By Sari Horwitz
The Justice Department will issue findings Wednesday that accuse the police department in Ferguson, Mo., of racial bias and routinely violating the constitutional rights of black citizens by stopping drivers without reasonable suspicion, making arrests without probable cause and using excessive force, officials said.
The Justice Department also plans to release evidence this week of racial bias found in e-mails written by Ferguson police and municipal court officials. A November 2008 e-mail, for instance, stated that President Obama could not be president for very long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years.”
Federal officials opened their civil rights investigation into the Ferguson police department after the uproar in the St. Louis suburb and across the country over the fatal shooting in August of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, by Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson police officer. A grand jury in St. Louis declined to indict Wilson in November.
In hundreds of interviews and in a broad review of more than 35,000 pages of Ferguson police records and other documents, Justice Department officials found that although African Americans make up 67 percent of the population in Ferguson, they accounted for 93 percent of all arrests between 2012 and 2014.
“If the report of the Department of Justice findings is accurate, then it will confirm what Michael Brown’s family has believed all along, and that is that the tragic killing of their unarmed teenage son was part of a systemic pattern of policing of African American citizens in Ferguson,” said Benjamin Crump, the attorney for Brown’s family.