The vast majority of cases in the Ferguson court are for municipal code violations where (since it is not a offense with a possible sentence of jail time) the defendant is not provided with a court appointed lawyer, and most of these defendants cannot afford one. One specific concern stated in the report is that because such a high percentage of defendants end up arrested and serving jail time for “Failure to Appear” (the court has had a practice of issuing arrest warrants for that after a single missed payment on a fine, despite a state law that requires the defendant be given 30 days to rectify the situation before a warrant is issued) that it can be argued that these defendants are being deprived of their right to counsel.
Also,
It is also noted that the FPD has continued to employ officers who have been proven to have lied during internal affairs investigations, continued to take their statements at face value, and illegally failed to disclose to defendants that the officer was known to the department to not be honest when making official statements.
Well in the example I just gave, the black man who was challenged by the police with such flagrant hostility was guilty of “Waiting At a Bus Stop While Black”. That sort of thing seems to be endemic in Ferguson.
Moreover, when you look at the policies of other communities – ones that are actually sane rather than flagrantly racist and whose police aren’t overtly hostile to racial minorities – extraordinary efforts are often made to avoid exacerbating hostilities between police and minority communities, like a more racially diverse police service that is also well integrated within the community, and doesn’t attack its residents like a pack of rabid dogs. The idea is that the police service is seen as a part of and helpful to the community rather than being its enemy, and is more accountable for its actions – like specific prohibitions against arbitrarily harassing someone for the crime of Being in Public While Black.
You can either work to de-escalate a racial problem or you can just stupidly make it worse. The Ferguson PD practically wrote the book on doing everything wrong – quite literally, just about everything. What matters are results in terms of what kind of community you end up with, not whether the brutal police shakedown of a group of black youths actually turned up an unpaid parking ticket.
It’s inherently wrong because it isn’t – and never was – the purpose of policing, and it’s exactly the kind of narrow-minded misdirection of police services that leads to abuses and counterproductive results. See, for instance, Ferguson, MO.
Ah, the caverns of semantics, where mortally wounded arguments retreat to await the End. The bones are scattered across the cavern floor, encrusted with dingbat guano…
So he was arrested for making a false declaration for saying his name was Mike instead of Michael. Just to be clear, you’re saying he was not innocent, that this was a legitimate arrest he could have avoided just by keeping his nose clean and not being the sort of lowlife bottom-feeder who tells a police officer the name he goes by when asked what his name is?
That person was not charged with anything, he was simply a random black man standing at a bus stop who was required (illegally) to present identification without probable cause, cussed out by the Lieutenant stopping him for no reason, and then told to “get the hell out of my face” when it turned out he had no outstanding warrants. Really, you need to either read the report or shut up.
Set that weak shit aside. He was charged with making a false declaration for saying his name was Mike. His name was Michael. Do you support the officer for making that charge or not?
Is the officer to assume that the vehicle arrived there by magic, and that he just happened to have the keys in his possession and climbed into it without having any intention of eventually driving it somewhere else?
Note that not only was the stop itself unconstitutional (a subjective judgement of ‘suspicious behavior’ does not justify a stop, the officer must be able to ‘articulate’ the crime that the suspect the person has committed), but he used his canine to attack a person that he knew posed no realistic threat. The department then ‘approved’ this blatant abuse of power.
The issue in this case is not that the officer pursued a person with an outstanding warrant, it’s that he had no probable cause in the first place, that he used unreasonable force to detain a person that he knew was not armed, and that the claim he ‘feared he was armed’ was a blatant lie, since he had already patted him down.
The fact that the car is present, that it belongs to the person sitting in it, and that that person is in physical control thereof is strong evidence that a crime has already occurred.