WASHINGTON
The Justice Department is prepared to take all steps to reform a U.S. police department, including dismantling it, Attorney General Eric Holder said Friday.
Holder's comments come a day after a Justice Department's report on the Ferguson, Missouri, that found officers there engaged in discriminatory acts against black residents.
"We are prepared to use all the powers that we have, to ensure that the situation changes there. That means everything from working with them to coming up with an entirely new structure," Holder said.
The outgoing attorney general said measures would include dismantling the police department. "If that's what's necessary, we're prepared to do that,” he said.
The department’s 103-page report on the shooting death of unarmed teen Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson, found the city’s police department fostered a culture of racial hostility that included unreasonable searches and seizures, racial slurs, and the excessive use of force.
The report, released Thursday, shows that while blacks make up just over two-thirds of the population in Ferguson, they accounted for 93 percent of arrests from 2012 to 2014; 85 percent of vehicle stops and 90 percent of citations.
"I was not only surprised by what I found, I'm not sure that's a strong enough word. I expected it as I got preliminary reports, but I was shocked towards the end by the numbers that we saw and the breadth of the practices that we uncovered," he said.
The way the law enforcement was conducted and the impact that it had on the lives of the ordinary citizens of Ferguson as "just appalling," according to Holder.
"That is not something that we're going to tolerate," he said.
The attorney general said he hopes police departments across the country were listening and that the federal government would use all tools to make sure what happened in Ferguson is uncovered and simply does not happen in any other part of the country.
"But I also want to make people understand, there are 18,000 police departments in this country, and I think what we saw in Ferguson was an anomaly," he said.
The findings of the report follow an independent six-month federal investigation into Brown’s killing that ignited mass protests in the St. Louis suburb, and an initially disproportionate police crackdown.
While Wilson was cleared of violating Brown’s civil rights, the debate about discrimination by law enforcement against blacks and other minorities continues.
