Ferguson police chief resigns

Associated Press

FERGUSON, MO.

The police chief in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson resigned Wednesday in the wake of a scathing Justice Department report prompted by the fatal shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old by a white police officer.

Calling Chief Thomas Jackson an “honorable man,” Mayor James Knowles III announced the city had reached a mutual separation agreement that will pay Jackson one year of his nearly $96,000 annual salary and health coverage.

Jackson’s resignation becomes effective next Thursday, at which point Lt. Col. Al Eickhoff will become acting chief while the city searches for a replacement.

Jackson previously had resisted calls by protesters and some of Missouri’s top elected leaders to step down over his handling of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown and the weeks of sometimes-violent protests that followed. He was widely criticized from the outset, both for an aggressive police response to protesters and for his agency’s erratic and infrequent releases of key information.

He took nearly a week to publicly identify Officer Darren Wilson as the shooter and then further heightened tension in the community by releasing Wilson’s name at the same time as store security video that police said showed Brown stealing a box of cigars and shoving a clerk only a short time before his death.

Jackson submitted a four-sentence letter in which he said he was announcing his resignation with profound sadness. He told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he felt it was time for the city to move on.

“I believe this is the appropriate thing to do at this time,” Jackson said. “This city needs to move forward without any distractions.”

During a 12-minute news conference, Knowles said Jackson resigned after “a lot of soul-searching” about how the community could heal from the racial unrest stemming from the fatal shooting last summer.

Jackson becomes the sixth employee to resign or be fired after the U.S. Department of Justice last week issued the report that cleared Wilson of civil-rights charges in the shooting but found a profit-driven court system and widespread racial bias in the city police department.