As the first images from Ferguson, Mo., surfaced 10 years ago — the bloodied body of a man left for hours in the street beneath sheets, protesters smashing car windows and looting stores — it didn’t take long for the federal government to see a role for itself, the Associated Press reports. The FBI within two days opened a criminal investigation into the killing of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer, while the main Justice Department less than a month later started a civil rights inquiry that resulted in a devastating report that identified abuses by the city’s overwhelmingly white police force and court system. The investigations put the DOJ Civil Rights Division into the spotlight, bringing heightened publicity to a unit whose work since its 1957 creation included fighting for voting rights and prosecuting Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Rodney King. The Ferguson probes became part of a cluster of high-profile investigations into police departments, work that fed a national dialogue on race and law enforcement and formed a legacy of the Obama administration Justice Department before being largely abandoned under President Trump. Inquiries into big-city police forces returned under President Biden.
“I can’t tell you the number of chiefs I’ve talked to who told me that they had their officers read the Ferguson report, that they did trainings around it,” said Vanita Gupta, who ran the Civil Rights Division starting two months after Brown’s death through the remainder of the Obama administration. “It became a document that had a life far beyond Ferguson and really triggered conversations nationwide around justice and policing.” The public outcry in Ferguson didn’t occur in a vacuum, coming two years after the killing of Black teen Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida and on the heels of federal investigations that exposed pervasive problems in police departments in Seattle, Albuquerque and Newark. In Ferguson, residents protested not only Brown’s death but also decades of mistreatment by police and city officials. Besides the investigation into Brown’s death, the Justice Department separately opened a civil inquiry into the entire police department. Officials scoured more than 35,000 pages of police records and found city emails containing racist language. They analyzed data on stops, searches, citations, arrests and use-of-force. The team, including lawyers, an investigator and community engagement specialists, participated in police ride-alongs, attended court proceedings and spent hours in coffeeshops talking to residents.
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