Discussion for article #233970
It’s such a toxic environment that no one will be charged.
Without any sanctions behind it, a scathing report is nothing more than throwing snowballs in a war zone. Nothing is going to change unless someone has the teeth to MAKE it change.
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Maybe not. He doesn’t seem to go after cases where he might lose and has a pretty good record on voting rights and civil rights. I think the fact that they are laying this out there means that something may actually happen.
On the other hand, a ton of people that have been harassed and illegally detained, charged, etc. have some mighty fine evidence for future civil cases with the Justice Dept. being their evidence.
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He offered remedies in his news conference in which DOJ will have oversight over compliance in Ferguson. They aren’t going to go to all this trouble to draw attention to the problem and then ignore working with the community or the PD in order to fix it. He was very strong in expressing that. The problem is that there are many Fergusons around the country and I’d like to see DOJ do more of this on a larger scale.
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I would be nice to see the DoJ take on Staten Island PD next.
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"Our investigation showed that members of Ferguson’s police force frequently escalate, rather than defuse, tensions with the residents they encounter. "
Yeah, but how else are they supposed to make their quota for the private prison contracts?
And I said it before and I’ll say it again: we ALL know what happened with Wilson and Brown and we ALL know who deliberately escalated the entire confrontation. “Get off the street” followed by “go fuck yourself” was followed by a complete and utter self-aggrandizing racially-tinged authoritarian shit-fit and no amount of Holder using diplomatic language about the incident in order to keep things cool is going to change that fact.
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The red-faced outrage from Fox is already exhausting me. And I haven’t even been exposed to any of it yet.
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They can either agree to comply with the DOJ’s recommendations or fight them in court.
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Knew this was going to be the outcome on both parts. Read a good article in WaPo months ago on this topic. Clearly a toxic stew when your town is a ticket mill that also feeds on itself, and the death of Michael Brown was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Also to note, the indirect implication is “vote the revenue hungry bums out”, but be careful that this issue transcends race as well. In the majority Black cities close to Ferguson (with majority Black political power), they are writing more tickets than they have population as well.
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They tend to do this in Detroit, but even though the political power in the city is primarily African-American their police force is not. There was a change in the law some years back, allowing police officers to reside outside city limits and this only compounded the problem of harsh police enforcement as law enforcement no longer lived in the same community they policed. Then when the Governor took over majority black communities in his Emergency Financial Managers move, even African-American political power became moot and under attack.
So then Michigan voters voted to repeal EFM law by 53-47, and the Governor rammed through a law by the rightwing nuts in the legislature during a lame duck session to override the will of the voters. There’s a lot of institutional racism that continues to fester and prevents the average voter from taking back control of some communities. It really needs more Federal oversight beyond what we see here in Ferguson. But at least its a start.
I’d like to see DOJ take on the Governors, (most of them rightwing ALEC-owned) that keep this type of white dominated control over these black communities. Governors could be doing a lot more on their own to rectify these problems, but many refuse to do so.
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The toxic environment is all too real in suburban Missouri where towns routinely use traffic cops to fund themselves so they can keep property taxes super low. It was worse in Ferguson because 67 percent of the population is black making it real easy for the cops to figure out who to ticket and who to give a warning.
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Holder may be using diplomatic language about the Wilson/Brown incident because they concluded that they couldn’t prove what they believe, based on their investigation, probably happened. However they did the next best thing by laying out in painstaking detail what a blatantly racist and corrupt cesspool the whole PD and city administration is currently, and “suggesting” that it be changed, immediately.
And I’m pretty sure that the suggestion will be (and probably already is being) followed up with negotiations on specific milestones, and consequences if they’re not met. They’ve already done that with other PDs/local admins they’ve investigated.
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