Angela Williams’ life was forever altered on Christmas Eve 2017 when she learned that Troy, Alabama, cops had severely beaten her 17-year-old son, Ulysses Wilkerson. Law enforcement officials said cops had approached the teen around midnight the day before because he was walking near a closed business. They claimed he fled and then reached for his waistband, prompting the officers to use physical force. There was no police transparency to provide evidence for their claims.

Williams was skeptical of their account, and she posted a picture of her son’s bloodied, bruised and swollen face on Facebook. Despite local and national outcry, a Pike County grand jury failed to indict four cops involved in the incident.

In December 2019, Williams and her son filed a federal civil lawsuit against five officers who were allegedly present. Two years later, she finally reviewed bodycam and dashcam footage of two officers involved in Wilkerson’s arrest. The footage was made available to her and her lawyer in September 2021 during mediation in the lawsuit, under the condition that it remained sealed. Williams eventually walked away from mediation, and a federal court denied her lawyer’s discovery motion for all of the video of all the officers involved. That footage has not yet been released to the public or Williams.

Wilkerson’s interaction with law enforcement didn’t end with the beating. Williams had to navigate a different kind of heartbreak in 2019 when police implicated him and another man in the fatal shooting of a 30-year-old named Michael Irwin Jr. The son insisted he wasn’t involved, but after facing capital murder charges and spending over four years in jail, he pleaded guilty to a lesser offense.

Wilkerson was released on probation this past April, after serving a total of five years in jail.

Today, as Williams continues to fight for police transparency, demanding the full video footage of her son's beating, she runs Mothers on a Mission, a group she founded to support moms like her. She also appears in “For Our Children,” a 2022 documentary that began airing on Netflix in May. Here, Williams traces her painful path from despair to activism for greater police transparency.

Read the full article about police transparency by Brittany Hailer at The Marshall Project.