The jackass Ferguson, Missouri police chief is resigning, which follows on the resignations of the city’s municipal judge and city manager. You can pretty much thank Eric Holder for this, if you’re into the whole giving credit where it’s due thing.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I guess this makes six people who have resigned since the report came out.
The count of 6 probably includes the city clerk and two police officers from last week who were fired because of the racist email messages.
Or are you talking resignations only, and not people who were fired?
I can only imagine that these people who are resigning are doing so in the hopes of slinking away without further humiliation to their families and/or in the hopes of avoiding prosecution.
Yeah, I’m also wondering if there’s a difference in benefits between “resigned” and “getting your ass legally handed to you by the US DOJ”.
Well, in the “resignation” of Chief Jackson the difference is $ioo,000 severance with full benefits for a year. More than 1/2 million has been given to PD employees for golden parachutes so far.
The interim Chief, Al Eickhoff, was Darren Wilson’s supervisor & the Lt. that met with Wilson and his pregnant police officer girlfriend (on light duty because of their pregnancy) at the Ferguson police department after the killing of Michael Brown. He allowed Wilson to keep his duty belt. Fearing for wilson’s safety, he also issued him another gun before sending him home to his white suburban home to recuperate after the “incident”.
BTW, it’s back to August tonight at the Ferguson PD and arrests include a father and his 14 year old son. The officers seem to be from other St Louis Co. municipal PDS. Most cops are not wearing name tags but in partial riot gear.
The DOJ will be back to “negotiate” the consent degree next week.
I think the tricksy prosecutor is the last man standing with executive function in the whole magilla.
April 7 elections for City Council. (Send a couple of bucks to aFerguson protestor candidate: http://bobhudginsforthepeople.com/)
However Mayor Knowles is still in office and he is disreputable. Still hasn’t read the DoJ Report because there aren’t racial problems in Ferguson. The DoJ Report now tells us Knowles and his wife were and are personal friends with Wilson and his police officer wife Barbie.
From one of the linked articles:
“The city of Ferguson repealed some of the fees, including a “failure to appear fine,” during the Justice Department’s investigation.”
Failure to appear fine. Was there not a single rational person anywhere in power in that entire town?
those fines on ppl who could least afford it were how they avoided raising taxes on the wealthy. lots written about it, and it’s widespread, even worse in nearby towns
busy day today but will find link to WaPo article about this when I get a chance [tomorrow?]
Those are pretty normal. Try not appearing for your traffic ticket.
You can pretty much thank Eric Holder for this, if you’re into the whole giving credit where it’s due thing.
Okay — but why does is always require the death by cop of yet another young black (and occasionally a white friend) man and large local and national protests organized by black leaders to shut down or reform these corrupt, racist public agencies? Is Ferguson unique in the US today? How many other towns and cities are similar? Ten? A Hundred? A Thousand?
Will Ferguson send the message to all those other town/cities that they had better clean up their act as of yesterday? Do the expulsions from OH result in frat boys everywhere giving up their racist words and deeds? Or do they become cleverer at hiding their despicable behaviors and society as a whole has to root them out one by one over the next three hundred years?
Yes, the DOJ’s actions re. Ferguson have proven that Eric Holder doesn’t care about black people. Good point.
How you concluded that from my comment is bizarre. Did I need to say, “Yes, Holder gets credit for this” instead of merely “Okay?”
Was the “troll” rating you gave my comment intentional (for emphasis because it’s accepted here that I’m not a troll) or inadvertent?
You pulled from BooMan’s post a quote which credits Holder’s leadership of the DOJ for this issue, and immediately followed it up with a “SO WHAT WE STILL HAVE RACISM” treatise. So F Holder, I guess?
Then you conclude with asking if we are going to have to keep on unearthing these horrendous racist incidents and their more frequent, less explicit cousins. To which I say, yes we will, and of course, and thank God for every one we unearth, reverse and punish. What action could the DOJ take that would end racism? It’s a bizarre question. If it’s a rhetorical question, then I apologize for misunderstanding, but the question is framed as a direct response to the quote you pulled from Boo.
You are not a habitual troll on the Frog Pond, but for these reasons I found this particular comment awfully trolly.
immediately followed it up with a “SO WHAT WE STILL HAVE RACISM” treatise. So F Holder, I guess?
Didn’t say that (and you are lying to claim that I did). Nor did I imply any direct criticism of Holder in my generic lament about the difficulty of cleaning up corrupt and racist local governments.
What I said (and others seemed not to have had any difficulty reading it) was: Okay — but why does is [it] always require the death by cop of yet another young black (and occasionally a white friend) man and large local and national protests organized by black leaders to shut down or reform these corrupt, racist public agencies?
Did I need to say, “why can’t be clean up these rotten agencies BEFORE the cops kill another young black man” for you to understand my point? Or do you often purposely misread my comments, incorrectly paraphrase them, and twist them into something to pick a fight with me about? In this instance, you leaped to a conclusion, assuming the worst about me, with no hesitation or doubt about your reading/interpretation. You could have responded with “Are you criticizing Holder and disagreeing that he deserves credit?” To which I would have responded, “No.”
Also, FWIW, my criticisms of Holder over the past six years have been limited to his handling, mostly non-handling, of the financial crooks. I’ve deferred to his judgment on other tough calls that he’s had to make even when with my much more limited access to information, I might disagree. Others, both on the left and right, have reamed him up one side and the other over those tough calls.
Points accepted; my apologies. I don’t intentionally misread your posts; I do sometimes misread them.
It’s worth pointing our that the last sentence of BooMan’s post employed satire in order to discourage commenters from engaging in cynicism in direct response to the outcomes he was specifically pointing out. Many of the most egregious perpetrators among Ferguson staff have resigned or have been fired; there has been a substantial sweeping away of these people within a week of the DOJ report. Yet, Frog Ponders swept in with cynical responses anyway; you were hardly the only one. At the moment I scrolled down, yours was at the top, so I attacked it. I plan to be more thoughtful in the future.
Food for thought: should we discuss how much, much more there is to be done to create and restore justice in this country? Yes, please. BooMan and others post comments inviting our viewpoints and ideas about these subjects every week. I believe other threads invite those worried explorations and discussions more readily than this one.
Let’s enjoy for a moment the Ferguson Police Chief and other scumbags having their considerable power forcibly ripped away from them, shall we?
Stories of that particular business model and the abuses of asset forfeiture have been out there for decades. Our national press was quite willing to ignore them.
Now that we know the DOJ is powerful enough to take on a 7-officer police department and hold them accountable, how about the LAPD, NYPD, and CPD, and other remaining notorious police departments?
I wonder if it actually is a good thing that the Racist Party is now so openly racist. Oh, we aren’t quite to the sort of quotes that were common in the south during the 1960s, but pretty damn close. It’s a lot harder to fight racism when it’s hidden under the covers, especially when the racists have 30 years of research on issue framing to their advantage. But anyone who read that report and thinks it wasn’t a problem is a racist – no caveats whatsoever.
Hmm, ironic that Darren Wilson was the person who got out okay here.
Anyhow, so what happens if the entire city government and structures are rotten? Who runs the town? How? Are there people who can do the job that can be installed/elected rapidly? Is DOJ going to put a city manager before elections?
Well, Wilson was the first Ferguson worker to lose his job, whether voluntary or not. And it’s impossible to imagine him as employable in law enforcement. And there’s the civil trial coming, where I hope he is placed in permanent legal penance for killing a person because he couldn’t be bothered to execute de-escalation policing tactics. While morally he deserved much, much more punishment for what he did, including loss of freedom, hard to say he didn’t lose anything.
Was he even trained in de escalation tactics? One of the things that came out of it us a lot of cops aren’t. Hell NYC uses Roadhouse as part of de-escalation class according to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.
Wilson (or more precisely, the fact he was employed as a police officer) is a symptom, not a problem. The real problem is that the city official were quite deliberately trying to run the city plantation-style, extorting money from the poor and from African-Americans. The people making the decisions were the ones who really had to go to solve the problem. At least some are gone now.
When they change their business model.
These are justifiable ‘resignations’, to be sure, but also likely a strategy employed to protect the City of Ferguson’s infamous income stream from disruption. The seniority and scope of these ‘resignations’ give one a rough idea of the price the city is willing to pay to insulate their underlying revenue generation scheme which is the real problem.
Shiny objects for the magpies.
sitting at breakfast just heard a news bulletin on local Dutch radio. During a protest at the Ferguson police station, shots were fired that injured two policemen. There were transported to a hospital …
Two “seriously injured” officers-not from the city of Ferguson, several other small municipality police were “guarding” the FPD from the peaceful protestors- were released from the hospital before 10 AM. A great deal of “immoral imagination” encircling the St Louis Co. investigation lead by chief Belmar of infamous reputation in the last 210 days of protests. Three arrests at a home in Ferguson. Reports by neighbors a SWAT team has not found evidence in the “attic”.