I’ve been reading the Ferguson report. It’s a horror. Every page documents an appalling violation of the whole purpose of having a police force: these people weren’t there to serve and protect, they were there to skim off as much cream from the community as they could. This wasn’t a police department, it was a racist extortion racket, oozing corruption.
Nobody who doesn’t live in the south — and who has lived someplace else, where it isn’t normal — can possibly understand how systemic, embedded, cultural, racism really is here — still. For my own part, I am more shocked that law enforcement stupidly allowed those e-mails to remain where they could be discovered than by the content of those e-mails.
None of this changes the facts so far adduced in the matter of Michael Brown’s shooting, and I don’t see what the Justice Department could have done but decline to prosecute Officer Wilson, but it sure undermines the presumption of good intent that most of us tend to grant police.