The Justice Department cleared a white former Ferguson, Mo,, police officer in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old on Wednesday, but also issued a scathing report calling for sweeping changes in city law enforcement practices it called discriminatory and unconstitutional.
The dual reports marked the culmination of months-long federal investigations into a shooting that sparked weeks of protests and a national dialogue on race and law enforcement as the tenure of Attorney General Eric Holder, the first African-American to hold that office, draws to a close.
In pairing the announcements, the Obama administration sought to offset community disappointment over the conclusion that the shooting of Michael Brown was legally justified with a message of hope for Ferguson’s majority-black citizens. Officials announced 26 recommendations, including training officers in how to de-escalate confrontations and banning the use of ticketing and arrest quotas.
Holder called the federal report a “searing” portrait of a police department that he said functions as a collection agency for the city, with officers prioritizing revenue from fines over public safety and trouncing the constitutional rights of minorities.
“It is not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg,” Holder said.
The decision not to prosecute Darren Wilson, the white officer who was cleared in November by a state grand jury and has since resigned, had been expected. To win a federal civil rights case, officials would have needed to prove that Wilson willfully deprived Brown of his rights by using unreasonable force.
But the report found no evidence to disprove Wilson’s testimony that he feared for his safety during the Aug. 9 confrontation. Nor were there reliable witness accounts to establish that Brown had his hands up in surrender when he was shot, Justice Department lawyers said.
One of Wilson’s attorneys, Neil Bruntrager, said his client was satisfied with the outcome. Brown family lawyer Benjamin Crump said the family was not surprised but very disappointed.
“I really was hoping they would have come up with better findings because this whole thing just does not add up,” Ewing said. “Everything just doesn’t make sense.”
While the federal government declined to prosecute Wilson, it found that the shooting occurred in an environment of systematic mistreatment of blacks, in which officials swapped racist emails and jokes without punishment and black residents were disproportionately stopped and searched, fined for petty offenses and subjected to excessive police force.
A 102-page report about the department found that its lack of racial diversity undermined community trust. It also found that the city relied heavily on fines for petty offenses, such as jaywalking, to raise revenue. Police interpreted “innocent movements as physical threats” and engaged in practices that overwhelmingly affected minorities and reinforced patterns of racial bias, it said.
The document was filled with examples of what it called a discriminatory criminal justice system. One black woman spent six days in jail because of a parking violation, it said. A lawful protest was broken up with a police warning of “everybody here’s going to jail.” And a black man sitting in a car with tinted windows was accused without cause of being a pedophile by an officer who pointed a gun at his head.
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