Justice Dept. won’t prosecute but finds a great deal to decry

Recent actions by the U.S. Justice Department regarding investigations of wrongdoing and racial discrimination in the deaths of two young black men might appear to be contradictory, but they are not.

In cases separated in both time and geography, the Justice Department announced that it would not be seeking federal charges against George Zimmerman, the armed neighborhood watchman who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida on Feb. 26, 2012, or against former police Officer Darrin Wilson of Ferguson, Mo., who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown last Aug.9.

Those decisions did not sit well with the Brown and Martin families, with civil rights activists or with many ordinary citizens who allege that young black men are being killed with impunity in confrontations fueled by racial bias.

But in both cases, the Justice Department was examining whether the evidence would support charging Zimmerman and Wilson with violating federal civil rights law. And in both cases, the local system of jurisprudence had already spoken. Zimmerman was found not guilty of criminal charges by a Florida jury following a trial in which he testified. In Missouri, a grand jury was presented evidence in the Brown case and declined to indict Wilson.

High standard

Those decisions aren’t an indication that the Justice Department is minimizing the role race may play in the way Americans interact. They simply reflect the high standard that prosecutors must meet in enforcing the law, especially when the federal government is pursuing action that would, in effect, trump that taken by the state or local judicial system.

The law requires the government to prove that a death was motivated by race, not just that race may have been a factor.

On the other hand, a Justice Department report into past practice by the Ferguson Police Department did show evidence of an alarming level of racial bias in everyday operations.

The Justice Department found that although African Americans make up 67 percent of Ferguson’s population, they were subject to 93 percent of the arrests made by the predominantly white police force over a two-year period.

The report chronicled the stopping of drivers without reasonable suspicion, arrests made without probable cause and the use of excessive force. It found that the police department, the administration and the courts focused on generating revenue from black residents from fines and fees, rather than protecting the community.

The investigation also uncovered blatantly racist emails exchanged within the department, and Ferguson’s mayor responded with the immediate firing of one police supervisor and the suspension of two others. While that response is commendable, it raises the question of why it was only uncovered by a federal investigation.

Why did it take a dramatic and tragic event such as the death of Michael Brown to bring federal officials to Ferguson to tell a community what local officials should have recognized: That the cancer of racism was corrupting the department and building a gulf between law enforcement officers and the people they were employed to protect and serve?

Ferguson is far from unique. Much closer to home, the Justice Department has monitored police operations in the city of Warren, and, more recently, Cleveland.

In Warren, the Justice Department began its probe after decades of complaints from the minority community about the city’s policing methods. The city entered a settlement agreement with the Justice Department in 2012 after the department found, among other things, that the city failed to properly train officers or respond to citizen complaints about mistreatment. Improvements have been made in virtually all areas found to be deficient by the probe, and citizen complaints are far fewer today.

In Cleveland, the Justice Department began its investigation in 2013, following a spectacular chase involving more than 100 officers and five dozen cruisers that ended with the car pulled over and the unarmed driver and his female passenger shot to death. Thirteen officers fired 137 shots at the stopped car, and the victims were hit more than 20 times.

‘Consent decree’

During the investigation, the city received feedback from the Justice Department and signed an agreement “to develop a court-enforceable consent decree” that mandates independent monitoring of reforms. Yet even while the department was under investigation, the city hired Timothy Loehmann, who had resigned from another department after being judged unfit for duty. And last Nov. 22 it was Loehmann who opened fire on Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy playing with a realistic-looking toy gun in a city park. Rice died the next day.

We’d say most officer-involved shootings are justified, although the lack of readily available statistics makes that difficult to prove. But more and more often, when the Justice Department is finally called in to examine the climate that exists in Ferguson (or dozens of other cities subject to review) overarching problems become obvious.

It’s the systemic bias — or even the perception of it — that builds a gulf between police departments and the people they serve and that fuels angry responses when race becomes a factor in officer-involved shootings. It shouldn’t take the Justice Department to expose problems that should be obvious to those closest to it.