Feds sue Ferguson to force police reform
WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department is suing the city of Ferguson in an attempt to forcibly overhaul the city’s troubled police and court operations, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Wednesday.
The decision comes hours after city leaders sought to revise a long- negotiated settlement, citing prohibitive costs of executing such a deal.
“There is no cost for constitutional policing,'' Lynch said late Wednesday.
"Painstaking negotiations lasted more than 26 weeks as we sought to remedy literally years of systematic deficiencies,'' she said of the government's action, which followed a public announcement last month of a tentative agreement that the attorney general described as "both fair and cost-effective . . . Last night, the City Council rejected the consent decree approved by their own negotiators; their decision leaves us no further choice.''
Lynch said the residents of Ferguson have been waiting "decades for justice,'' having endured civil rights breaches that established a pattern and practice of racially biased policing
a reminder of what was going on ... even if you filter out most of the bias in the report:
Many Conservatives are Blowing it on the Ferguson DOJ Report
Their reaction is neither fair, accurate, nor good for America.
I took the time over the weekend to read the entirety of the 102-page Department of Justice report on the Ferguson PD (“FPD”). I cannot recommend highly enough that you do the same. During the course of this reading, I intentionally read it with as jaundiced of an eye towards the Department of Justice as possible. I intentionally disregarded all commentary regarding what the DOJ investigators reported that they saw, and also all of their reported interviews of the citizens of Ferguson and FPD officers. I decided to say to myself, let’s assume that everything DOJ says is a lie, and also that everyone who was willing to talk to the DOJ during the course of their investigation either lied or shaded the truth. What remained astounded me.
Even if you read only the parts of the Ferguson DOJ report that come directly from the files of the FPD (which is to say, files that would be most favorable to the Department), the report paints an incredibly damning picture of the Ferguson Police Department. No conservative on earth should feel comfortable with the way the Ferguson PD has been operating for years, even according to their own documents.
The reflexive defense of the FPD by conservatives tends to come from two sources: the first is the belief among many conservatives that Officer Darren Wilson was telling the truth and that the witnesses and friends of Michael Brown were lying – and thus by extension, the DOJ is perceived to be taking the “Michael Brown side” and therefore is not credible. However, this particular source of distrust makes no sense as the DOJ likewise did not charge Officer Wilson in connection with the Michael Brown shooting. Thus, insofar as the credibility of a person is judged by whether they believe the spurious “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative, the DOJ comes down on the side of conservatives.