海角大神

As I聽noted earlier,聽the Justice Department released a report concluding that there was no basis to charge former Ferguson, Mo., Police Officer Darren Wilson with civil rights violations in connection with the shooting of Michael Brown last August. At the same time that investigation was going on, the Justice Department was also conducting a broader investigation of the Ferguson Police Department鈥檚 overall relationship with the community in general, and the African-American community in particular, and聽the findings are quite damning toward a department that demonstrated quite aptly last year that it had problems:

Many of the details in the report, which is quite lengthy, are likely to be shocking to the average American, but probably not so shocking to minorities who deal with hostile police forces on a regular basis:

There鈥檚 a fairly detailed summary of some of the report鈥檚 more shocking findings that has been聽compiled by ABC News, but suffice it to say that there is clear evidence of not only racial bias on a casual basis by members of the Ferguson police force but that the laws of the city seem to be designed to have the harshest impact possible on the city鈥檚 poorest residents, the vast majority of whom are African-American. Most of these ordinances don鈥檛 target actual violent crime but rather the same sort of 鈥渜uality of life鈥� crimes that police departments in major cities such as New York City have been more aggressive in enforcing in recent years, most particularly against minorities. Some of the statistics from the report are really quite telling. The report also details specific instances of racial bias inside the department such as the trading of blatantly racist e-mail jokes about the president and others, and the mocking of members of the local minority community. The Ferguson Police Department was, until quite recently, exclusively white, notwithstanding the fact that the community itself was becoming more and more African-American over time to the point where it is now 67% African-American. But perhaps the best way of showing just how bad the situation in Ferguson has been is by looking at the statistics, which show things like the following:

• 85% of the vehicle stops conducted by Ferguson officers were of cars driven by African-Americans

• 93% of the arrests made were of African-Americans

• 88% of the recorded uses of force by Ferguson officers were against African-Americans

• 92% of the cases in which warrants were issued involved African-American defendants

• 95% of the cases where someone spent two or more days in jail involved African-American defendants

• 100% of the cases involving the use of police dogs against suspects involved African-Americans

While the statistics themselves don鈥檛 prove the existence of racial bias, taken together with the other evidence uncovered by the investigation they paint a portrait of a police department that seemed to be clearly and disproportionately targeting the African-American community in Ferguson, largely because they thought they could get away with. Up until the shooting of Michael Brown and the events that followed, that鈥檚 exactly what happened.

The reality, of course, is that this news about Ferguson shouldn鈥檛 be all that surprising. That isn鈥檛 because Ferguson itself is a particularly racist community, but because it mirrors things that minorities in all types of communities across the United States have been saying for years about the disproportionate manner in which they have been treated, regardless of their social class. That, I think, is why the shooting of Michael Brown, along with cases such as the Eric Garner case in New York and the Tamir Rice case in Cleveland, have resonated so strongly across the country. It rises above the facts of those individual case and points toward what many African-Americans clearly feel to be a widespread racial bias problem in law enforcement that usually isn鈥檛 talked about in the mainstream media. Indeed, while this report only focuses on one small town outside St. Louis, it鈥檚 hard to believe that similar examples of this type of behavior could not be found in big and small departments across America on a regular basis. The only reason the story has gotten this much attention is because a young African-American man was shot and killed, which caused the people of Ferguson to rise up in protest over what they saw as just the latest example of a police department that had been treating them harshly for years. If that hadn鈥檛 happened, or if the national media had ignored the protests, then none of this would have come to light. One has to wonder how many more Ferguson鈥檚 are out there.

Depending on how the city responds to this report, the next steps in this investigation could be varied. Ultimately, the most likely outcome is the appointment of a federal monitor who will be in charge of putting in place reforms in how the department operates. This has been done in many large city departments in the past, but rarely has it happened in such a small jurisdiction. Whether it happens voluntarily or as the result of the order of federal district court judge, though, depends on whether or not the leaders of Ferguson finally decide to face the reality of what has happened to their community.

Here鈥檚 the report.

Doug Mataconis appears on the Outside the Beltway blog at http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/.