Following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, and the subsequent civil unrest, the Obama administration provided federal funding to equip American police officers with body-worn cameras. The Ferguson shooting — and disputes about eyewitness versus physical evidence — catalysed national adoption of body cameras as a means of generating continuous video evidence of police-public encounters. By 2016, over a third of large American police departments had adopted body camera programmes.

The body camera debate following Ferguson generated significant poetry and fiction about who controls evidence, who is believed, and whose account of violence is treated as credible. Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), published in the same year as the Ferguson unrest, directly engaged with these questions through its treatment of anti-Black violence and the failure of official evidence and testimony to protect Black lives. Ferguson itself became a poetic locus for the next generation of protest writing.