Discussion: Ferguson Mayor: 1 Fired, 2 Under Investigation Over Racist Emails

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Discussion for article #233979

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They are investigating the ones that refer to defendants and the President as “those ni(CLANG!)” just to make damn sure there is racism in them.

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yea…because firing an intern and ‘investigating’ the janitors totally makes up for everything…carry on.

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Here’s the full report:

They are pretty well fucked no matter how many scapegoats they try to pin it on. The report is damning about the entire PD, as should be unsurprising. Another choice section:

In another case, from March 2013, officers responded to the police station to take custody of a person wanted on a state warrant. When they arrived, they encountered a different man - not the subject of the warrant - who happened to be leaving the station. Having nothing to connect the man to the warrant subject, other than his presence at the station, the officers nonetheless stopped him and asked that he identify himself. The man asserted his rights, asking the officers “Why do you need to know?” and declining to be frisked. When the man then extended his identification toward the officers, at their request, the officers interpreted his hand motion as an attempted assault and took him to the ground. Without articulating reasonable suspicion or any other justification for the initial detention, the officers arrested the man on two counts of Failure to Comply and two counts of Resisting Arrest.

In our conversations with FPD officers, one officer admitted that when he conducts a traffic stop, he asks for identification from all passengers as a matter of course. If any refuses, he considers that to be “furtive and aggressive” conduct and cites - and typically arrests - the person for Failure to Comply. The officer thus acknowledged that he regularly exceeds his authority under the Fourth Amendment by arresting passengers who refuse, as is their right, to  provide identification…Further, the officer told us that he was trained to arrest for this violation.

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Any employee or elected official should be held accountable. One of the main jobs a police officer has is to defuse situations and not escalate them–and this is exactly what happened with Mr. Brown.

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Mayor seems to be singing a different melody now that the Justice Department report is publicly available.

“We’re investigating the obvious racists, but the rest of us are ok, really.”

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City officials seem to be operating under the illusion that some “selective pruning” is going to make everything all right. Think again. This appears to be a municipality that has been financing itself by filing bogus charges against the nearest dark-skinned target. Nothing short of a complete housecleaning is going to suffice.

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OK, so we’re good now? We done here?

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I hope the next municipal elections fire many more folks than this youth just did (including him, of course).

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Why the hell did it take a DOJ report for 1 person to be fired and 2 investigated? Shouldn’t this have been handled long before this came to light?

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“We must all work to address issues of racial disparity,” he said.

First order of business is making sure this is your last term as mayor. This will go a long way to correcting the problem of racial disparity.

It’s going to be very interesting to see how well you keep from stumbling all over yourself with this one.

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He added that since August 2014, the city has hired a black female corrections officer and two black female assistant court clerks.

Wow. Three people. That’s some impressive diversity they’ve got going there.

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But they let officer whatshisnuts go, oh yeah, Wilson. So in the end, the cops got away with it and the racial divide is still huge.

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That report illustrates what a complete shit-show the Ferguson “Justice System” is. Honestly, I don’t see how they can fix it without firing nearly everyone. It’s corrupted from top to bottom. Horrible. Disgraceful. UGH.

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Especially at such high and influential levels in the department! And of course having more minorities on the staff always means that the culture will change so all is nicey-nicey in future. However, somehow I don’t think they’re going to get off quite that lightly. We’ll see.

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If the 67% don’t take over the city government at the next elections and completely clean house, then honestly, they deserve what they get.

VOTE.

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There will have to be many more changes than what the Mayor describes. Sounds like it might need to start with the mayor.

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So the City didn’t know about the emails on their own official system until the DoJ “discovered” them?

After everything that went down in Ferguson in the past months, what kept the City from looking for these things themselves? Why the hell did it take the feds coming through official City records to discover this shit?

Sounds like the Mayor and other officials have had no problem intentionally looking away and deliberately ignoring what was going on under their watch… and only take minor actions now once the DoJ points out the most egregious examples of blatant racism.

Too damn little, too damn late.

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Ferguson is Everytown, USA.
Go look at USA Today’s map of US cities with arrest figures by race. This country is a racist cesspool.
Every state, blue or red, where there are enough black bodies to enslave guess who gets more attention from police?
Slavery never died.
http://www.gannett-cdn.com/experiments/usatoday/2014/11/arrests-interactive/

Pretending it’s only Ferguson is how you continue to sweep it under the rug.

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Scapegoating a few people won’t change anything. The entire police force needs to be dismantled, and rebuilt from the ground up, and all the politicians who stood by and let it happen need to go also,including the mayor.

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