Ferguson, Missouri, is two-thirds black, but the crime statistics compiled in the city over the past two years seem to suggest that black people accounted for a disproportionate amount of lawlessness. They accounted for 85 percent of traffic stops, 90 percent of tickets and 93 percent of arrests. In cases like jaywalking, which often hinge on police discretion, blacks accounted for 95 percent of all arrests.
The racial disparity in those statistics is so stark that the US Department of Justice has concluded in a report scheduled for release yesterday that there was only one explanation: The Ferguson Police Department was routinely violating the constitutional rights of its black residents.
The report, based on a six-month investigation, provides a glimpse into the roots of the racial tensions that boiled over in Ferguson last summer after a black teenager, Michael Brown, was fatally shot by a police officer, making it a worldwide flashpoint in the debate over policing in the US.
It describes a city where the police used force almost exclusively on blacks and regularly stopped people without probable cause.
Racial bias is so ingrained, the report said, that Ferguson officials circulated racist jokes on their government e-mail accounts.
In a November 2008 e-mail, a city official said US President Barack Obama would not be president long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years?”
Another e-mail included a cartoon depicting African-Americans as monkeys.
“There are serious problems here that cannot be explained away,” a law enforcement official who has seen the report said.
The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because it had not been released yet.
Those findings reinforce what the city’s black residents have been saying publicly since the shooting in August last year: that the criminal justice system in Ferguson works differently for blacks and whites.
A black motorist who is pulled over is twice as likely to be searched as a white motorist, even though searches of white drivers are more likely to turn up drugs or other contraband, the report said.
Minor, largely discretionary offenses such as disturbing the peace and jaywalking were brought almost exclusively against blacks, it said.
When whites were charged with these crimes, they were 68 percent more likely to have their cases dismissed, the department said.
“I’ve known it all my life about living out here,” Angel Goree, 39, who lives in the apartment complex where Brown was killed, said on Tuesday by telephone.
Many such statistics surfaced in the aftermath of Brown’s shooting, but the department report offers a more complete look at the data than ever before.
Federal investigators conducted hundreds of interviews, reviewed 35,000 pages of police records and analyzed race data compiled for every police stop.
The report will most likely force Ferguson officials to either negotiate a settlement with the Department of Justice or face being sued by it on charges of violating the constitution.
Since Attorney General Eric Holder took over, the department has opened more than 20 such investigations into local police departments and issued tough findings against cities including Newark, New Jersey; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Cleveland, Ohio.
It is not clear what changes Ferguson could make that would head off a Department of Justice lawsuit.
Goree said she was skeptical that changes would be made without the city being sued.
“If the justice department doesn’t take it to the full extent of the law, it’s not going to be one iota of a change,” she said.
While much of the attention in Ferguson has been on Brown’s death, federal officials quickly concluded that the shooting was simply the spark that ignited years of pent-up tension and animosity in the area.
The department was expected to issue a separate report yesterday clearing the police officer, Darren Wilson, of civil rights violations in the shooting.
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