Thursday, March 05, 2015

The Ferguson Report shows exactly what living in a police state is like...

On Tuesday, several media outlets began leaking bits of information from the report from the federal probe on the Ferguson Police Department, which has been eagerly awaited since the probe was launched last September. Today, the report was officially released, and it details how city officials and police officers systematically and routinely violated the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights of citizens, motivated both by the desire to increase revenue and, of course, straight-up bigotry.

Although there are 54 officers in the Ferguson Police Department, only four are African American. This is largely out of step with the city's population, which has changed greatly in the past 20 years to become 67 percent black. Although we knew before today that the Department of Justice was going to slam Ferguson, we now know for sure that, for example, "partly as a consequence of city and FPD priorities, many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson's predominately African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue," as the report's authors put it.

 We also now have specific examples of what it's like to be black and live there—and it sounds a lot like being a character in a dystopian novel. According to the report, cops in Ferguson regularly engaged in "ped checks" or "Terry stops"—slang for stopping and searching people for no discernible reason. Here's one of many instances the DOJ found in which citizens were treated like dollar signs by cops: Full story...

Related posts:
  1. How reality TV is teaching us to accept the American police state...
  2. Ferguson shows how the police can kill and get away with it...
  3. John Oliver: Ferguson, MO and police militarization...
  4. Democracy in the United States is a ‘hollow myth’
  5. What's behind all those right-wing cop shootings in America?
  6. Police violence and the American gulag...
  7. The inauguration of police state USA. Towards a democratic dictatorship?

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