This thread is not about Brown/Wilson, we’ve got other threads for that.
Taking this report at face value, it looks pretty bad. Like a classic Southern small-town speed trap, on steroids, extended to pedestrians, with racism added – lots of racism. I venture to suggest that this is, generally speaking, not good for law enforcement; it erodes public respect for the most potent weapon a cop carries – not the gun, not the club, not the pepper spray, but the badge.
Issues for debate:
Is this report in any way inaccurate or exaggerated?
If not, what does this mean for the bigger picture? How many other American towns are like Ferguson in this respect?
What can be done about it? E.g., in Ferguson’s case, would it help to dissolve the town PD and let the county police take over policing Ferguson? If not, what would help?
Eric Holder is turning into Captain Ahab, and it isn’t pretty.
He wanted desperately to prosecute Officer Wilson for shooting Michael Brown, but his exhaustive research found nothing he could charge Wilson with. Michael Brown was no “gentle giant,” and he wasn’t an innocent shot by a bigot for no reason.
But Holder is determined to punish the Ferguson PD and will keep digging until he finds something to punish them for.
But all he’s proving is that he’s too vindictive and obsessive for his job.
It’s unfortunate that you’ve decided to view this as some kind of personalized battle. I suggest you read the report. I think you’ll find that the investigation was pretty far from an attempt to dig up trivial wrongdoing. It revealed very significant, systemic problems.
A lot of cities and towns in St. Louis County need to be disbanded or merged into larger entities. BTW: the City of St. Louis is not in St. Louis County. Even so there are something like 80 different municipalities in that county. Fully one third of all of Missouri’s traffic tickets are in that one county. These little fiefdoms are used to put money in the pockets of the people in power.
I’m not a fan of Eric Holder, but even a broke clock can be right twice a day. The issue with Ferguson and other places in St. Louis County might just be one of those times.
I haven’t read the DOJ report but if NPR “news” is any indication it is full of minorities being oppressed by white devil slavemasters. For example, did you know that according to NPR if a non-white person has repeated traffic/parking violation AND does not pay those tickets (the latest NPR report implied making a non-white person pay a ticket was racist) AND they do not go to court about it, that putting them in jail is racist.
Also according to NPR, Ferguson PD is racist because 80% of all traffic stops are a minority driver (no mention that Ferguson is 70% minority residents or any other context for those numbers).
All over the internet, I’m seeing people cheering that Wilson was acquitted by the DOJ while simultaneously dismissing its report on the Ferguson PD. This isn’t a surprising, sadly. People want so badly for racism to be dead, the integrity of the police to never be question, and black people to be held responsible for their lowly station in life that they are willing to put themselves in the SAME position as their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, who turned a blindeye to the SAME issues 30, 40, 50 years ago.
There has never been a time in this country when black people have protested en mass against something that was a figment of their hypersensitive imaginations. But these fools who refuse to face reality would like for us to believe that there’s nothing to see here. And they have the audacity to heap praises on MLK when they want to point to the role models that black people should aspire to.
Municipal employees are immune from RICO. So as a practical matter, no.
But in the theoretical world in which they could be prosecuted, the question isn’t so much whether they could be a criminal organization–almost any network of humans counts–but whether they committed any of the predicate acts. I don’t think selective policing or prosecution would qualify. And even if you think the cases of racially motivated violence documented in the report were part of an intentional conspiracy, I don’t think there’s any predicate act that would meet in RICO.
The best theory you could come up with would be that they conspired to fine some people for crimes they knew the people did not commit, a form of fraud. If they communicated about that fraud by phone, email, or fax across state lines, then you’d have them. But it’s not a strong theory, legally.
And it sort of misses the point. Racism doesn’t require explicit conspiracy or communication. There can be a systemic problem without anyone having sat down in a meeting room and decided to charge black people with crimes they didn’t commit.
While some of the items in the report seem like reaching, on balance there is well enough to come to the conclusion that the Ferguson PD is shit. The scale has tipped sufficiently in my mind that they lose the benefit of the doubt when evaluating the items on the margin. That’s just my take on the department, not what is actionable.
I’d rather the solution be from the citizens themselves rather than the DOJ stepping in. I’m thinking the city can de-incorporate or cede the municipal services to the county or state.
Well, can’t cut and paste from that PDF very well, but I thought the part on the focus of the department on generating ‘revenue’ (i.e. fining people to bring in money to the municipality) pretty significant, especially the obvious pressure being applied to the police department to increase tickets and other fines to make up for shortfalls in the budget. This puts a lot of pressure on the police to find or invent things to fine people for (with the subtext that if they don’t, well, there will probably have to be cuts in staffing levels, dontchaknow?). It’s going to exacerbate an already volatile situation that is also already racially charged.
Based on my reading of the report it exonerates the police officer by supporting his version of events.
It also highlights the corruption and cronyism in the Ferguson police department. Nothing directly racist (and given how much the DOJ wanted to find something then that’s saying something) but a corrupt police force is pretty much the canary in the coal mine as to how the community is doing generally.
Does it matter if revenue generation is racially motivated or not? Both are bad, but revenue generation intent is bad independent of racial motivations, yes?
I would love it if out of all this we have some basis to tear down police activities that have revenue generation as a motive.
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Does it matter if revenue generation is racially motivated or not? Both are bad, but revenue generation intent is bad independent of racial motivations, yes?
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Yes, but you can really see how latent racism could be really heated up by such a program and sort of feed on each other to make this a bigger deal than it might have otherwise been.
I honestly think that this would be the place to start trying to fix this issue. It’s not going to be a magic silver bullet that will make racism go away, but it will take one large pressure off the police force…and probably make the whole public happier (except that it’s really the public that drives this stupid shit, really, since it’s them not wanting to pay taxes that creates and elects idiot elected officials who push this sort of thing to make up for budget deficits in a vicious circle).
A few of the more smokier of the smoking guns picked out from Richard Parker’s snippet:
“African Americans are more than twice as likely as white drivers to be searched during vehicle stops even after controlling for non-race based variables such as the reason the vehicle stop was initiated, but are found in possession of contraband 26% less often than white drivers”
“From 2012 to 2014, FPD issued four or more citations to African Americans on 73 occasions, but issued four or more citations to non-African Americans only twice.”
“from 2011 to 2013, African Americans accounted for 95% of Manner of Walking in Roadway charges, and 94% of all Failure to Comply charges.”
“the disparate impact of FPD’s enforcement practices on African Americans is 48% larger when citations are issued not on the basis of radar or laser, but by some other method, such as the officer’s own visual assessment”
“These disparities are also present in FPD’s use of force. Nearly 90% of documented force used by FPD officers was used against African Americans. In every canine bite incident for which racial information is available, the person bitten was African American.”
That radar/laser one is telling – police officers’ eyes just so happen to “detect” traffic violations of African Americans far more than radars and lasers do.