"Michael Brown doesn't want to be remembered for a riot," the Rev. Al Sharpton said at the shooting victim's funeral. "He wants to be remembered as the one who made America deal with how we police in the United States." Two decades ago Rodney King wanted to be remembered for the same thing. As the Justice Department and the Senate now launch investigations prompted by the tactics of the Ferguson, Missouri, police in Brown's shooting and its aftermath, we would do well to remember the lessons that the 1991 Christopher Commission drew from its investigation into the police practices that led to King's beating at the hands of the LAPD and the riots that followed. Indeed, if the nation had indeed applied the recommendations of the Christopher Commission, there might have been no need for the National Guard and Attorney General Eric Holder to go to Ferguson to quell another potential riot.

Among the central findings of the Christopher Commission were that attitudes on gender as well as on race contributed to poor policing practices. According to the Commission, "female LAPD officers are involved in excessive use of force at rates substantially below those of male officers." The Commission credited this to the female officers' perceived ability to be "more communicative, more skillful at deescalating potentially violent situations and less confrontational ... less personally challenged by defiant suspects and [showing] less need to deal with defiance with immediate force or confrontational language."

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