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“Wisest Course”: Dump Ferguson P.D.

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Ron Allen of NBC News reports on the reaction of the parents of the slain Michael Brown to a Justice Department report on abuses by the Ferguson, Mo., Police Department against African Americans. (Video)

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Says Same About Neighbors

On Monday, President Obama’s Task force on 21st Century Policing delivered a long-awaited report in response to the deadly confrontations of 2014, including the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. [PDF]. On Tuesday, a biting report from the Justice Department called out the Ferguson Police Department for abuses against African Americans. And later Wednesday, the St.Louis Post-Dispatch Wednesday editorialized that “dumping its police department would be the wisest course for Ferguson — and indeed, for most of the nearly five dozen other police departments in St. Louis County.”

The editorial said, “The obscure intersection of Canfield Drive and Copper Creek Court in Ferguson has turned out to be a crossroads for American policing.

“Since then-Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown near that intersection last Aug. 9, ‘Ferguson’ has become shorthand for a wide variety of complaints about law enforcement practices, here and around the country. Not all of those complaints are valid, but some surely are.

“On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice said witness testimony and forensic evidence do not refute Mr. Wilson’s assertion that he feared for his life when he shot Mr. Brown, even though the 18-year-old was unarmed. The same conclusion was reached in November by a St. Louis County grand jury.

“But later Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder addressed the findings of his department’s investigation into the circumstances underlying the community outrage over Mr. Brown’s death. ‘Some of those protesters were right,’ Mr. Holder said, adding that the findings of the six-month investigation of the Ferguson Police Department are ‘searing.’

“The Ferguson report came two days after the release of interim recommendations from President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. What happened in Ferguson leading up to Aug. 9 underscored the importance of the task force recommendations: Police practices in large parts of America must change.

“That’s already happening in some of the nation’s more forward-thinking police departments, as well as in the two dozen departments operating with Justice Department supervision under court-approved consent decrees.

“Ferguson will have to reach its own agreement with the Justice Department or face the possibility of a civil rights lawsuit. Either way would be expensive, raising the possibility that the city could choose to disband its 52-officer police force. The neighboring city of Jennings did that in 2011, choosing to contract for services from the St. Louis County Police Department. Ironically, one of the newly unemployed Jennings officers, Darren Wilson, was hired on in Ferguson.

“The public interest, in terms of both finances and public safety, suggests that dumping its police department would be the wisest course for Ferguson — and indeed, for most of the nearly five dozen other police departments in St. Louis County. As the president’s task force noted Monday, ‘small forces often lack the resources for training and equipment accessible to larger departments.’. . .”

The editorial also said, “On progressive police forces, swaggering macho cops are being transformed — sometimes reluctantly, often enthusiastically — into better educated, better trained, more community-oriented, more diverse and more effective police forces. They’re trained to recognize their own biases. They’re using sophisticated data models to identify individual criminals instead of patrolling entire communities like occupying forces.

“Everyone, including the cops, is safer. If this could be the eventual legacy of the Ferguson tragedy, what a gift it would be.”

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