The killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014 brought Ferguson, Missouri into open revolt — and brought armored vehicles, snipers, and tear gas into an American suburb in images that changed the national vocabulary. Police arrested hundreds over the following weeks under a shifting regime of curfews, "keep moving" orders, and a five-second standing rule later held unconstitutional; journalists including the Washington Post's Wesley Lowery and the Huffington Post's Ryan Reilly were arrested in a McDonald's for reporting.
A second wave followed the November grand-jury announcement declining to indict Wilson. Most charges were eventually dropped, and federal courts enjoined the police tactics one by one, but the Justice Department's 2015 investigation supplied the deeper indictment: Ferguson's courts and police had operated for years as a revenue machine that jailed its Black residents over traffic debt — a municipal system of imprisonment for poverty that the uprising, and the arrests meant to contain it, had finally exposed.