Feds won’t charge Ferguson officer in Michael Brown’s death

Attorney General Eric Holder announced Wednesday that no federal civil rights charges will be brought against the former Ferguson, Mo., police officer who shot and killed unarmed teenager Michael Brown last August.

While a separate Justice Department probe found systemic bias in the Ferguson Police Department overall, Holder said prosecutors couldn’t clear the high hurdle needed to file charges against former Officer Darren Wilson.

“The facts do not support the filing of criminal charges against Officer Darren Wilson in this case,” Holder said at a news conference. “Michael Brown’s death, while a tragedy, did not involve prosecutable conduct on behalf of Officer Wilson.”

Federal charges would have required prosecutors to prove that Wilson knowingly and deliberately violated Brown’s constitutionally protected civil rights during their ill-fated Aug. 9 encounter. This would mean, for instance, that Wilson used unreasonable force and targeted the 18-year-old Brown because of race.

Wilson is white. Brown was African-American. After the shooting and the demonstrations that ensued, Holder himself visited Ferguson and directed his department to find out what had happened and why.

“The promise that I made when I went to Ferguson, and at the time we launched our investigation, was not that we would arrive at a particular outcome, but rather that we would pursue the facts, wherever they lay,” Holder said.

Justice Department investigators said their review, spelled out in an 86-page report released Wednesday, included dozens of interviews, the canvassing of more than 300 Ferguson households and the use of “physical, ballistic, forensic and crime scene evidence; medical reports and autopsy reports.”

The investigators concluded Wilson had fired his gun 12 times during the two-minute noontime encounter on Ferguson’s Canfield Drive.

Physical evidence corroborates Wilson’s account that he first shot Brown during a struggle over the gun, while autopsy results confirm that Wilson did not subsequently shoot Brown in the back when the teenager ran away, the report says. “Blood evidence” further corroborates witness statements that Brown appeared to pose a physical threat to Wilson, according to the report.

Federal investigators discounted as unreliable or inconsistent with the physical and forensic evidence some eyewitness claims that Brown had raised his hands in a sign of compliance.

“There is no credible evidence that Wilson willfully shot Brown as he was attempting to surrender or was otherwise not posing a threat,” the report says.

Brown’s parents said in a statement that they were disappointed in the decision not to prosecute Wilson.

“While we are saddened by this decision, we are encouraged that the DOJ will hold the Ferguson Police Department accountable for the pattern of racial bias and profiling they found in their handling of interactions with people of color,” said Lesley McSpadden, Brown’s mother, and his father, Michael Brown Sr. “It is our hope that through this action, true change will come not only in Ferguson, but around the country.”

The Justice Department decision to forgo prosecution was widely expected because of the high burden of proof. The decision announced Wednesday followed a similar declaration Feb. 24 that no federal charges would be brought against George Zimmerman for the 2012 shooting in Florida of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin.

Both shootings sparked demonstrations, political maneuvering and considerable commentary. The Ferguson shooting also prompted a broader federal investigation into how the nearly all-white Ferguson Police Department has operated in the predominantly African-American community.

In that 102-page report, also formally made public Wednesday, Justice Department investigators spelled out 26 recommendations to address what they called a pattern or practice of discriminatory behavior by local court and law enforcement officials. Holder termed the report “searing.”

Investigators found, for instance, that:

▪ From 2012 to 2014, 93 percent of the people arrested in Ferguson were African-American, though African-Americans accounted for only 67 percent of the city’s population.

▪ In 88 percent of the cases in which Ferguson police documented a use of force, it was deployed against African-Americans. African-Americans were the targets in all 14 reported instances of a Ferguson police dog biting an individual.

▪ Ferguson police overwhelmingly charged African-Americans with petty offenses, for which fines and court appearances can impose a substantial burden. From 2011 to 2013, for instance, African-Americans accounted for 95 percent of individuals charged with a “manner of walking in roadway” offense.

The federal investigators also uncovered email trails that documented racial bias.

One November 2008 email, attributed to an unnamed city official, discounted the possibility of Barack Obama staying president because “what black man holds a steady job for four years.” Another email, from May 2011, jokingly characterized the termination of an African-American pregnancy as part of a Crime Stoppers program.

“This investigation found a community that was deeply polarized; a community where deep distrust and hostility often characterized interactions between police and area residents,” Holder said.

Jeffrey Mittman, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri, called the Justice Department’s findings intolerable and “not unique to Ferguson.”

“In cities and towns across the United States, communities of color are under siege by their own police departments,” Mittman said in a statement.

The federal recommendations include ending Ferguson’s aggressive reliance on issuing arrest warrants as a means of collecting fines. The city anticipates collecting $3 million in fines and fees this year, double the amount from five years ago.

Other recommendations include prohibiting the use of ticket or arrest quotas by Ferguson police, providing better supervision of officers’ “stop, search, ticketing and arrest practices” and improving tactics for handling “vulnerable people,” such as the mentally ill.

Justice Department officials said they “will seek to work with the city of Ferguson and the Ferguson community to develop and reach an agreement for reform.”

“If that change happens, our son’s death will not have been in vain,” Brown’s parents said.

Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III and other city officials were briefed on the Justice Department report Tuesday and indicated they’d offer a reaction sometime Wednesday.

Past investigations by the Special Litigation Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division have resulted in collaborative changes and consent decrees, with agencies such as the New Orleans and Cleveland police departments.

When law enforcement agencies are recalcitrant, the investigations can lead to federal lawsuits such as one filed in 2012 against the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona.

This story was originally published March 4, 2015 at 9:48 AM with the headline "Feds won’t charge Ferguson officer in Michael Brown’s death."