Since the Department of Justice released its report on the internal practices of the Ferguson Police Department, the national shouting match that erupted repeatedly last year resurfaced — but in a different way.
An earlier DOJ report cleared Darren Wilson of criminal wrongdoing in the death of Michael Brown last summer. Those in the Darren Wilson camp rejoiced in the federal government’s affirmation that Brown deserved to get shot several times. Regardless, people on all sides of mainstream thought accepted the DOJ report and moved on. Passions still burn, though, especially in the context of what happened after the shooting — protests that were countered by a police department more heavily armed than our troops were when they invaded Iraq in 2003.
People on each side saw themselves as champions of justice for oppressed minorities or righteous defenders of law and order. At the same time, they painted their opponents as cop-hating anarchist looters, or as a corrupt city government with a racist police force.
There were likely actual racists and anarchists on either side of the police barriers, just as there were people who earnestly believed they were doing the right thing. But the argument has become so entirely ideological that the aforementioned beliefs still persist, long after they’ve been invalidated by a DOJ report.
At the height of the controversy, the DOJ descended on the town, collecting documents and conducting interviews. What it found was an appalling story, substantiated by the FPD’s own paperwork, of a police force that acts like a revenue-collecting racket, denying citizens of their constitutional rights and using excessive force quite regularly. Officers ranked sergeant or above review their own use-of-force reports, and, to their own admission, officers punish residents simply for making them irritated and issuing citations for things like “manner of walking.” That disturbing information sits on top of overwhelming racial bias. Statistics alone demonstrate blacks in Ferguson are twice as likely to be searched, cited and arrested. Force was used against blacks disproportionately, and every police dog attack was against a black person.
Many have already criticized it as anti-police propaganda straight from President Barack Obama and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke said it will “fuel this cop hatred, this anti-police sentiment, that’s going on in America. ... We haven’t seen these types of assaults on the institution of policing since the turbulent ‘60s.” Interesting he pointed out the 1960s, when Mayor Richard Daley’s own thoroughly corrupt Chicago Police Department beat peaceful protesters into bloody heaps on national TV.
But many conservative intellectuals are moving past knee-jerk defenses of the police and are instead focusing on something that rightly disturbs them: A government enriching itself with armed agents who abuse their authority and are violently indifferent to the rights of its citizenry. Leon Wolf of RedState deliberately assumed everything the DOJ said was false when he read the report, but he was still convinced by the statistics and the FDP’s own evidence. Others are joining him — criticizing police misconduct isn’t disrespectful to the institution of law enforcement. We’re glad it’s not just the left speaking out in condemnation of the FPD’s behavior.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 3/17/2015 under the headline “Left and right finally agree on Ferguson”]
