More than six months after the police killing of Michael Brown, the unarmed, African-American teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, a federal investigation uncovers racist, profit driven practices. Officials contend that law enforcement practices in the small suburb did not conform to federal civil rights law.
According to the Department of Justice report, the Ferguson Police Department had been rife with racial bias. The report was released a couple of days after President Obama also made some recommendations for law-enforcement public. These recommendations suggested that police officers use less confrontational tactics.
Attorney General Eric Holder also addressed the situation, claiming that the report had revealed a deeply polarized community where interactions between residents and police officers had often been clouded by distrust and hostility. The investigation, Holder underlined, was not only fair and rigorous, but has also proceeded independently of other local investigations.
The comprehensive, 87-page report concluded that the tragic death of the African-American teenager had not been the cause of prosecutable conduct on Officer Darren Wilson’s part.
And although the Department cleared Darren Wilson, the officer involved in the shooting, of the federal civil rights charges brought against him, it raised important questions and urged that significant changes occur in the city where worrisome racist practices were identified. On the one side, the investigation revealed that officers traded racist emails. Yet other unconformities were also signaled: tickets were discovered to have been issued preponderantly to African-American citizens, and excessive force was routinely used when people had been stopped for minor (and even non-existent) offenses.
Mr. Holder, during his statement on the Department of Justice’s report, described police officers in Ferguson as acting as a “collection agency” rather than the law enforcement entity it actually represented. He added that, regardless of public safety, the city relied on their police force (even by using disciplinary tactics) to ensure specific ticketing levels by individual officers.
“Our review of the evidence, and our conversations with police officers, have shown that significant pressure is brought to bear on law enforcement personnel to deliver on these revenue increases,”
Consequently, officers would often resort to the practice of charging multiple violations for the exact same conduct. Numbers also support the Department’s conclusions. In Ferguson, over 85% of vehicle stops were to African-American residents. Moreover, 90 percent of all citations in Ferguson between 2012 and 2014 were issued to African-Americans and 93% of all arrests involved African-American citizens. The situation was so dire, Holder mentioned, that some officers even held competitions to determine who could have issued the most citations during a single stop.
“We must do better not only as a city, but as a state and a country,”
Ferguson Mayor, James Knowles III noted.
After the report’s reveal, Ferguson leaders were cooperative and ready to begin changing the community they live in, mentioning early signs of improvement. In fact, 600 defendant warrants have already been rescinded and failure-to-appear warrants are no longer being issued.
And while change is coming, one unfortunate truth is that Michal Brown’s death had to be the trigger that would ultimately warrant the change.