WHY ERIC HOLDER WON’T LET GO OF FERGUSON

The attorney general seems intent on taking one more jab at the police before leaving the Justice Department

By Jason L. Riley

The Wall Street Journal
February 24, 2015

When all was said and done, the events that unfolded in Ferguson, Mo., last summer were not extraordinary but rather all too familiar. Eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, a black robbery suspect, resisted arrest, attacked a police officer and was shot dead. We’ve seen this movie many times before. But what might have prompted a helpful discussion about high crime rates in black communities has instead prompted a dishonest debate over police behavior.

Professional agitators in the civil-rights community push false narratives to stay relevant, but we should expect more from the Justice Department. Instead, we have Attorney General Eric Holder channeling Al Sharpton . Last week Mr. Holder said that he will soon announce the results of his Ferguson investigation. CNN, citing “sources,” reported that Darren Wilson, the police officer involved in the shooting, is unlikely to be charged but that Justice is preparing to sue the Ferguson police department “over a pattern of racially discriminatory tactics used by police officers, if the police department does not agree to make changes on its own.”

After months of looking into the incident, the Justice Department seems to have come to the same conclusion as the Ferguson grand jury and found no grounds for a criminal prosecution of Mr. Wilson. Mr. Holder might now be trying to justify his bigfooting by suing the city, but there is probably no basis for that, either. Hence, the leak to the media that a civil lawsuit may be in the works. The leak was an egregious breach of protocol and, in effect, a threat. We’ve seen this movie before, too.

In 1994, Congress passed a bill that made unlawful “the pattern or practice” of conduct by police “that deprives persons of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” Since the law’s inception, the Justice Department has taken action against more than 50 state and local police departments, and nearly all have opted to settle rather than litigate. Investigations often come at the urging of groups like the NAACP and ACLU. Settlements typically involve a police department adopting “best practices” that can encompass the entire realm of policing—hiring, training, supervision—and are drawn up by Justice Department lawyers with little or no experience in law enforcement.

“This is about expanding federal power in the police departments,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department attorney, in an interview. “The lawyers at Justice believe they are the ones who should be promulgating national standards of how cops should behave. And police departments are so afraid of bad publicity that they agree to settle the case with all kinds of rules that Justice wants to impose.”

Pretending that racist police departments (or prosecutors or sentencing guidelines) are a bigger problem than black criminality may line Mr. Sharpton’s pockets and excite the Democratic base, but it won’t prevent future Fergusons or make inner cities less violent and more hospitable to the mostly law-abiding residents who can’t afford to live anywhere else. And to the extent that federal intervention results in police officers becoming overly cautious, neighborhood delinquents gain the upper hand and the community gets more dangerous. After New York City police cut back on the use of stop-and-frisk—after a judge ruled against the policing technique in 2013 and Mayor Bill de Blasio ’s administration refused to challenge the ruling—gun violence rose dramatically. Over the past year, shootings have climbed by 23%. As one police officer told the Daily News, “Guys know they’re not going to get stopped, so they’re packing more now”—in other words, carrying guns.

The Justice Department lawsuits imply that blacks are disproportionately targeted by police due to their skin color, not their behavior, but most serious research refutes that notion. “Contrary to frequently voiced accusations and despite a voluminous literature intent upon demonstrating discrimination at every turn, there is almost no reliable evidence of racial bias in the criminal justice system’s handling of ordinary violent and non-violent offenses,” Amy Wax, a former Justice Department official who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, wrote in “Race, Wrongs, and Remedies” (2009). “Rather, the facts overwhelmingly show that blacks go to prison more often because blacks commit more crimes.”

Attorney General Holder accuses Americans of being afraid to talk honestly about race relations, then uses his office to scapegoat police departments for black pathology. The conversation that Mr. Holder wants to have about race assumes facts not in evidence. It is also the wrong message to send to the young black men responsible for so much violent crime. These lawsuits make excuses for behavior that ought to be condemned and distract from a much more consequential debate about black cultural attitudes toward work, marriage, parenting and the rule of law. What ails these black communities are the Michael Browns, not the Darren Wilsons. And Mr. Holder’s war on cops won’t change that.

Mr. Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor, is the author of “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed” (Encounter Books, 2014).