US clears officer in Ferguson case, criticizes police force

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

The Justice Department on Wednesday cleared a white former Ferguson, Mo., police officer in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old, but also issued a scathing report calling for sweeping changes in city law-enforcement practices it called discriminatory and unconstitutional.

The dual reports marked the culmination of months-long federal investigations into a shooting that sparked protests and a national dialogue on race and law enforcement as the tenure of Attorney General Eric Holder, the first black person to hold that office, draws to a close.

In pairing the announcements, the Obama administration sought to offset community disappointment over the conclusion that the shooting of Michael Brown was legally justified with a message of hope for Ferguson’s majority-black citizens. Officials announced 26 recommendations, including training officers in how to de-escalate confrontations and banning the use of ticketing and arrest quotas, for the police force and municipal court.

Holder called the federal report a “searing” portrait of a police department that he said functions as a collection agency for the city, with officers prioritizing revenue from fines over public safety and trouncing the constitutional rights of minorities.

“It is not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg,” Holder said.

Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III said the city had cooperated with the Justice Department and has made some changes, including a diversity training program for city employees. But the Rev. Al Sharpton, the chief eulogist at Brown’s funeral, countered that Knowles’ remarks — during a six-minute news conference where the mayor took no questions — were “mostly evasive, insignificant and showed a total failure to address the need for a change in leadership at the police department.”

The decision not to prosecute Darren Wilson, the white officer who was cleared in November by a state grand jury and has since resigned, had been expected. To win a federal civil-rights case, officials would have needed to prove that Wilson willfully deprived Brown of his rights by using unreasonable force.

Instead, the report found no evidence to disprove Wilson’s testimony that he feared for his safety during the Aug. 9 confrontation. Nor were there reliable witness accounts to establish that Brown had his hands up in surrender when he was shot, Justice Department lawyers said.

One of Wilson’s attorneys, Neil Bruntrager, said his client was satisfied with the outcome. Brown family lawyer Benjamin Crump said the family was not surprised but very disappointed, and one of Brown’s uncles, Charles Ewing, said he believed Wilson was “getting away with it.”

“I really was hoping they would have come up with better findings because this whole thing just does not add up,” Ewing said. “Everything just doesn’t make sense.”

While nights of protests over Wilson’s actions drew hundreds of protesters in recent months in Ferguson, only about 30 braved sub-freezing weather to gather Wednesday night outside the suburb’s police station, at times blocking traffic in defiance of police warnings to clear the road.

Though the federal government declined to prosecute Wilson, it found the shooting occurred in an environment of systematic mistreatment of blacks, in which officials swapped racist emails and jokes without punishment and black residents were disproportionately stopped and searched without good reason, fined for petty offenses and subjected to excessive police force.