In this Nov. 25, 2014 photo, police watch the street as protesters gather outside the Ferguson Police Department. (Charlie Riedel/AP)
Ferguson police routinely violate blacks’ rights, federal review finds
The
Justice Department will issue findings Wednesday that accuse the police
department in Ferguson, Mo., of racial bias and routinely violating the
constitutional rights of black citizens by stopping drivers without
reasonable suspicion, making arrests without probable cause and using
excessive force, officials said.
Federal officials
opened their civil rights investigation into the Ferguson police
department after the uproar in the St. Louis suburb and across the
country over the fatal shooting in August of Michael Brown, an unarmed
black 18-year-old, by Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson police officer. A
grand jury in St. Louis declined to indict Wilson in November.
Federal officials will not bring civil rights charges
against Wilson, but they see their broad civil rights investigation
into the troubled Ferguson police department as the way to force
significant changes in Ferguson policing.
Outgoing
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said last fall that the need for
“wholesale change” in the Ferguson police department was “pretty clear.”
In remarks two weeks ago, he said he was “confident that people will be
satisfied with the results that we announce.”
In hundreds of interviews and in a broad review of
more than 35,000 pages of Ferguson police records and other documents,
Justice Department officials found that although African Americans make
up 67 percent of the population in Ferguson, they accounted for
93 percent of all arrests between 2012 and 2014.
“If
the report of the Department of Justice findings is accurate, then it
will confirm what Michael Brown’s family has believed all along, and
that is that the tragic killing of their unarmed teenage son was part of
a systemic pattern of policing of African American citizens in
Ferguson,” said Benjamin Crump, the attorney for Brown’s family.
The
findings come as Justice Department officials negotiate a settlement
with the police department to change its practices. If they are unable
to reach an agreement, the Justice Department could bring a lawsuit, as
it has done against law enforcement agencies in other jurisdictions in
recent years. A U.S. official said that Ferguson officials have been
cooperating.
As part of its findings, the Justice
Department concluded that African Americans accounted for 85 percent of
all drivers stopped by Ferguson police officers and 90 percent of all
citations issued.
[Archive: Federal civil rights charges unlikely against Ferguson police officer]
The
Justice Department also plans to release evidence this week of racial
bias found in e-mails written by Ferguson police and municipal court
officials. A November 2008 e-mail, for instance, stated that President
Obama could not be president for very long because “what black man holds
a steady job for four years.”
The Justice Department
did not identify who wrote this and other racist e-mails and to whom
they were sent. Officials at the department spoke on the condition of
anonymity to discuss the review and its findings before Wednesday’s
release.
The review concludes that racial
bias and a focus on generating revenue over public safety have a
profound effect on Ferguson police and court practices and routinely
violate the Constitution and federal law.
“This
is not the full report, and we need to be careful not to rush to
judgment as we saw in August,” said Jeff Roorda, a former Missouri state
representative and a spokesman for the St. Louis Police Officers
Association.
“We owe it, not just to law enforcement, but to Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner to
figure out what’s really going on here so it can be addressed,” he
said, referring to others killed by police officers in Cleveland and New
York. “Reaching conclusions from statistics about traffic stops I don’t
think draws the whole picture.”
The Justice review also
found a pattern or practice of Ferguson police using unreasonable force
against citizens. In 88 percent of the cases in which the department
used force, it was against African Americans.
In
Ferguson court cases, African Americans are 68 percent less likely than
others to have their cases dismissed by a municipal judge, according to
the Justice review. In 2013, African Americans accounted for 92 percent
of cases in which an arrest warrant was issued.
Justice
investigators also reviewed types of arrests and the treatment of
detainees in the city jail by Ferguson police officers. They found that
from April to September 2014, 95 percent of people held longer than two
days were black. The police department also overwhelmingly charges
African Americans with certain petty offenses, the investigation
concluded.
For example, from 2011 to 2013, African Americans accounted
for 95 percent of all “manner of walking in roadway” charges, 94 percent
of all “failure to comply” charges and 92 percent of all “peace
disturbance” charges, the review found.
The shooting of
Brown on a Ferguson street on Aug. 9 set off days of often violent
clashes between demonstrators and police in the streets of Ferguson.
Elected
officials, protest organizers and community leaders renewed calls
Tuesday for Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson to resign — some adding
that the department should be disbanded — and said the Justice
Department probe should have gone further by investigating other
municipal police forces in the area.
“I would speculate
that the same pattern and practices of Ferguson exist in every other
department in St. Louis County,” said Adolphus Pruitt, the president of
the St. Louis NAACP, which has filed racial discrimination complaints
against county police.
He added, “It’s time for the Ferguson police department to disappear.”
Justice
Department investigators spent about 100 days in Ferguson, observing
police and court practices, including four sessions of the Ferguson
Municipal Court. They conducted an analysis of police data on stops,
searches and arrests, as well as data collected by the court, and met
with neighborhood associations and advocacy groups. The investigators
also interviewed city, police and court officials, including the
Ferguson police chief and his command staff.
In the past
five years, the Justice Department’s civil rights division has opened
more than 20 investigations of police departments, more than twice as
many as were opened in the previous five.
The department
has entered into 15 agreements with law enforcement agencies, including
consent decrees with nine of them, including the New Orleans and
Albuquerque police departments.
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