Not just a few bad apples
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 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.”
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