New York Times reporter Matt Apuzzo says that the Justice Department’s investigation into the Ferguson, Missouri police has found extensive racial problems:
Police officers in Ferguson, Mo., have routinely violated the constitutional rights of the city’s black residents, the Justice Department has concluded in a scathing report that accuses the officers of using excessive force and making unjustified traffic stops for years.
The Justice Department […] says the discrimination was fueled in part by racial stereotypes held by city officials. Investigators say the officials made racist jokes about blacks on their city email accounts.
This is the official answer to the question of why the protestors in Ferguson were so quick to assume that Darren Wilson was a racist murderer. The department’s racial problems would have been obvious to black people in Ferguson. They would have seen it in the way they were treated, the things that were said at the side of the road when the police stopped them, the way cops treated black people on the street. It would have been a regular topic of discussion in the black community.
So when the story of the Mike Brown shooting broke in Ferguson, this is how it looked: A member of a police department with a history of racism, equipped with a sidearm, possibly body armor, and several non-lethal weapons, confronts an unarmed and comparatively vulnerable black man on the street, and despite having a car which can be used for either cover or escape, he gets out and chases the black man down the street and shoots him multiple times, killing him. You can’t blame anybody for at least suspecting that this was a racially motivated killing.
As it happens, after a thorough investigation, which probably wouldn’t have happened without the protests, it turns out there’s some convincing evidence that Mike Brown attacked Officer Wilson. It appears to have been a reasonably justifiable shooting. But in the early days it only made sense to assume the worst — that the shooting was part of the long racist pattern of policing in Ferguson.
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