COLUMBIA, S.C. — President Barack Obama on Friday said that the Ferguson, Mo., police department engaged in a systemic pattern of racial discrimination and that it can change or risk a lawsuit from the Department of Justice.
Obama made his most extensive comments about a Justice Department report showing Ferguson police department’s pattern of racial bias and constitutional violations.
He said the department was “systemically biased” against black residents who were “stopped, harassed, mistreated, abused,” and bore the brunt of a city that attempted to use the criminal justice system as a way to make money.
The department is “clearly a broken and racially biased system,” Obama said. “It was an oppressive and abusive situation.”
Some of the incidents the report cited include the police using racial slurs, the pervasive use of stun guns and flouting the constitutional rights of citizens. The Justice Department review made public a trove of racially and religiously insensitive e-mails, some of which cited Obama.
“What happened in Ferguson is not a complete aberration. It’s not just a one-time thing. It’s something that happens,” Obama said.
Obama’s visit to historically black Benedict College came the day before his trip to Selma, Ala., to mark the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” when peaceful civil rights protesters attempting to march from Selma to Montgomery were stopped by police, brutally beaten, poked with cattle prods and shrouded in tear gas.
Obama told the crowd of 1,166 young people that he will discuss the “meaning of Selma for your generation” in a speech he has not yet finished.
“It was young people who stubbornly insisted on justice,” he said. “Stubbornly refused to accept the world as it is and transformed not just the country but transformed the world.”
