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Fault Lines
- Ferguson: City under siege
Ferguson: City under siege
On August 9, 2014, an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown was shot dead by a white police officer in the city of Ferguson, Missouri.
Brown was the forth unarmed black man to be killed in the US by police in the span of a month, and the killing sparked several days of protests in the community.
The street protests and police response brought Ferguson into the national and international spotlight. Things quickly spiralled: Reports of gunshots fired from the crowds, a state of emergency was declared, the national guard was deployed and the US attorney general launched a federal investigation into the killing.
So why was Michael Brown shot? And why was the authorities' response to the protests so disproportionate?
Fault Lines travelled to Ferguson to witness the demonstrations and the subsequent heavy-handed police reaction - and to find out how Brown's killing sparked something bigger, exposing tensions that have been bubbling beneath the surface for years.