Bigoted Ferguson was 'powder keg': Our view
Black residents in Ferguson, Mo., have never had much doubt about the reason that a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager last August: The department is racist, so the killing must have been racially motivated.
They got the first part right. On Wednesday, the Justice Department exposed overwhelming evidence of pervasive bigotry in the police department: racist e-mails, racially skewed arrest records — even wild racial differences in traffic enforcement.
It is a damning picture, and one that should be studied by other cities where white police departments are at odds with minority communities.
At the same time, the Justice Department found no prosecutable civil rights violation by the officer, Darren Wilson, who shot Michael Brown.
Critics in Ferguson will likely see inconsistency and injustice in the split decision, but they should not. The fact that the department is racist does not mean that every officer is, or that Wilson acted out of racial animus.
By focusing instead on the department, Justice is more likely to get at the core problem: persistent bias in law enforcement. Police tend to deny it, but blacks nationwide perceive it almost universally, regardless of community or social standing. By definition, that's a problem, and it needs to be addressed.
By finding a pattern of discrimination and excessive force in Ferguson, rather than focusing on one officer, Justice contributes to a solution. It has investigated more than 20 other departments.
The evidence of bias in Ferguson — both statistical and anecdotal — is substantial.
In a community that is two-thirds black, 93% of arrests over a three-year period were of African Americans. The discrepancy can't be explained by any difference in the rate at which people of different races violate the law, Justice said. Nor is there any non-racial explanation for the fact that 85% of the city's traffic stops involve blacks.
Racist e-mails uncovered in the probe speak volumes about attitudes in the court system and in a police department that was just 6% black. One "jokes" about black women having abortions as a way to prevent crime. Another says President Obama wouldn't stay in office long because what black man "holds a steady job for four years."
Is it any wonder that Ferguson was a "powder keg," in the words of Attorney General Eric Holder, and that the Brown shooting, whether justified or not, touched off an explosion of rage and resentment?
Major work — training, recruiting of more minority officers and the political will to change — will be needed to fix such deep-seated problems. The Justice Department has the power to negotiate agreements or force them through the courts. In several jurisdictions across the country, including Los Angeles, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, change has taken root.
There's no longer any doubt that racism is at the heart of Ferguson's problems. Maybe it even contributed in some way to Wilson's actions and Brown's death. But the solution isn't to go after a personification of the problem. It's to go after the problem itself: an attitude that still pervades too much of law enforcement decades after chief Bull Connor set dogs on blacks in the streets of Alabama.
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