Thank you: my family, particularly my wife and my son, a beautiful, loving little soul who has made my life immeasurably richer; Mark Lotto, Kate Lee, David Patterson, Brett Martin, Brett Michael Dykes, Campbell Robertson, Ryan Holiday, the late Michelle McNamara at True Crime Diary (and Patton Oswalt), William Sothern, Nikki Page, Karen Gadbois, Scott Lewis, Josmar Trujillo, Robert Levine, Robert Kolker, Tom Lowenstein, Angel Polachek, Bill Loehfelm, Jarret Lofstead and the NOLA Fugees folks, Susan Larson, Rachel Conner, Mariame Kaba, Lil Boosie, Hashim Nzinga, Michael Arria, Michael Friedman, Greg Augarten, Michael Perlstein, Kade Crockford, Joseph Corcoran (RIP), Susan Kaplow, Mark Healy, Raven Rakia, Jim Boren, Kirk Menard, Seth Ferranti, Cormac Boyle, Annie Preziosi, Richard Bourke, Christine Lehmmann, David Simon, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Evan Wright, George Pelecanos, Richard Price. Thanks to the phenomenal team at Scribner for their hard work, patience, and support with this project, particularly my editor, John Glynn.
Ferguson, we see you. Dellwood, we see you. Jennings, we see you. Kinloch, we see you.
—2015 Ferguson protesters’ chant
The August 9, 2014, shooting of unarmed teen Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, provoked a nationwide and ongoing revolt against police killings. Though the Department of Justice declined to indict Officer Wilson on civil rights charges in 2015, the Ferguson Police Department was lambasted in an extensive report by the DOJ for its pattern and practice of unconstitutional policing. Officer Wilson came to the Ferguson PD from a police department in Jennings, Missouri, that was so troubled—it was rocked by a number of incidents of excessive force by its officers—that the city council there disbanded it. And in July of 2016, Jennings, Missouri, paid out a $4.7 million settlement to two thousand people over a lawsuit alleging that the city’s practice of jailing citizens for unpaid fines and fees was unconstitutional.1 Jennings, Louisiana, and Jennings, Missouri, have many parallels: both are small towns where police have historically treated the citizenry as revenue generators and where excessive force is commonplace. As protests against unconstitutional policing have emerged everywhere from North Charleston, South Carolina, to New York City, and, most recently, Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights, Minnesota, where Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were killed by police, sparking the most intense protests since the summer of 2014, which saw the murders of Eric Garner and Mike Brown, it’s apparent that problems with policing aren’t confined to the Jenningses of the United States.
So I have to express my incredible thanks and boundless gratitude to the protesters in the Ferguson/St. Louis area for bringing the issue of law enforcement misconduct into the public discourse. In a few months, you made possible what criminal justice system reformers have been unable to achieve for decades. Thank you. The future belongs to folks like y’all.
Thanks also to Louisiana’s Public Records Act, La. R.S. 44:1–41, and Article XII, Section 3, of the Louisiana Constitution, which grants any person the right to examine and copy public documents in the possession of the state and its political subdivisions. I couldn’t have deeply investigated the Jeff Davis 8 case without it.
Special thanks to Nic Pizzolatto for his words of encouragement about my Medium.com piece about this case, “Who Killed the Jeff Davis 8?”