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Justice Dept. declines to prosecute Ferguson officer in Brown shooting
By Sari Horwitz
March 4, 2015
Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson was justified in shooting Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, in Ferguson, Mo., in August because he feared for his life after Brown first tried to grab his gun and then came toward him in a threatening manner, according to a Justice Department report released Wednesday.
“Given that Wilson’s account is corroborated by physical evidence and that his perception of a threat posed by Brown is corroborated by other eyewitnesses . . . there is no credible evidence that Wilson willfully shot Brown as he was attempting to surrender or was otherwise not posing a threat,” officials concluded in the 86-page report. The review explained why the Justice Department will not pursue civil rights charges against Wilson for the fatal shooting.
A second scathing 102-page report, also released Wednesday, highlighted widespread racial bias by the 72-member Ferguson Police Department and described a system of using law enforcement to extract money from African American residents, a practice Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. called “revenue generation through policing.”
The investigation found that Ferguson officers competed to see who could issue the largest number of citations during a single stop, and in one instance, that total rose to 14. Even minor code violations sometimes resulted in multiple arrests, jail time and payments that far exceeded the cost of the original ticket.
“Seen in this context, amid a highly toxic environment, defined by mistrust and resentment, stoked by years of bad feelings and spurred by illegal and misguided practices, it is not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg,” Holder said Wednesday, in one of his last speeches before he steps down.
Justice officials personally met with Brown’s parents Wednesday morning to notify them of the department’s findings.
“Today we received disappointing news from the Department of Justice that the killer of our son wouldn’t be held accountable for his actions,” Lesley McSpadden and Michael Brown Sr. said in a statement. “While we are saddened by this decision, we are encouraged that the DOJ will hold the Ferguson Police Department accountable for the pattern of racial bias and profiling they found in their handling of interactions with people of color.”
Justice Department officials said they would have had to prove that Wilson used unreasonable force against Brown and that he did so “willfully,” knowing that it was against the law to do so. Instead, after a six-month review, investigators found that Wilson’s shooting of Brown did “not constitute a prosecutable violation.”
A grand jury in St. Louis had declined to indict Wilson in November.
Justice Department investigators came to their conclusion after canvassing more than 300 homes and reviewing physical, ballistic, forensic, medical and crime-scene evidence. They also examined Wilson’s personnel records, audio and video recordings and the transcripts from the proceedings before the St. Louis County grand jury.
“The promise I made when I went to Ferguson and at the time that we launched our investigation was not that we would arrive at a particular outcome, but rather that we would pursue the facts, wherever they led,” Holder said.
Holder said he understood why some would wonder how the department’s findings could differ so sharply from the initial accounts of what happened in Ferguson. But he said the discrepancy was due, in part, to a deeply rooted pattern of racial bias in the police department that had left the Ferguson community polarized.
“A community where both policing and municipal court practices were found to disproportionately harm African American residents,” Holder said.
Justice officials met with Ferguson city officials Tuesday, including the mayor and the police chief, to discuss their findings in what one Justice official called “a very difficult meeting.” The Justice Department made 26 recommendations for the Ferguson Police Department and the municipal court, including a “robust system of true community policing” and new hiring practices to recruit minority officers.
“It is time for Ferguson’s leaders to take immediate, wholesale and structural corrective action,” Holder said. “Let me be clear: The United States Department of Justice reserves all its rights and abilities to force compliance and implement basic change.”
The majority of law enforcement agencies that have been investigated by the department’s civil rights division have entered into voluntary agreements to implement recommended changes. But if that doesn’t happen, the department can bring a lawsuit, as it has done against several cities.
Ferguson Mayor James Knowles (R) said at a news conference Wednesday night that his police department is determined to address racial discrimination charges. “We must do better, not only as a city but as a state and a country,” he said.
Justice officials also released seven racist e-mails written by Ferguson police and municipal court officials that they said indicated “intentional discrimination.”
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.” Another e-mail described Obama as a chimpanzee. An e-mail from 2011 showed a photo of a bare-chested group of dancing women apparently in Africa with the caption: “Michelle Obama’s High School Reunion.” Another joked that a black woman would help stop crime because she got an abortion.
Justice officials did not specifically identify who wrote the e-mails and to whom they were sent but said they were written by police and court supervisors.
Knowles said that three police supervisors who were found to have sent racist e-mails will be fully investigated and that one has already been fired.
“Let me be clear, this type of behavior will not be tolerated in the Ferguson Police Department or in any department in the city of Ferguson,” Knowles said. “These actions taken by these individuals are in no way representative of the employees of the city of Ferguson.”
In hundreds of interviews and in a wide-ranging review of more than 35,000 pages of police records and other documents, Justice Department officials found that although African Americans make up 67percent of the population in Ferguson, they accounted for 93percent of all arrests between 2012 and 2014. The Ferguson police also overwhelmingly employed force against African Americans, including the use of dogs in police actions.
As part of its findings, the Justice Department concluded that African Americans accounted for 85percent of all drivers stopped by Ferguson police officers and 90percent of all citations issued.
In one case, a woman received two parking tickets that totaled $152. But she has paid $550 to date in fines and fees to the city. She has been arrested twice for having unpaid tickets, spent six days in jail and still owes Ferguson $541.
In an example of what Holder called “routine” constitutional violations, a Ferguson officer arrested a 32-year-old African American man who was sitting in his car resting after a basketball game. With no apparent justification, the officer accused the man of being a pedophile, wouldn’t let him use his phone and ordered him out of his car for a pat-down. When the man objected, the officer drew his gun, pointed it at the man’s head and arrested him on eight different counts.
Ferguson shows how a police force can turn into a plundering ‘collection agency’
By Terrence McCoy
March 5, 2015
Of all the harrowing stories buried inside the Justice Department’s report on the Ferguson Police Department, one of the most illustrative begins with an illegally parked car. The yearwas 2007. And a Fergusonofficer who noticed the illegally parked vehicle issued its driver, an African American woman, two citations and a ticket for $151.
To the driver, who had bounced in and out of homelessness, the fine was draconian. She couldn’t pay it in full. So over the next seven years, the woman missed several deadlines and court dates. That tacked on more fees, more payment deadlines, more charges. She ultimatelyspentsix days in jail. All because she didn’t park her car correctly. As of December 2014, the woman had paid the city of Ferguson $550 resulting from a $151 ticket. And she still owes $541.
The Ferguson police and courts have come under broad criticism for discriminatory practices. Eighty-five percent of people subjected to vehicle stops are African American,according to the report.Ninety percent of people hit with citations are African American. Ninety-three percent of people arrested are African American. But despite the racial overtones, other mechanisms are in play that that go back centuries.
This, as the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out in a tweet, is “plunder made legal. … Municipal employees in Ferguson report sound more like shareholders. Gangsters.”Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.called it a system “primed for maximizing revenue” — one that now basically serves as a “collection agency” instead of “a law enforcement entity focused primarily on maintaining public safety.”
“The new Department of Justice report depicts a system in Ferguson that is much closer to a racket aimed at squeezing revenue out of its population than a properly working democracy,” wrote George Washington University political scientist Henry Farrellin the Monkey Cage blog, which runs in The Washington Post. Ferguson city employees, from the police chief to the finance director, collaborated togenerate revenue through tickets and fees, according to the Justice Department.As described in the report, Farrell and others pointed out, Ferguson is reminiscent of medieval Europe, when gangster governments collected “tribute” and bamboozled the subjectpopulation at every turn.
Here’s theFerguson Police Chief Jackson writing to the city manager: “Municipal Court gross revenue for calendar year 2012 passed the $2,000,000 mark for the first time in history, reaching $2,066,050 (not including red light photo enforcement.)” The city manager was thrilled. “Awesome!” he wrote. “Thanks!”
And here’s a police captain, in March of 2012, writing to the Ferguson city manager to boast of record collections to the tune of $235,000. “The [court clerk] girls have been swamped all day with a line of people paying off fines today,” he wrote the city official. “Since 9:30 this morning there hasn’t been less than 5 people waiting in line and for the last three hours 10 to 15 people at all times.” The city manager was, again, overjoyed at the revenues bolstering city coffers, lauding the police and court staff for their “great work.”
The staff also patted themselves on the back for charging more for petty offenses than other municipalities. “Our investigation found instances in which the court charged $302 for a single Manner of Walking violation; $427 for a single Peace Disturbance violation; $531 for high Grass and Weeds; $777 for Resisting Arrest; and $792 for Failure to Obey, and $527 for Failure to Comply, which officers appear to use interchangeably,” the Justice Department found.
And when people couldn’t pay, they were arrested. Around 21,000 people live in Ferguson. But in 2013, the city’s municipal court issued a staggering 32,975 arrest warrants for minor offenses, according to Missouri state records. “Folks have the impression that this form of low-level harassment isn’t about public safety,” Thomas Harvey of ArchCity Defenders, which explored the practices in a report last summer, told NPR. “It’s about money.”
And it goes beyond Ferguson. “For months,” the St. Louis Post Dispatch said, “the municipal courts of St. Louis County have fended off accusations by activists and law professors that they are modern-day debtor’s prisons.”
Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III, responding to the report, said the city has already begun reviewing the way it imposes and collects fines, noting it had approved an ordinance capping the revenue it gets from court fines and fees at 15 percent, reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The tacit agreement between a police force and citizenry is that fines and taxes, while onerous, pay for necessary protection. It’s a process that often works well. But if it’s abused, it can “qualify as our largest examples of organized crime,” wrote Columbia University’s famed social scientist Charles Tilly,cited by Farrell. They take money and offer protection in an agreement that can work quite nicely, but frequently doesn’t.
“The word ‘protection’ sounds two contrasting tones,” Tilly wrote. “One is comforting, the other ominous. With one tone, ‘protection’ calls up images of the shelter against danger provided by a powerful friend … With the other, it evokes the racket in which a local strong man forces merchants to pay tribute in order to avoid damage — damage the strong man himself threatens to deliver.”
Or in Ferguson’s case, either you pay this ticket for having high grass, or you’ll pay more money still and ultimately go to jail. Pay to protect yourself from the harm inflicted upon thewoman who illegally parked her car.
“Consider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat and then charges for its reduction,” Tilly wrote, citing how European states first formed during the early 1600s. Venice, for example, was inhabited by both merchants working the ports and a government with questionable motives. “Governments’ provision of protection, by this standard, often qualifies as racketeering,” he wrote.
The city of Ferguson works in a similar way. It strives to extract an ever-increasing amount of revenue from people who can’tafford to give another dime. “City, police, and court officials for years have worked in concert to maximize revenue at every stage of the enforcement process, beginning with how fines and fine enforcement processes are established,” the Justice Department report said.
The amount of revenue siphoned through citations rose 56 percent between 2011 and 2014 — from $1.4 million to $2.3 million — which netted the city a tidy tribute. So when the chief of police reported that his team had “beat our next biggest month in the last four years” in revenue collection, the city manager had one reaction.
“Wonderful!” he said.