The investigations into Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri 10 years ago catapulted the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division into the spotlight.
FILE - Attorney General Eric Holder , center, speaks during a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2014, to announce the Justice Department's civil rights division will launch a broad civil rights investigation in the Ferguson, Mo., Police Department. Joining Holder are Molly Moran, left, Acting Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Division, and Ronald Davis, right, Dir. of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services .
“It was this constant, daily experience of hostile engagement with law enforcement. People were afraid to go out of their homes. They were afraid to drive because they didn’t want to get stopped. They knew that each one of those encounters would be a negative encounter,” said Jonathan Smith, who headed the Civil Rights Division section that investigated Ferguson and other troubled police forces.
Officials scoured more than 35,000 pages of police records and found city emails containing racist language. They analyzed data on stops, searches, citations, arrests and use-of-force. The team — which included attorneys, an investigator and community engagement specialists — participated in police ride-alongs, attended court proceedings and spent hours in coffeeshops talking to residents.
The report showed how Black residents were disproportionately subjected to excessive force and baseless searches-and-seizures, practices the Justice Department said reflected racial bias within the city. It accused the city of using law enforcement operations to generate revenue rather than for legitimate public safety purposes.
Even so, she said, one consequence of the department’s policing work in Ferguson was that community leaders and political figures began calling for federal intervention after similar deaths. That’s what happened in Baltimore, for instance,where a federal inquiry into the Chicago force was opened after Laquan McDonald was fatally shot by a police officer.
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