On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed eighteen-year-old African American man, was fatally shot by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, following a violent altercation on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. With many of the crucial facts surrounding Brown’s death under dispute – in particular, whether Wilson’s stop of Brown was justified, whether Wilson or Brown initiated the confrontation, whether Brown surrendered or resisted arrest – many residents in the majority African American community took to the streets to protest what they viewed as an emblematic instance of police brutality, as well as general indifference among community leaders toward the concerns of black and brown residents. In response, Ferguson police – and eventually the Missouri National Guard – mustered an intimidating show of force in an effort to contain the protests. The presence of large numbers of heavily armed police and guardsmen exacerbated an already tense situation, leading to charged and sometimes violent encounters between protestors and law enforcement officials. Wilson’s killing of Brown, the heated and sometimes violent protests, and the extraordinary heavy-handedness of the police response made the events in Ferguson national news, riveting public attention and forcing conversations about police brutality and the over-policing of communities of color.

For many Americans of color, the promise of local democracy seems unfulfilled. On average, African Americans and Latinos are underrepresented descriptively on municipal councils, ideologically distant from local elected officials, and poorly represented in the overall ideological orientation of local government policy. At the same time, however, the picture is not uniformly bleak: There are perceptible differences in how well or how poorly different local governments perform in substantively representing the preferences of African American and Latino constituents.

In the previous chapter, we examined patterns in descriptive representation, ideological congruence representation, and policy responsiveness across economic groups in communities throughout the United States, revealing the substantial underrepresentation of citizens with low wealth at the municipal level. Importantly, however, Chapter 7 focused largely, though not exclusively, on general patterns of (inequality in) representation. This emphasis, while vital, has the effect of minimizing the nontrivial number of instances in which less affluent residents receive considerable representation at the local level.