Tuesday, September 2, 2014

At least 6 Ferguson Cops Named in Civil Rights Suits

Besides Darren Wilson, the Ferguson, Mo., officer who killed unarmed Michael Brown earlier this month, six others on the same force have been named in civil rights lawsuits alleging the use of excessive force, the Washington Post reports.
Killing a mentally ill man with a Taser, pistol-whipping a child, choking and hog-tying a child and beating a man who was later charged with destroying city property because his blood spilled on officers’ clothes are just some of the allegations lodged against the officers in complaints and four federal lawsuits, including one that is on appeal, the Post writes.

About 13 percent of officers with the Ferguson Police Department, including Wilson, have faced ­excessive-force investigations, the report says. In all but one of the cases, the victims were black. Among the officers involved in the cases, one is African American, the Post says.

The Ferguson Police Department and city officials declined to comment on the cases. But police officials from outside Ferguson and plaintiffs’ lawyers told the Post that the nature of such cases suggests there is a systemic problem within the Ferguson police force.

Comparable data on excessive force investigations is not available, the Post writes. “But the National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project, funded by the libertarian Cato Institute, estimated on the basis of 2010 data that about 1 percent of U.S. police officers — 9.8 out of every 1,000 — will be cited for or charged with misconduct,” the newspaper says. Half of those cases involve excessive force.

Department of Justice officials said they are considering a wider investigation into whether there is a pattern of using excessive
force
http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/08/at_least_6_ferguson_cops_named_in_civil_rights_suits.html

5 comments:

  1. It's racist for Ferguson residents to assert that police brutality has anything to do with race...

    Just because most of their cops are white and most of their residents are black doesn't mean there's discrimination and doesn't mean that anybody's civil rights are being violated. There are perfectly rational and innocent explanations for why this may be the case.

    There may in-fact be some issues with police brutality, and perhaps even some isolated incidences of racist cops, but lately things have actually swung in the other direction (where necessary police for is intentionally NOT applied to minority residents solely based on how it might look.)

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  2. I bet you are a white person.............

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    Replies
    1. I bet he's not a person at all, neither White nor Black.Fools belong to a category of their own.

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  3. It's sheer bad faith to focus on Ferguson Police Force as if elsewhere everything were running smoothly. In fact, the entire US is fast becoming, if it has not already been turned into a Kopstate.

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