Kudos to a Redstate.com contributor for going through the DOJ's Ferguson report and and highlighting what a racist, out of control, disgraceful city it is.

I specifically like how the author stripped out the narrative section of the report, which was filled with DOJ conclusions and interviews conducted with town residents and focused simply on the data provided by the Ferguson PD, which was plenty damning on its own, even as the author notes that the data was probably white washed.

I highly recommend reading the whole thing but I cherrypicked some sections for you.....

.....Perhaps the most damning portion of the DOJ report is the beginning, which lays out in painstaking detail (consisting entirely of information pulled from the City of Ferguson’s records) that the FPD’s primary purpose  in Ferguson was to generate revenue for the city’s budget. The report contains a shocking volume of documentary evidence, including emails, that Ferguson’s police supervisors, including the City Manager, repeatedly hounded Ferguson officers to increase their ticket fines without regard to whether the tickets they were writing were justified. While police departments across the country like to repeatedly claim that they do not have “ticket quotas,” and that they are solely interested in public safety, this report gives the lie to that claim, at least in Ferguson. The internal emails collected during this investigation show a pattern of behavior that most Americans have long suspected exists behind closed doors in many police departments: discipline issued for failing to write enough tickets, threatening emails to cops who are under performing in writing tickets, and prominent “score sheets” posted showing who top “performers” are.

If you read nothing else in the report, flip to page nine, roman numeral 3, and read that section. The results of this tremendous top-down pressure are astounding. Between the years of 2010 and 2014, revenues from fines and fees assessed by the Ferguson PD almost tripled, from $1.38M to over $3.0M. As a consequence, the portion of the city’s budget that was comprised by revenue from these fines increased from about 10% to about 25%. Each year the city has budgeted for these increases and clearly ordered the FPD to get them at any cost.

In this respect, at least, Ferguson is illustrated to be much worse than surrounding municipalities. Fines for trivial offenses like having tall grass at your home are much, much worse than surrounding localities. The overall revenue of Ferguson is more closely tied to this downward pressure than other localities in the area – again, according to Ferguson’s own internal documents including emails from city Finance officials bragging about their brilliant revenue generation plan.

......Worse still, the entire municipal system, including the City’s municipal court, is under the supervision of the FPD and clearly views their sole job as ratcheting up the collection of fines and fees rather than fairly adjudicating cases before them. In spite of the fact that a significant portion of Ferguson’s population lives below the poverty line, Ferguson has no system in place to determine ability-to-pay with respect to municipal fines and offers no community service alternative for those who are unable to pay. As a result, the Ferguson municipal court and police system operates functionally as a debtor’s prison. Inability to pay fines, or missing a single payment on a payment plan, results in the immediate issuance of an arrest warrant – the crippling effects of which are seen in the sheer volume of these warrants that are issued. In the last year alone, the city issued over 9,000 warrants for failure to pay fines, and there are over 16,000 of these warrants currently outstanding. Given that Ferguson has a total population of 21,000 people, this provides a perverse and ready incentive for Ferguson cops to stop virtually any citizen they see without probable cause and “run their license” for warrants – and evidence (from FPD’s own records) indicate that this was a regular practice, and that its brunt was felt almost exclusively in Ferguson’s black community (over 96% of the people who were arrested solely for having an oustanding warrant during the study period were black).

.....Based only on the information contained within the actual FPD “use of force” reports, the FPD habitually uses excessive force in blatant violation of the Constitution and their own policies. By the officers’ own descriptions in the reports they turned in, they habitually used force that was excessive to the required situation, especially with respect to their use of canine attacks and taser attacks. Numerous instances even within these (quite possibly sanitized) reports indicate that officers used force in response to mere verbal belligerence or no force at all. Numerous inmates were, by officers’ own admissions in these reports, tased while behind locked bars (in one instance, an inmate was tased in the back while he was behind closed and locked bars). Canines were used in situations where, by the officers’ own descriptions, force was not necessary.

Further, by the words of the officers’ own reports, both tasers and canines were used in situations where no force – or much more minimal – force was required. In one instance, an officer was equipped with one of the “new” tasers that has a camera that is activated when it is in use and clearly showed the officer tazing a suspect who was offering no threat at all to the police officer in question. The clear impression, even from the Ferguson PD’s own evidence, is that the Ferguson PD for years has used force – especially tasers – in a retaliatory way towards anyone who commits “contempt of cop” rather than as a means to ensure the safety or the public or of officers. And as with almost all other aspects of the report, it was demonstrated that Ferguson’s black community was much more likely to have force – as well as inappropriate force – used against them. For instance, each and every single instance of canine attack ordered by the Ferguson PD was against a black suspect. Blacks were shown, even among the population of arrested citizens, to have tasers and other methods of physical force used against them with far greater frequency.

.......One of the most infuriating sections of the DOJ report describes the misuse and abuse of several municipal code sections that are blatantly facially overbroad under the constitution and serve no purpose other than to allow cops to arrest and fine the citizens of Ferguson for offenses that can only be described as “contempt of cop” violations. The DOJ brief is replete with instances of dozens of citations and arrests for violations of the City’s “Failure to Obey,” “Failure to Comply,” “Manner of Walking,” and “Resisting Arrest,” where, even according to the charging document, the charged conduct can only be described as making a police officer irritated. Numerous instances were recounted where citizens were arrested for “Failure to Obey” or “Failure to Comply” where the described order was facially illegal or in excess of legitimate police authority.

Charging documents (again provided by the FPD) revealed that in officers’ own words, they arrested and cited citizens in retaliation for exercising their First Amendment rights not to be polite to cops, including one woman who was, by admission, arrested for peacefully calling an officer’s supervisor during the course of that officer making an arrest in her presence that she felt involved the excessive use of force. The Ferguson PD also engaged repeatedly in conduct that can only be described as retaliation against citizens for attempting to videotape them, a behavior that has been roundly condemned on the conservative side of the aisle.

The Ferguson PD also has policies and practices that are blatantly unconstitutional and that essentially invite any FPD officer to stop any person in Ferguson without probable cause or judicial oversight for the purpose of running their warrants (see above). One particularly troubling aspect of this system set forth in the report is the Ferguson PD’s use of “wanteds,” a system in which the Ferguson PD is essentially allowed to issue their own arrest warrants without judicial oversight at all and which is predictably by all accounts subject to widespread abuse. The “wanteds” system, even as described in the words and policies of the FPD, is a blatant violation of Constitutional Fourth Amendment warrant protections and is characteristic of the FPD’s systematic disregard for the Fourth Amendment even as set forth in their own documentary evidence.

.......I am not going to sugar coat this or engage in a lot of pointless throat clearing here – the report, taken as a whole, even in terms of material collected exclusively from FPD documents, is incredibly damning of police and municipal court practices in Ferguson. Anyone who can read the actual report itself and be comfortable with the fact that citizens of an American city live under such a regime is frankly not someone who is ideologically aligned with me in any meaningful way. The practices of the FPD and Municipal Court are destructive to freedom and in blatant violation of our constitutional rights, and they depend for sufferance on the fact that most people are not willing (or, in the case of most of Ferguson’s residents, able) to mount an expensive legal fight for relatively trivial amounts of money such as are involved in a traffic ticket. Evidence of the Ferguson PD’s knowledge of their blatantly unconstitutional practices (especially with respect to the habitual issuance of arrest warrants for missing a payment) is shown in the report by the way that the Municipal Court regularly drops these warrants as soon as a defendant appears with counsel.

I am singularly unimpressed with the argument that the report should be dismissed because it is the product of the Holder DOJ’s dissatisfaction at the resolution of the Michael Brown case. The implicit admission in such an argument is that many police departments are worse; if so, the proper response is not to excuse the Ferguson PD but rather to acknowledge that there are, in fact, systemic problems that exist on a widespread basis that should also be solved.

These problems, largely, have their root in the first matter highlighted above – that many municipal police departments face increasing and unrelenting pressure from city hall to fill increasingly wide gaps in revenue with money from fines and citations. Even a well-intentioned police officer who respects freedom, the citizenry, and vulnerable populations can succumb to temptation when his paycheck and his ability to feed his family is put on the line. And in those cases, where legitimate offenses do not occur, he will be sorely tempted to create them, and to create them among the portion of the populace that is least likely to complain and least likely to be believed when they do complain: non-wealthy black citizens.

Until we, as a people, are willing to understand and address the problem, it will never get better. Until we are willing to hold our municipal officials accountable for using the police force to suck money out of people’s pockets instead of legitimately protecting the public safety, the problem will get worse. But most importantly, until and unless we are able to emotionally detach ourselves from the horrible Michael Brown situation and see that what has been exposed, even according to the (probably whitewashed) FPD records, is a travesty, there is no hope for improvement.