On an unbearably hot August afternoon last summer, I was walking along West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Mo., notebook in hand, when I ran into two good friends who were also on the clock, Joel Anderson of BuzzFeed and Jamelle Bouie of Slate. A few nights later, we got dinner with a couple of other black journos from D.C. We'd all known each other for years, and joked about how we rarely get together back home and here we were, eating wings at a gastropub in St. Louis. But this was a strange reunion: We weren't gathered for a birthday, or happy hour, but because a young black man's body had lain out for four hours on a sweltering street.
In the 12 months since, the national conversation about police brutality has reached a higher pitch than we could have imagined. We've all become part-time cops reporters and part-time criminal justice reporters. We've interviewed weeping family members, scrutinized dash cam footage and witnesses' YouTube uploads, and wrestled with the long-term political implications of what this moment might mean. At this point, I'm probably approaching 30,000 words on the subject of race and policing. It's everything you want in a story ā consequential, evolving, complicated. This work will matter in a way that so many other stories don't or won't.
[For more of this story, written by Gene Demby, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/co...eport-on-black-death]
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