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[4 articles on Ferguson, MO, Dept. of justice report—count as 1 reading]

Justice Dept. declines to prosecute Ferguson officer in Brown shootingBy Sari Horwitzhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/justice-dept-declines-to-prosecute-ferguson-officer-in-brown-shooting/2015/03/04/2c0acbb2-c29d-11e4-9271-610273846239_story.html 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.

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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

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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 67 percent of the population in Ferguson, they accounted for 93 percent 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 85 percent of all drivers stopped by Ferguson police officers and 90 percent 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 http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/05/ferguson-shows-how-a-police-force-can-turn-into-a-plundering-collection-agency/?tid=pm_national_popMarch 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 year was 2007. And a Ferguson officer 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

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and court dates. That tacked on more fees, more payment deadlines, more charges. She ultimately spent six 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 Farrell in the Monkey Cage blog, which runs in The Washington Post. Ferguson city employees, from the police chief to the finance director, collaborated to generate 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 subject population at every turn.

Here’s the Ferguson 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

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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 the woman 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’t afford 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.

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A City Where Policing, Discrimination and Raising Revenue Went Hand in HandBy CAMPBELL ROBERTSONhttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/05/us/us-details-a-persistent-pattern-of-police-discrimination-in-a-small-missouri-city.html?rref=homepage&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Home%20Page&pgtype=articleMARCH 4, 2015

A 32-year-old black man was sitting in his car, cooling off after playing basketball in a public park in the city of Ferguson, Mo. Then a police officer pulled up.

The officer approached him and demanded his identification. He then accused the man of being a pedophile, since there were children in the park, and ordered him out of his car. When the man objected, the officer arrested him and charged him with eight violations of Ferguson’s municipal code, including a charge for not wearing a seatbelt, even though he was in a parked car.

This encounter in summer 2012 in some ways appeared to be exactly how the criminal justice system in Ferguson had been designed to work, according to an investigation of the Ferguson Police Department released on Wednesday by the United States Justice Department. As described in the report, Ferguson, which is a majority black city but where nearly all city officials are white, acts less like a municipality and more like a self-perpetuating business enterprise, extracting money from poor blacks that it uses as revenue to sustain the city’s budget.

The efficiency of Ferguson’s system was as striking in the report as the bluntness with which officials acknowledged it.

“Unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections,” wrote the city’s finance director to the Ferguson police chief in March 2010. “What are your thoughts?”

Three years later, the finance director wrote to the city manager, saying that he had asked “the Chief if he thought the PD could deliver 10% increase. He indicated they could try.”

The revenue-generating enterprise described in the report begins with the police, who, under pressure to “fill the revenue pipeline,” compete with one another to see how many citations they can issue in a single traffic stop. Those cited are then summoned before a court to face fines that city officials boast are among the highest in the region, with hundreds of dollars levied for such violations as “peace disturbance,” “failure to comply” and “manner of walking.” For all three violations, more than nine out of 10 of those cited were black.

For people caught up in this system, the consequences could be devastating. The man arrested in 2012 after sitting in his car told investigators that as a result of the charges against him, he lost a job as a government contractor. An African-American woman who had been periodically homeless was cited once for parking her car illegally. From that ticket, she was twice arrested and spent six days in jail,

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all while trying to make partial payments on the original fine of $151 and the fees and penalties that accrued. More than seven years and $550 worth of payments later, she still owes $541.

In early 2013, according to one account in the report, a patrol sergeant saw a black man talk briefly to someone in a truck and walk away. The sergeant suspected some type of criminal activity and questioned the man. When the man refused to submit to a frisk, the sergeant shocked him with a Taser repeatedly, at one point for 20 continuous seconds. In the end, the man was charged with “failure to comply” and “resisting arrest,” the report said, “but no independent criminal violation.”

Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story The report lists one example after another of arrests of African-Americans without apparent

justification. In another instance from 2013, a group of black youths were listening to music in a car. Suspecting that they had been using marijuana, an officer arrested them, and some went to jail, for “gathering in a group for the purposes of committing illegal activity.” No evidence of marijuana was found, even after a search of the car.

The report describes a reflexive and gratuitous hostility toward black residents that goes beyond arrests into routine uses of force. Several cases are described in which officers used Tasers against black people for no apparent reason of public safety, including one time when an officer shocked a man for urinating on the prison floor. Every instance in which a police dog bite was reported, the person bitten was black, including, in one case mentioned in the report, an unarmed 14-year-old boy.

But as unforgiving as this system is to the poor black residents, it appears to be far more flexible for the officials who run it, and their friends and family.

Federal investigators found that the judge, the court clerk, the mayor, police supervisors and officials from Ferguson and other neighboring cities — some of whom, the report pointed out, were quick to assert that black residents of Ferguson lacked a sense of personal responsibility — routinely had tickets dismissed for themselves and their friends, pleading “an honest mistake” or suggesting that having a ticket dismissed “would be a blessing.”

“Your ticket of $200 has magically disappeared!” read one email from the court clerk to one friend. “It’s gone baby!” she wrote to another.

Though the federal authorities were shocked by what they found in Ferguson, this system, and the profound distrust it engendered, was not new to those who lived there. One black woman, who was cited for a permit violation after she had called police for help on a domestic disturbance, declared that she would not call the Ferguson police ever again, “even if she is being killed.”

In one instance in the report, a city official expressed unease about the injustice that kept the city afloat. In 2012, a City Council member wrote to other city officials opposing the reappointment of the municipal court judge, arguing that he “does not listen to the testimony, does not review the reports or the criminal history of defendants, and doesn’t let all the pertinent witnesses testify before rendering a verdict.”

The city manager acknowledged the judge’s shortcomings. But, according to the report, he said, “the City cannot afford to lose any efficiency in our Courts, nor experience any decrease in our Fines and Forfeitures.” The judge was reappointed.

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The 12 key highlights from the DOJ’s scathing Ferguson reportBy Mark Berman and Wesley Lowery http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/03/04/the-12-key-highlights-from-the-dojs-scathing-ferguson-report/March 4, 2015

 

Seven months after a white Ferguson police officer shot and killed an unarmed 18-year-old, the

Justice Department has issued a searing report into policing and court practices in the Missouri

city. Investigators determined that in “nearly every aspect of Ferguson’s law enforcement

system,” African Americans are impacted a severely disproportionate amount. The report

included racist e-mails sent by police and municipal court supervisors, repeated examples of bias

in law enforcement and a system that seemed built upon using arrest warrants to squeeze money

out of residents.

Here are some key excerpts from the report:

1. The city’s practices are shaped by revenue rather than by public safety needs.

2. The 67% of African Americans in Ferguson account for 93% of arrests made from

2012-2014.

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3. Here is what happened when a 32-year-old black man was seen resting in his car

after playing basketball. 

4. A Ferguson woman parked her car illegally once in 2007. It ended up costing her

more than $1,000 and 6 days in jail.

5. The disproportionate number of arrests, tickets and use of force stemmed from

“unlawful bias,” rather than black people committing more crime.

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6. A singled missed, late or partial payment of a fine could mean jail time.

7. Arrest warrants are “almost exclusively” used as threats to push for payments.

8. And if time is served, no credit for jail time is received and the length of time isn’t

even recorded by the court.

9. This example of a lieutenant’s actions was a huge cause for concern:

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10. Officers used a dog to attack an unarmed 14-year-old black boy and then struck

him while he was lying on the ground, all while he was waiting for his friends in an

abandoned house. The report concludes that in every dog bite incident reported, the

person bitten was black.

11. After an officer assaulted a man, he demanded the man not pass out because he

didn’t want to carry him to his car.

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12. From October 2012 to October 2014, every time a person was arrested because he

or she was “resisting arrest,” that person was black.

Swati Sharma contributed to this report.