Progress related to criminal justice, on average, lagged most of all, the group said last year.

Even though many abuses have been addressed, the group said, the St. Louis area has barely budged toward reforms that would keep abuses from recurring. Among them: consolidating all municipal courts into four, preventing conflicts of interests among judges and prosecutors, and collecting municipal court fines and fees like any ordinary unpaid bill.

“At the most basic level, it gets down to the value of humanity, hierarchy of human value,” said the Rev. Starsky D. Wilson, president and CEO of Deaconness Foundation who served as co-chairman of the Ferguson Commission. “We came to that conversation because of the touch point of the criminal justice system. So the reality is we had … a distorted negative perception of the human being that is Michael Brown.”

Most of the changes have been voluntary, he noted. Municipalities have behaved better because they were embarrassed, but not because they were made to.

Wilson said he's hesitant to say anything is fixed. “We are slow to assume that the state of any progress is permanent without overriding oversight and reform,” Wilson said.