Justice Department Investigation Finds Pattern of Police Bias in Ferguson, MO

[Content Note: Police brutality; racism.]

Although a separate investigation by the US Department of Justice is expected to find no civil rights violations against Officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last year (much like the investigation into George Zimmerman's shooting of Trayvon Martin), the simultaneous investigation into the Ferguson Police Department, by whom Wilson was employed, has found a pattern of bias and excessive force:

Police officers in Ferguson, Mo., have routinely violated the constitutional rights of the city's black residents, the Justice Department has concluded in a scathing report that accuses the officers of using excessive force and making unjustified traffic stops for years.

The Justice Department, which opened its investigation after a white Ferguson police officer shot and killed a black teenager last summer, says the discrimination was fueled in part by racial stereotypes held by city officials. Investigators say the officials made racist jokes about blacks on their city email accounts.

...The report's findings were summarized by a federal law enforcement official. The full report is expected to be released on Wednesday.

...Ferguson officials now face the choice of either negotiating a settlement with the Justice Department or potentially being sued by it on charges of violating the Constitution.

In compiling the report, federal investigators conducted hundreds of interviews, reviewed 35,000 pages of police records and analyzed race data compiled for every police stop. They concluded that, over the past two years, African-Americans — who make up about two-thirds of the city's population — accounted for 85 percent of traffic stops, 90 percent of citations, 93 percent of arrests and 88 percent of cases in which the police used force.

Black motorists were twice as likely as whites to be searched but were less likely to be found in possession of contraband such as drugs or guns.

The findings reinforce what the city's African-American residents have been saying publicly for the past year: that years of discrimination and mistrust created the volatile environment that erupted after Mr. Brown's shooting.

Now the question is: Is this official finding, which reflects the reported lived experiences of Ferguson's black community, going to be a catalyst for meaningful and lasting change, for something that looks even a little bit like justice, or will the Ferguson Police Department and the entrenched powers which have underwritten and abetted its patterns of abuse merely take this report and use it to justify greater attempts to conceal the same ugly dynamic?

I fervently hope for the former, and fear the latter. I am honestly not sure that meaningful and lasting change can happen within a system to which this sort of racist abuse is not a bug but a feature.

But I hope I'm wrong. I really do.