Almost All Arrests in Ferguson Between 2012-2014 Were Black People
As expected, an initial release of the Justice Department's report from their civil rights investigation into the Ferguson, Mo. police department is damning, and concludes, the New York Times reports, that officers "have routinely violated the constitutional rights of the city's black residents."
According to the Times, the full report is expected to be released Wednesday, and will contain the following data points, culled from records from 2012–2014 (emphasis ours):
In compiling the report, federal investigators conducted hundreds of interviews, reviewed 35,000 pages of police records and analyzed race data compiled for every police stop. They concluded that, over the past two years, African-Americans — who make up about two-thirds of the city's population — accounted for 85 percent of traffic stops, 90 percent of citations, 93 percent of arrests and 88 percent of cases in which the police used force.
City officials were also found making racist jokes about black people on their government email accounts; black residents of Ferguson are twice as likely to be pulled over by the overwhelmingly white police force.
The Department of Justice's probe was announced last year by Attorney General Eric Holder in the weeks following of Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson officer, shooting and killing unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. Wilson is expected to be cleared of any civil rights violations.
[Image via AP]
