Holder slams Ferguson police force: 'Collection agency'
Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday that the Justice Departments investigation provided a searing account of unconstitutional police practices in Ferguson, Missouri and that all options are on the table in pursuit of reform.
The speech came after the department released two reports on its investigation in Ferguson one of which cleared Officer Darren Wilson of all federal charges in the shooting death of Michael Brown last August, the other of which outlined a pattern of practice investigation into police and municipal court conduct in Ferguson.
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The report on Wilson led the Department of Justice to multiple, often conflicting witness accounts, sometimes provided by the same individuals whose stories changed over time.
Holder said a possible explanation for this discrepancy was the distrust outlined in the second, larger investigation into police-community relations in Ferguson.
The attorney general spent a chunk of his remarks sharing the stories of Ferguson residents whose rights he said had been violated by Ferguson law enforcement.
One woman, Holder said, was given two parking tickets in 2007 that together tallied $152. To date, she has paid $550 in fines and fees, been arrested twice for unpaid tickets and spent 6 days in jail. Still, she owes the city $541.
Local authorities consistently approached law enforcement not as a means for protecting public safety, but as a way of generating revenue, Holder said, adding that racial bias both implicit and explicit results in the unconstitutional execution of the law.
Officers in Ferguson routinely violate the Fourth Amendment, Holder said, and stop citizens without reasonable suspicion and then use unreasonable force against them. Incidents often blatantly cross the line, he said.
Holder outlined another incident from the summer of 2012 in which a Ferguson police officer detained a 32-year-old African-American man, ostensibly for having car windows tinted darker than the citys ordinances allowed. The officer then accused the man of being a pedophile, ordered him to get out of the car for a pat-down, and then, when he refused, arrested him on eight different charges. The arrests caused the man to lose his job.
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Holder slams Ferguson police force: 'Collection agency'