Answer:
With the events in Ferguson in 2014 and the subsequent growth of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, sociologists have been pondering what they can do to address police violence. When a group of us gathered in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel in 2014 during the ASA conference, this was at the top of our mind. What could we do as a collective of sociologists who were deeply concerned about the events we were watching unfold on television? The police killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown and the protests that were met with militarized law enforcement efforts to squash the right to free assembly struck the 10 of us gathered in the lobby, as it did so many across the country, as symbolic of racialized policing practices that have terrorized and traumatized black communities for generations.
