U.S. tells Ferguson to fix system
Justice agency slams illegal police stops, courts in disarray
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has called on Ferguson, Mo., to overhaul its criminal-justice system, declaring that the city had engaged in so many constitutional violations that they could be corrected only by abandoning its entire approach to policing, retraining its employees and establishing new oversight.
In one example after another, the report released Wednesday described a city that used its police and courts as moneymaking ventures, a place where officers stopped and handcuffed people without probable cause, hurled racial slurs, used stun guns without provocation, and treated people as suspicious merely for questioning police tactics.
The report gave credence to many of the grievances aired last year by blacks in protests after the deadly police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old. Though the Justice Department separately concluded that the officer, Darren Wilson, who is white, violated no federal laws in that shooting, Attorney General Eric Holder said investigations revealed the root of the rage that drew people into the streets.
“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.
The findings will force Ferguson, a working-class city near St. Louis that is about two-thirds black but has a mostly white police force, to make changes or face a federal civil-rights lawsuit. Justice Department officials, who met with city leaders to discuss their findings this week, said it appeared Ferguson was open to making changes that would head off a court battle.
In a statement he read to reporters Wednesday night, Mayor James Knowles said the city had begun making changes. He did not directly address all the steps that the Justice Department called for in the report or say whether he would fight the federal government in court.
“Today’s report allows the city of Ferguson to identify problems, not only in our Police Department but in the entire St. Louis region,” he said. “We must do better not only as a city, but as a state and as a country. We must all work to address issues of racial disparity in all aspects of society.”
Holder said the things Justice Department investigators uncovered in Ferguson raised questions about what went on in police departments around the country.
Their report described a city where police officers did not know the law or did not bother to follow it. Internal documents showed Ferguson police officers conducting “pedestrian checks,” in which they stopped people walking down the street and demanded to see their identification without any probable cause.
One officer cited in the report told investigators he considered people who refused to show identification to be suspicious or aggressive, and typically arrested them.
When people refused to comply with or questioned unconstitutional orders, police sometimes responded with force, the report said. Stun guns were commonly used even when officers were not threatened.
“Supervisors seem to believe that any level of resistance justifies any level of force,” the report found.
Blacks in Ferguson accounted for 85 percent of traffic stops, 90 percent of tickets and 93 percent of arrests over a two-year period studied by investigators. In cases such as jaywalking, which often hinge on police discretion, blacks accounted for 95 percent of those charged.
A black driver in Ferguson was twice as likely to be searched, according to the report, even though searches of whites turned up drugs and other contraband more often.
Oversight in the department is so lax and record keeping is so inconsistent that illegal stops and arrests go unnoticed or unquestioned, the report said.
“Supervisors are more concerned with the number of citations and arrests officers produce than whether those citations and arrests are lawful or promote public safety,” the Justice Department concluded.
But federal authorities reserved some of its harshest criticism for the local court system, which does not function as an independent branch of government. Court employees answer to the police chief. The prosecutor is also the city’s lawyer. Judges are installed by the City Council and must be reappointed every two years.
The Justice Department report describes the courts as a bureaucratic morass in which people often receive the wrong court dates, court procedures are made up on the fly, and it can be unclear how much money people owe or when they owe it. The punishment for missing a payment or an appearance, even for routine traffic violations, is often jail.
Court fines are a major source of revenue, and internal emails show city officials pushing for more tickets and fines, then congratulating one another when revenue exceeded expectations. Police supervisors insisted that officers hit ticket quotas and reorganized the shift schedules to help hit them.
“Everything’s about the courts,” one Ferguson officer told federal investigators. “The court’s enforcement priorities are money.”