Six years after a police officer killed Michael Brown, St. Louis hasn’t seen a single substantive police reform.

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Members of Millennial Activists United during a 2014 protest in Ferguson, Mo. Credit: Photo by Lawrence Bryant

This week’s podcast: Why police reform fails ([link removed])

Six years after a police officer killed Michael Brown, St. Louis hasn’t seen a single substantive police reform. A group of young Black leaders have now set their sights higher: taking control of city politics.
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** Not just a few bad apples
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Kayla Reed, executive director of Action St. Louis. Photo by Lawrence Bryant for Reveal.

In April, St. Louis elected the city’s first-ever Black female mayor, Tishuara Jones, who ran on a promise to drastically change the way policing works in the city. On her ninth day in office, she proposed taking $4 million away from the police budget and using some of those funds to hire social workers who can answer calls related to mental illness and drug addiction. A new two-part series ([link removed]) from Reveal, The Missouri Independent and The St. Louis American looks at this evolution in policing and political power in St. Louis.

Jones’ election owed a lot to a new generation of Black activists who saw police reform efforts founder and became convinced that to achieve real change, they had to overcome the police union’s political power. Kayla Reed, co-founder and executive director of Action St. Louis, spent four years working to get Jones and other new leaders elected.

Before the killing of Michael Brown, Reed worked as a pharmacy technician. In 2014, she became a fixture at Black Lives Matter protests, attending demonstrations in front of the Ferguson Police Department nearly every night of the week. Eventually, she quit her job and became a full-time organizer. Reed’s movement is built on a new mindset toward the police: The problem isn’t a few bad apples, it’s the entire system. “We decided to say, ‘Well, how can we put our hands on the scale?’ ” Reed told reporter Rebecca Rivas. “We’re organizers. We talk to people, we mobilize them to action. Can we mobilize them to take an action and vote a particular way?”

In addition to knocking on thousands of doors to elect a new mayor and progressive circuit attorney – the elected official with the power to prosecute police – Action St. Louis works on other pressing criminal justice issues such as ending cash bail and closing a jail long criticized by advocates for its inhumane conditions. “They’re never just pulling on one lever,” said activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham, a member of the Ferguson Commission, created by the governor in 2014 to study the conditions that led to the uprising after Brown’s death. “They are thinking creatively about how we’re building at the base.”

Read the stories:
* ‘The fight has to change’: Why Ferguson activists ditched police reform ([link removed])
* The Ferguson movement is on the cusp of revolutionizing political power in St. Louis ([link removed])

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** In the Field: Our PPP data goes nationwide
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A row of businesses in South LA. Photo by James Bernal for Reveal.

The Paycheck Protection Program has infused more than $770 billion into businesses, making it one of the biggest financial bailouts since the Great Depression. Reveal and other news organizations sued the federal government to get access to how the money was given out. We found major racial disparities in how the loans were distributed ([link removed]) – in the vast majority of major metro areas, the rate of lending to majority-White areas was higher than the rates for any majority-Latinx, Black or Asian areas.

Now, through our Reveal Reporting Networks ([link removed]) , we’ve made the PPP data available to any reporter who wants to investigate how the loan program has played out in their area. Since our story first landed, local reporters around the country have dug into the data and wrote about racial disparities in their communities. Southern California radio station KPBS ([link removed]) and The NEWcomer ([link removed]) in Green Bay, Wisconsin, found that majority-White neighborhoods in their areas received by far the most PPP loans, while Michigan Radio ([link removed]) found that White communities in Detroit received PPP loans at twice the rate of Latinx communities. By sharing this data for free, Reveal is helping media outlets around
the country do crucial reporting on the lasting economic fallout of this inequitable program in their communities.

Get involved: If you’re a local reporter who wants to peruse the PPP data, join our PPP Reporting Network ([link removed]) . And anyone can explore our interactive map of the data ([link removed]) .


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This newsletter is written by Sarah Mirk. Have any feedback or ideas? Send them my way. (mailto:[email protected]?subject=Weekly%20Reveal%20feedback)

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