Breaking: Racism, Excessive Force Against Blacks By Ferguson Police Exposed In DOJ Report

The Justice Department is about to release a report chronicling bias, excessive force, and extreme racism embedded in the Ferguson Police Dept.

The U.S. Department of Justice is about to release a report on racism in the Ferguson Police Department. Ferguson has been the locus of civil rights protests ever since Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed 18-year old Michael Brown last summer.

The report will reveal a “pattern of police bias and excessive force,” according to the New York Times.

“Police officers in Ferguson, Mo., have routinely violated the constitutional rights of the city’s black residents, the Justice Department has concluded in a scathing report that accuses the officers of using excessive force and making unjustified traffic stops for years,” the Times reports.

The Dept. of Justice “says the discrimination was fueled in part by racial stereotypes held by city officials. Investigators say the officials made racist jokes about blacks on their city email accounts.,” the Times adds. 

They concluded that, over the past two years, African-Americans — who make up about two-thirds of the city’s population — accounted for 85 percent of traffic stops, 90 percent of citations, 93 percent of arrests and 88 percent of cases in which the police used force.

Black motorists were twice as likely as whites to be searched but were less likely to be found in possession of contraband such as drugs or guns.

NPR notes emails sent from Ferguson Police Dept. officials that were especially racist and ugly.

One says Obama will not be president for long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years.” Another says a black woman in New Orleans was admitted to a hospital to end her pregnancy and then got a check two weeks later from “Crime Stoppers.”

MSNBC adds that the report will show “Blacks were even bitten by police dogs disproportionately. In each of the 14 cases involving someone being bitten by a police dog, that person was black.”

The full report will be released Wednesday.

 

Image by sarah-ji via Flickr and a CC license 
There is no relation between the DOJ report and any officer depicted in the image above.