of a renewed focus for him, and he went on to become a well-
known—and well-connected—antiviolence activist.
An Unlikely Police Ally
In March 2015 Franks founded his own grassroots organization
called 28 to Life. Its name came from the (now debunked) statistic
that a black person is killed by a cop every twenty-eight hours.
Franks’s mission was simple: to save black lives. He realized that
in order to do that, he had to build relationships with people in law
enforcement, and that is what he set out to do.
Once an unapologetic basher of police officers, Franks is now
on friendly terms with a number of them. He gets text messag-
es from the St. Louis police chief. He gets tweeted by city circuit
attorney Jennifer Joyce, whom he refers to as J.J. He acts as a
Violence erupted in August 2014 during a protest over the police
shooting death of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri.
Protests—some peaceful, some violent—shook the nation.
