a $10 million investment by the City of New York.

Now, positive police-community relations are a plus for any community, but it is not where we need to invest $10 million dollars in a community where in 2015, the rate of preterm births, a key driver of infant death, is the fourth highest in the city; the teen birth rate is higher than the city average; and the rate of elementary school absenteeism is eighth-highest in the city.

Social welfare is not a function of police training, nor is it a part of their corporate culture. More importantly, policing as a practice has a foundationally biased perspective of poor Black and Brown communities, and that is a truth we all should be honest enough to sit with.

The step after this acknowledgement is changed behavior. Listening followed by action.

Over the past year or so, I have been in roundtable conversations with a diverse array of actors in the criminal legal system. Organizers, directly impacted people, loved ones of the impacted, along with academics, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, elected officials, social workers, historians, cops, prison guards, and wardens — basically all the cogs in an irreformable and irreparable old steam engine.

The convenings are a part of a project that Bruce Western of the Columbia University Justice Lab called the “Square One Project.” The home page provokes the following scenarios:

Imagine neighborhoods soaring in education instead of arrests.

Imagine community groups leading the effort to end violence in our towns and cities.

Imagine a response to crime that brings communities together instead of breaking them apart.

The next Square One roundtable convening will take place in Detroit in October, and I also wonder, “can police imagine a community that does not rely on them as a dominant resource?”

In communities such as East New York and Ferguson, police-community relations are one problem of many: High unemployment, negative prenatal outcomes, bad water, dilapidated and unaffordable housing, and the list can go on. More of a police presence is not a solution to any of the above.

Emory University Sociologist Abigail Sewell asserts that “part of the solution may be to reduce police contact in the first place.” With that reduction can come abundant and sustainable investments in community-based organizations and individuals of expertise who reside in the projects and hang on the street corners — the community writ large.

Regulating the justifications for police use of deadly force is a commendable step in the right direction. The leap that communities like East New York need, however, is an investment in reducing the social determinants that give law enforcement the excuse to have a suffocating presence there.

Black and Brown neighborhoods do not need more overseers, or more state of the art smaller jails. We are capable of thriving without emphasis on our perceived criminality, and we are capable of taking care of ourselves, just like those in places like Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, or Carrol Gardens, once we are provided with the tools to deal with the tentacles of American racism, such as poverty, the distribution of money, and overpolicing. The “Seven Neighborhoods Study” produced by formerly incarcerated people in the 1990s found that there was a “direct connection between low income, racially isolated, underserved communities…and encounters with law enforcement that result in prison or death.”

Only time will tell whether the Act to Save Lives will have a measurable positive impact on police interactions with Black and Brown people. That new NYPD community center will come as a win for those focused on building a new paradigm for police-community relations.

But the academic and practitioner in me still thinks about Malcolm X, who famously said, “If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made. They won’t even admit the knife is there.” I know that police harassment is an underlying and extralegal blade that can be wielded at any time in the name of progress.

Yes, it is less legal to be killed by police, but I still feel the knife.

There are events morning and night: People have staged die-ins, blocked intersections, and marched for miles every day in the sweltering Missouri heat. There is always someone with water or sandwiches or voter registration forms nearby, and a volunteer medic every few hundred feet. There are legal observers and a drum line, but no hint of reconciliation in the air.

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Annie Smith, the mother of Anthony Lamar Smith, gave a press conference on Friday at the site of her son’s death. “I didn’t get justice, so I can’t have any peace,” she said.

The weekend has been split, as it usually is in St. Louis, between massive demonstrations that are angry but peaceful and smaller nighttime protests that devolve into broken windows and tear gas. The property damage has been in a different section of the city every night, led by younger and angrier protesters, and there is tension between people who think breaking windows is violence and people who argue that it’s not as violent as killing people. The chant “you kill us, we kill your economy” is a two-edged sword, and in the daytime it sounds like thousands of people making commerce inconvenient and at night it sounds like dozens of people making commerce disappear.

On Sunday morning, people gathered in the Delmar Loop, which had seen the worst of the damage, to help clean up and board up storefronts and paint murals on the plywood. Then they went to protest. That’s how St. Louis has been since 2014 at least, when this cycle ingrained itself into the city.

By Sunday night a fully militarized police force had seized control again. They chanted, “Whose streets? Our streets!” after arresting dozens of people—media, legal observers, and protesters alike. An undercover police car reversed through a crowd marching through a street in downtown St. Louis on Sunday, after which a line of riot police protected the car while protesters de-escalated the situation.

A funny thing about new normals is how easily people accept them; most people seemed upset but not shocked by these incidents. They expected the not guilty verdict and were ready for it—and for the police response. Journalists have been arrested at St. Louis protests before, the most famous example being Wesley Lowery and Ryan Reilly while they worked from a Ferguson McDonald’s in 2014. And on Saturday, a woman named Pat Washington was hit by a truck during a protest, though her injuries were minor and she finished the march. Two other times this weekend I’ve seen cars simply keep driving through the crowd.

If you are looking for a 2017 dystopia, it’s in St. Louis. It is entirely usual and patently unacceptable for the police force to do many of the things they’ve been doing on video over the last few days: firing projectiles toward residents at random, macing people who came out of a bathroom, knocking over and kicking elderly women before arresting them on spurious charges, running cars into crowds, using strobe lights on crowds of protesters at night knowing there were epileptics in the area, and putting a synagogue under siege on Shabbat. It is messy and complex here. There are shades of 2014, with the same protesters demanding the same changes and the same authorities quelling the unrest. But is it also three years later, and as a nation we are debating whether it’s appropriate to have Sean Spicer on the Emmys or whether it’s okay for the president to tweet a video of himself hitting Hillary Clinton with a golf ball.

On Monday morning, protesters arrived downtown by 7:00 a.m. Protests are expected to continue into Tuesday evening. Police and news helicopters circle above, and people wonder aloud why they don’t just admit a cop was guilty for once instead of putting everyone through all this again.

Editor’s note: This is the second in a three-part series on the trial over the killing of Anthony Lamar Smith. Read part one.

St. Louis residents are used to being told to wait for justice, and this all feels familiar. In 2014, it took months to get the grand jury’s decision not to charge Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown.

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Now, any time something big happens in St. Louis—like a verdict or an important anniversary—people converge on the city. Activists, journalists, residents, and protesters head back to the same street corners and the same cafes, and everybody speculates, though there’s no telling what might happen next.

This year’s unseasonably early cold snap makes it feel like that November when we all waited for Wilson’s verdict. Again, the waiting has stretched into months, and there’s an edgy monotony of checking the news and reporting on local events, and wondering how long tension can build before it bursts.

On September 1, two officers were shot and a woman was killed by a stray bullet near the downtown area. A few hours later, residents who’d gathered in the area spotted heavily armed officers a few blocks away. It turned out to be a search of nearby abandoned buildings, presumably for a suspect in the shooting. Five cruisers and at least as many undercover units gathered and milled about, while residents speculated that it was a raid of someplace nearby.

“I saw the cops converge behind this building for something or somebody,” said Megan Macarey, a yoga teacher at a nearby charity. “Police are militarizing the neighborhood.”

Macarey had been calling her friends, telling everyone they might have to come outside and keep an eye on things. Most neighborhoods that are the target of police in St. Louis are like that, with informal networks and a practiced sequence of events. Cops show up, everyone comes out and videos everything. Macarey said, “Tensions are high, and we know police are putting up the barricades,” which the city had erected earlier that day in anticipation of the verdict’s release.

That is how policing is done in St. Louis: opaquely and usually with a show of force. There are times when the police can be perfectly lovely, such as at the Labor Day parade when they were playing with children. But policing of protests is decidedly less friendly in many instances, and given that two officers have just been shot, few people in the activist community expect the police to be in a conciliatory mood any time soon.

Over Labor Day weekend, there were protests going on at nearly any hour. Sunday night, local activists marched through a bar district, gaining a fair amount of support from patrons who joined them to chant, “Out of the bars and into the streets!” Monday morning, Fight for $15 shut down a local McDonald’s before joining the Labor Day parade, which featured thousands of union workers alongside ads for Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Monday evening was the vigil for Smith, which was supposed to be candlelit until a storm roiled above us and forced everyone to use their cell phone lights instead. Annie Smith, Anthony Smith’s mother, gave a statement: “Why has it taken so long for the verdict?” Smith is, like many people, tired of waiting for justice. “I lost my voice yelling, and I’m tired of yelling,” she said.

The verdict could feasibly come back guilty. But although roughly 11,000 people were shot and killed by police officers from 2005 to 2016, only 77 officers were charged—and only 26 were eventually convicted. It’s more likely that Stockley will be found not guilty. When that happens, the people here will be reacting to not just this verdict, but to every verdict this feels like, each piling on top of one another.

Editor’s note: This is the first in a three-part series on the trial over the killing of Anthony Lamar Smith.

The Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results (NEAR) Act of 2016, sponsored by Democratic Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, represents a dramatic and desperately needed shift in how the nation’s capital will approach violent crime. In 2015, D.C. led the country in two categories: murders and police presence. With 119 homicides, it had a higher murder rate than every state in the country; and with six officers for every 1,000 citizens, it was the most heavily policed district in America.

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In his office on Pennsylvania Ave, Councilmember McDuffie sports a pink polo beneath a gray tweed jacket. He speaks in perfect prose, with none of the ums and ahs and broken sentences that plague most of us. He believes in the NEAR Act because it addresses the “root causes” of violence.

“You cannot arrest your way out of this problem,” he says.

McDuffie was raised in D.C. in the 1980’s and 90’s, when it was known as the murder capital of the United States. He grew up around the open drug markets; he had friends who were killed in their neighborhoods.

“I’ve seen a person shot, bleeding out in my arms. I’ve seen these things firsthand,” he says. “That is the context I brought to this work.”

McDuffie has also seen the perils of overpolicing. He’s watched police officers “converge on communities of color, stopping people in neighborhoods like mine without probable cause.”

The NEAR Act draws from model programs in Chicago and Richmond by establishing an Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (ONSE) in D.C. The ONSE will hire people from within the community—“people who have credibility in these neighborhoods,” McDuffie says. They will identify community members who are at risk of committing violence or becoming a victim of violence, and then offer them trauma-informed therapy, life planning, and mentorship. The bill also provides funds to train police officers on “cultural competency” and how to recognize bias, and it calls for increased data collection on police stops and the use of force.

While he was drafting the bill, McDuffie consulted with local activists who had long called for criminal justice and police reform in the district—including Eugene Puryear, an author and organizer who helped found the Stop Police Terror Project.

Puryear’s energy is contagious; he peppers his caffeinated speech with phrases like “punctuated equilibrium” and “tectonic shifts.” He lauded McDuffie for doing a “deep dive on the issue,” but he also wants to credit the organizers who he thinks helped create the political space for the NEAR Act. He believes that the national Movement for Black Lives—and its local manifestations, such as the Stop Police Terror Project—convinced the council members to care about overpolicing and mass incarceration because their constituents were fired up about these issues.

During the early phases of the Stop Police Terror Project, the group interrupted a speech by Mayor Muriel Bowser, who was pushing a crime bill that would have boosted police presence in the city. The group faced harsh criticism for the action—Puryear says that “everyone said we were band of radicals interrupting stuff with no positive program and no support in the community.”

But when the city council held a public hearing two months later to compare Bowser’s bill to the NEAR Act, nearly everyone who testified did so in favor of the latter. With overwhelming support from the community, the council passed the NEAR Act unanimously in March 2016. But neither the council nor the mayor fully funded the act in the 2017 budget, essentially putting it in limbo.

Over the next several months, the Movement for Black Lives kept growing. Thousands of protestors demonstrated in 88 cities across the country in the weeks after Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were killed by police officers. When Puryear and the Stop Police Terror Project started knocking on doors to gather signatures to fully fund the NEAR Act, they saw how badly residents wanted action.

“Once you would say you had any connection to Black Lives Matter, doors were swinging wide open,” Puryear said. He knocked on at least 500 doors, and he says that “every person who came to the door signed our petition, bar none.”

The council and the mayor agreed to fully fund the NEAR Act in the 2018 budget, which will go into effect on October 1. And the NEAR Act isn’t alone: Puryear says it’s part of a “cascading series” of local initiatives that came around in this “Black Lives Matter moment.” This includes a body-worn camera program for D.C. police officers and a juvenile justice bill, also sponsored by Councilmember McDuffie, that bans solitary confinement and court shackling for underage defendants.

Puryear believes that social change in the United States comes in spurts—long periods of very little change followed by rapid periods of huge changes. He hopes that we’re in one of those periods now, but he recognizes that progress isn’t inevitable. “What we do really matters,” he says. “The opportunities that are presented can just as easily be lost.” He thinks the next major battle surrounding the NEAR Act is its implementation: “There’s a lot of different ways this can be rolled out within the letter of the law.”

McDuffie agrees, and he says he’s working to make sure the bill gets implemented with the spirit and intent of how it was drafted.

The two models that the NEAR Act is based on have shown promise: Richmond has seen a 76 percent drop in homicides, and the Cure Violence model has curbed violence in pilot programs around the world. It remains to be seen whether the nation’s capital will have similar success—whether the old way of approaching violent crime, with militarized policing and mass incarceration, is finally on its way out.

Shay,* mother of 17-year-old Lamar and a participant in my research with low-income African-American mothers in Washington, D.C., reminded me of this. A few months before I interviewed her, she had called the police to take her son away. “He looked at it like I had set him up because I had to get him to the house for them to get him,” Shay explained. “He was being a disrespectful child, talking back and being aggressive, not listening.”

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Shay had grown increasingly alarmed by Lamar’s behavior in recent months. He was hanging out with friends who committed petty crime, and he had even gotten a few court summonses for minor offenses, appearances he usually skipped. Despite Shay’s distrust of police—a skepticism honed growing up in one of D.C.’s most violent housing projects—she reached out to them. She hoped they would link Lamar with resources he could use to avoid criminality, such as effective counseling and expanded educational and employment opportunities—resources she had not been able to provide.

Lamar wound up in a youth detention facility out of state. The statistics on long-term outcomes for teens who spend time in juvenile detention are not especially promising, but Shay insists that she made the best decision. “He knows now that mommy saved him,” she said.

The conventional wisdom is that poor African-Americans have nearly universal disdain for police, seeing them only as an occupying force. Yet research shows that African-American women living in high-poverty neighborhoods are part of groups most likely to report crime and disturbance to the police, even when researchers control for the higher crime rates they tend to experience. The key, though, is that when these women (especially mothers) call the police, they aren’t calling because they have faith in police officers’ crime-solving prowess or trust that police have their best interests at heart. They make the difficult choice to rely on police because they are one of the most readily available providers of social support—help that police are actually ill-equipped to furnish.

Of course, mothers are well aware that calling the police, especially on teenage sons, is risky. Those risks have gained national attention only recently, but nothing that Black Lives Matter activists brought to light is news to them.

Pam, another mother I interviewed, rattled off grievances against the police, including the shooting of an unarmed boy in a high-poverty, predominantly African-American neighborhood in Southeast Washington, D.C. some years ago. “There’s a lot of police brutality going on out there, a lot of crooked stuff. What can we do?” she lamented. Yet she reports calling the police on her drug-addicted son several times, hoping he could take advantage of a diversion program and get into drug treatment. Much to her chagrin, he’s now incarcerated instead.

For mothers living in poverty, the stakes of choosing not to contact police when a child is truant, addicted, or out of control can be high. Child welfare investigation is a regular occurrence for poor mothers, especially if they are African-American and living in central cities. Although calling the police can trigger a child welfare investigation, it can also serve as a gesture of diligent parenting. Thus the risk of reporting can seem worth taking to avoid the appearance of child neglect, a charge that could put the entire family in jeopardy.

Raising children is a tough task for anyone, particularly when those children are prone to misbehave. But when wealthier kids misbehave, their parents have better options for seeking help. They can redirect their children’s energy toward organized activities. They can find private counseling, or they attend schools where good counseling is more readily available. And, because child welfare agencies rarely investigate their homes or assume the worst about their parenting skills, they need not worry that one child’s misbehavior will threaten custody of all their children. When poor kids misbehave, these options are harder to come by. The social safety net, toilsome to access and often punitive in its own right, leaves mothers with few alternatives to the police department.

Against the backdrop of police bias and misconduct, police organizations have taken to publicizing dancing, jumping rope, and making music with children of color as if dance-offs will render forgettable the legacy of violence. These displays of goodwill are positive initial gestures. But long-term delivery of effective and respectful policing, coupled with a more robust and more usable landscape of non-criminal social services, is what’s really needed for violence reduction and police legitimacy. A dual strategy of police reform and safety net reform can ultimately aid in the fight against poverty by stemming the tide that inexorably pushes poor parents and kids toward penal entanglement, which tends to exacerbate hardship.

This moment invites deeper questions about the functions and scope of police work. It beckons us toward reconsideration of how police regulation fits into a broader reform agenda. Body cameras and use of force standards are reasonable places to begin, but it will take more than police-specific reform to recast the work of police in communities. The Ferguson Commission, for example, integrated child well-being and economic opportunity into its agenda for change. Other proposals have suggested that multidisciplinary teams that include social workers respond to police calls, a helpful proposal even though it still operates in a crime control framework. Most towns and cities aiming to avoid becoming the next Ferguson, the next Baltimore, have turned their attention to police regulation, but they have not simultaneously sought ways to make social support more accessible in heavily policed communities beyond the criminal justice system.

As governments redefine the contours of policing, they can also tackle the deeper challenges of parenting in the toughest communities. They can make decisions like Shay’s and Pam’s less necessary.

*Name has been changed to protect confidentiality

As members of Minneapolis’ Black community staged a peaceful protest against what one relative of Jamar Clark called his “execution-style” killing by police, a masked man—accompanied by three accomplices—shot five Black Lives Matter protesters outside of a police station.

Activists who were on the scene say that police nearby did nothing to protect the protesters and that it took approximately 15 minutes for ambulances to arrive.

The shooting of peaceful protesters by white vigilantes is terrorism, plain and simple. The victims were shot as they exercised their right to free assembly. The horrific act should have been met with a state response that takes these ongoing threats seriously and did not perpetuate the devaluing of Black life. Instead, the response by the City demonstrates that the policing and criminal justice systems in Minneapolis are irredeemably broken.

The police in Minneapolis were aware of threats to the protesters but took no action to avert this tragedy. All four suspects managed to get away after drawing guns and shooting five protesters only a block away from the Fourth Precinct police station. Activists reported that during the chaos of the shootings, not only did police fail to protect the demonstrators, but they taunted and maced them. In the past week, the Minneapolis Police Department further escalated tensions by using a chemical irritant against protesters.

The shootings in Minneapolis took place on the same week as the one-year anniversary of the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice. They also occurred the week that first-degree murder charges were filed against a Chicago officer in the merciless shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.  Indeed, Minneapolis is the latest example that our criminal justice and policing systems are not designed to keep Black communities safe. All around the country, Black people are finding that they are as under-protected as they are over-policed.

We must address not only this current crisis but the root causes that created it.

We need meaningful community control of police and support for Black communities to address safety concerns. Communities are experts in the type of policing they need and must have the power to set police priorities, determine policing tactics, and make hiring and firing decisions. Police departments in San Francisco and Newark have introduced programs in which local communities have a meaningful say in setting priorities for the department, but there are currently no existing ideal models for community control of local police.

We need to ensure that our communities are protected not only from white vigilantes, but from other forms of violence ignored by the state, including poverty, a dearth of employment opportunities, failing education systems, homelessness, and a lack of mental health services. We know that investments in education, affordable housing, mental health services, restorative justice programs, and higher wages are vital for rebuilding these traumatized communities.

The United States spends $100 billion annually on policing alone—this despite a steady decline in crime rates. Growth in corrections spending has outpaced growth in expenditures in other critical areas. State spending on higher education rose by less than six percent between 1986 and 2013, yet corrections spending jumped by 141 percent.

If all of the energy and resources that go towards policing and incarceration were instead redirected toward these basic needs and opportunities, we would see a kind of safety we have not seen in this country since its original sin.

Legislators and state officials have stripped our communities of basic resources, preyed and profited on our exploitation, and continue to fill prisons while shutting down schools. The killing of Jamar Clark and the terrorist event in Minneapolis are the latest symptoms of our great American tragedy.

In my case, that gig was working as an editor-writer at a magazine, and I jumped at the chance. As a 29-year-old writer, I didn’t see any opportunities for growth in St. Louis. This was a town, after all, that had slowly sucked civic pride right out of me. Underneath its veneer of friendliness, St. Louis felt like a dystopian world in which everyone is in play or being played by forces known and unknown.

It was a place, in fact, where a group of CEOs and wealthy elites working under the mantle of “Civic Progress” made the real decisions about the city’s direction. The benefits of said “progress” never extended to me or other members of my community—not in terms of adequate jobs, housing, education or anything else that would offer us the opportunity to thrive.

On August 9, 2014, these tensions between the powerful and the disregarded boiled over when an 18-year-old black teenager was shot by a 28-year-old white police officer. I was in St. Louis at the time, celebrating my mother’s 70th birthday with families and friends. Our joy quickly turned to sorrow, frustration, and anger. We gathered around the television and watched as police officers, dressed for war, met protesters with batons, tear gas, and rubber bullets.

These events added to the sense of exclusion and disaffection that I had experienced during my years growing up in St. Louis—feelings that persisted until this September when I downloaded the 16-person Ferguson Commission report. Instead of burying the institutionalized racism and poverty my community has struggled with, the authors state an unequivocal truth: “We know that talking about race makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But make no mistake: this is about race.”

In painstaking fashion, the report details how multiple municipalities in the region use poor, black citizens as veritable cash machines, collecting fines and fees from them to fill the city coffers. The Commission adds to the findings of an Arch City Defenders report, which had revealed that one town, Bel Ridge—about the size of a square mile with a population of 2,700 people, 81 percent of whom are black and 42 percent in poverty—filed almost 8,000 cases in municipal court. Almost a quarter of the city’s revenues came from court fines and fees.

For me, reading the report evoked a memory going back some thirty years when I watched the police try to arrest my mother.

My father was out enjoying his morning routine, grabbing coffee at White Castle and reading the paper, when two police officers—one older and gruff, the other younger and visibly apprehensive—came to the door and announced that my mother was under arrest for amassing parking fines; fines that were all incurred in front of our house, mostly for alternate-side parking violations. Forking over cash for fines just didn’t rank as high as other needs like paying the mortgage and buying food.

Neither officer was expecting Angela Davis, but that’s what they got. My mother sat on the staircase in the foyer and said she wasn’t getting up. They threatened her and tried to pick her up, but she pulled away and yelled. Things escalated when the older police officer shouted at my grandmother who was slowed by a stroke and trying to calm the situation. The front door was open and a crowd gathered.

The older officer unbuttoned the holster to his service revolver and placed his hand on the grip. My mother said, “Well, it’s a good goddamned day to die.”

Thirty years later she tells me she has never been more scared—or more defiant—than at that moment. Like so many others who have had similar experiences—some of whom are included in the Ferguson report—her resistance was not rooted in hatred of the police. Her brother, her father, two of her uncles—they were all in law enforcement. This was about respect. My mother offered to pay the fine in person on Monday, but the officers wanted it their way.

Just as I thought the arrest was about to become terrifyingly violent, my father came home. I remember how he shifted from confusion to fear to anger.

Now that I am about the same age as my father was then, I realize he had felt what so many black men feel in situations like that: emasculation. My father, the Marine, the civil engineer, with no criminal past—the man who talked philosophy with friends and could handle himself around roughneck construction workers—was forced to navigate a path that a white man of the same socio-economic status would likely not encounter. They didn’t have that history of police harassment; black male subjugation in the face of a baton or gun; and the gut punch of knowing that the man behind the badge has total control over you.

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Thankfully, a higher-ranking police officer, who was black, arrived on the scene. He sorted it out and reprimanded the lead officer. The next day my parents paid the fine with a little help from a family member. If my mother had been arrested, the cost to my parents—bail, a lawyer, court fees, the fine itself—would have financially crippled us.

The Ferguson report demonstrates that my family’s experience was not unique, and that the truths laid bare in the document don’t just apply to Ferguson, the St. Louis area, or Missouri. In fact, the report is an indictment of a country that is breaking the backs and hopes of the poor and people of color.

But the report also offers sweeping reforms that would help us move beyond the current, unjust status quo—actions raging from police training and consolidating police departments, to court and sentencing reform, to increasing healthcare coverage for the poor and addressing hunger, to raising the minimum wage, ending predatory lending, and investing in quality job training for disconnected youth that leads to employment.

In recognizing the lived realities of African Americans—and offering reforms that speak to those experiences—the Ferguson report is a blueprint on how to tear down the racial wall that divides us. Now we need to respond with action, until young black people no longer have to leave repressive hometowns in search of opportunity as I did.