On August 9th, 2014, Michael Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson were walking in the middle of the street when they were approached by a police officer by the name of Darren Wilson. With there being altered stories explaining what happened next rather than choosing one side of the story we can agree that an altercation occurred and it led to the unfortunate death of eighteen year old Michael Brown. Because of the differing stories and videos online, I will not focus on whether I feel like the killing of Michael Brown was justified, but whether the process to indict/or not to indict Officer Darren Wilson was justified and not flawed. Beginning as soon as you read the table of contents of the DOJ report on the Ferguson Police Department there is an eye opening consistent trend throughout. Starting with section III, the heading for the section is “Ferguson Law Enforcement Efforts Are Focused On Generating Revenue” the words unconstitutional, violation, racial bias are all regularly found within the table of contents. These issues alone would spark a person’s interest just reading those words out of a newspaper, but for them to be repetitively used within a DOJ report is mind-blowing. The DOJ report begins with stating that even thought the Ferguson population has been consistent in recent decades, the Census taken in 2010 determined that African Americans make up 67% of the population (2014). Of this population, 25% of the population is living in poverty and as the report states, “these court practices exacerbate the harm of Ferguson’s unconstitutional police practices. They impose a particular hardship upon Ferguson’s most vulnerable residents, especially upon those living in or near poverty” (2014). This information regarding Ferguson and their court issues in the past clearly raises a red flag with how Ferguson views their African American citizens. For example, there is a story included in the report about an African American woman who received two citations and a $151 fine for parking her car illegally. Because of her financial status and being homeless she was unable to pay the fine and appear to the court hearings. She tried to make partial payments, but the court rejected them and they refused to accept anything less than the full amount. During this time she spent six days in jail, paid a total of $550 dollars to the court, and she was arrested on two occasions. The worst part of this incident is that she still owes $541 when she already paid $550 for single parking violation. This incident isn’t the only time the Ferguson justice department took advantage of an African American and these incidents seem to be a consistent trend throughout this report. Reading each section and comprehending the statistics of the report may lead one to believe that the Ferguson police department is full of a bunch of racist pigs, but these statistics given are full of flaws. For example, the DOJ claims
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The DOJ provides multiple occasions where the Ferguson police department violates the 4th amendment, but the one that caught my attention the most was the incident in July of 2013. The DOJ describes the incident as racial discrimination and unlawful detention (2014, p. 17). The report articulates that the Ferguson police officers ran into an African American man while they were in the process of coming to arrest another person. Instead, the police officers arrested the man they ran into in the parking lot and ran his record without any reasonable suspicion. The man turned out to be the original arrestee’s landlord and even after the cops arrested him, the landlord helped the cops find the person they came searching for from the beginning. The man later field a complaint stating that he was racially profiled, but the police department back their officers actions and argued that “the detention as “minimal” and pointing out that the car was air conditioned (2014, p. 17). According to the constitution, the police had no right to arrest the man because the 4th amendment protects all citizens from unreasonable search and seizures. The only logical explanation of this man’s arrest was that he was arrested because of the color of his
The DOJ provides multiple occasions where the Ferguson police department violates the 4th amendment, but the one that caught my attention the most was the incident in July of 2013. The DOJ describes the incident as racial discrimination and unlawful detention (2014, p. 17). The report articulates that the Ferguson police officers ran into an African American man while they were in the process of coming to arrest another person. Instead, the police officers arrested the man they ran into in the parking lot and ran his record without any reasonable suspicion. The man turned out to be the original arrestee’s landlord and even after the cops arrested him, the landlord helped the cops find the person they came searching for from the beginning. The man later field a complaint stating that he was racially profiled, but the police department back their officers actions and argued that “the detention as “minimal” and pointing out that the car was air conditioned (2014, p. 17). According to the constitution, the police had no right to arrest the man because the 4th amendment protects all citizens from unreasonable search and seizures. The only logical explanation of this man’s arrest was that he was arrested because of the color of his