Shootings by police declined. Bronson thinks the use of Tasers helped by giving police a nonlethal way to stop a suspect.

“It wasn’t like a giant love fest, but we finally got it done,” said Al Gerhardstein, a civil rights lawyer in Cincinnati.

Cincinnati has since undergone a revival. “The downtown is back and healthy,” Bronson said. Over-the-Rhine, a poor neighborhood in 2001, is rapidly gentrifying, with the young middle-class moving in.

Lynch came to St. Louis during the disturbances in Ferguson this month to advise community leaders on the Cincinnati solution.

The story went differently in Anaheim, Calif., the home of Disneyland, in the summer of 2012. Protesters threw rocks at riot police and smashed downtown windows in several days of unrest following a series of police shootings.

“In Anaheim, people were freaked out,” said Jose Moreno, a member of the Anaheim School Board and an education professor at the University of California in Long Beach. “It really woke up the community that in Anaheim there is a concentration of working poor that folks don’t associate with us because of Disneyland.”

There were later peaceful protests, including at Disneyland.

But the ordeal didn’t have a lasting impact on business in the Los Angeles suburb. There is a “business and residential boom” in the area hit by unrest, says Anaheim city spokeswoman Ruth Ruiz.

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