Federal officials opened their civil rights investigation into the Ferguson police department after the uproar in the St. Louis suburb and across the country over the fatal shooting in August of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson police officer. A grand jury in St. Louis declined to indict Wilson in November.
Federal officials will not bring civil rights charges against Wilson, but they see their broad civil rights investigation into the troubled Ferguson police department as the way to force significant changes in Ferguson policing.
Outgoing Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said last fall that the need for “wholesale change” in the Ferguson police department was “pretty clear.” In remarks two weeks ago, he said he was “confident that people will be satisfied with the results that we announce.”
In hundreds of interviews and in a broad review of more than 35,000 pages of Ferguson police records and other documents, Justice Department officials found that although African Americans make up 67 percent of the population in Ferguson, they accounted for 93 percent of all arrests between 2012 and 2014.
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