The Lingering Damage of Ferguson’s Racism

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/opinion/editorials/ferguson-racism-fred-watson.html

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When Justice Department investigators examined the city of Ferguson, Mo., after a white police officer shot and killed an African-American teenager named Michael Brown in 2014, they found no grounds to charge the officer with federal civil rights violations. But they did uncover endemic bigotry among city officials, as well as policing that routinely violated black residents’ constitutional rights, with brutality and excessive, often bogus, enforcement.

Such enforcement was an essential component of a corrupt system in which the city budget depended heavily on fines and fees, as do other cities’ throughout the country. Once caught up in Ferguson’s system, African-Americans were far less likely than others to have their cases dismissed and were often required to return for multiple court appearances.

Ferguson agreed to a consent decree requiring it to root out the racist and unconstitutional practices that Justice officials documented in a hair-raising report two years ago.

The city, however, has a further obligation: a moral duty to compensate victims of abusive policing. A case in point is Fred Watson, an African-American father of two who lost his home, career and peace of mind after he was unjustly arrested five years ago, with the city prosecutor pursuing the charges until dropping them last week.

The Justice Department cited Mr. Watson’s case as a particularly vivid example of how the police routinely engaged in abusive and unconstitutional behavior. The encounter began with Mr. Watson sitting behind the wheel of his car near a Ferguson park after he had just played basketball. A police officer approached and drew his weapon.

The officer, who had a record of brutality and misconduct, accused Mr. Watson without cause of being a pedophile, forbade him to use his cellphone and demanded to search the car. When Mr. Watson cited his constitutional rights and refused, the officer searched the car without permission and issued several bogus tickets — including one for not wearing a seatbelt, even though the car was parked.

The city later claimed that Mr. Watson had pleaded guilty. But according to court documents, the city lacked records needed to support that claim. Moreover, a lawyer who represented Mr. Watson at the time maintained that he had entered no such agreement. Early this year, the St. Louis County court essentially nullified the suspect plea.

Mr. Watson, a veteran of the United States Navy, has filed a federal lawsuit charging the city and the officer who arrested him with violating his rights.

The damage to the Watson family has been catastrophic. According to court documents, Mr. Watson’s arrest cost him the top-security clearance that had allowed him to work in the cybersecurity industry for more than a decade. The family’s lawyers say the Watson children have dropped out of private school and have periodically lived with their father in storage units or slept in their car.

The city needs to financially compensate the family and apologize for this tragedy. It also needs to consider whether it could truly be complying with the consent order if it continued to hound Mr. Watson for five years.