In 2017, a white St. Louis policeman was acquitted of murdering a Black man. The verdict sparked days of protests and clashes with police. Before shifts that week, two officers texted colleagues, expressing excitement.
“Let’s whoop
some ass,” officer Christopher Myers wrote, according to texts obtained by
federal agents. Later, he added: “The bosses are being a little more lenient
with the use of force by us.”
“The more the merrier!!!” officer Dustin Boone
wrote. “It’s going to be fun beating the hell out of these shitheads once the
sun goes down and nobody can tell us apart … Just fuck people up when they
don’t act right!”
On the third night of protests, the two officers
confronted a middle-aged Black protester named Luther Hall. Hall later told authorities
his hands were raised when someone grabbed him from behind and slammed him into
the ground face first. Then, Hall said, he was struck by police batons and
boots. He required spinal surgery and for weeks struggled to eat through a
bruised jaw.
The alleged beating was not captured on video. But
the accuser made an excellent witness: Hall was an undercover cop, posing as a
demonstrator.
The alleged misconduct by police at the 2017 clashes
triggered criminal charges against these and other officers. Myers and Boone
have pleaded not guilty to criminal civil-rights violations.
For many residents the charges were not enough. They
also called for a sweeping review of racial and other problems within the St.
Louis department, a so-called “pattern or practice” investigation, a powerful
federal tool to address systematic police abuses. The probes enable the Justice
Department to sue a police force and compel it to clean up abusive practices.
The U.S. Attorney in St. Louis, Jeff Jensen, got
involved, according to a government lawyer familiar with the matter, reaching
out to fellow officials appointed by U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington
to push for a pattern or practice case. Such cases are investigated by a
special civil rights unit in Washington.
“He was shut down pretty hard,” the lawyer recalled.
“He got the message pretty quick: We weren’t going to be doing these kinds of
cases.”
Jensen declined to comment for this story. Lawyers
for Boone and Myers didn’t reply to requests for comment.
The decision was part of a broader retreat by the
Justice Department from policing America’s police. In nearly four years, Trump
officials have opened just one police pattern or practice case, official
records show, compared to at least 20 opened during the eight years of the
Obama administration.
The Justice Department’s civil rights division “has
a strong record of upholding the civil rights of all Americans,” spokeswoman
Ali Kjergaard said. “We fully support police reform and have aggressively
prosecuted police officers who violate civil rights.”
The result is that at a time when the United States
is facing another public reckoning over civil rights abuses by police, the
Justice Department unit charged with handling such problems has remained
largely sidelined.
“There are 18,000 police departments in the country
and they are all doing well?” said Cynthia Deitle, former chief of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation’s civil rights unit under presidents Bush and Obama.
“No one needs an overseer? Nobody needs to be checked? Everybody’s fine? That
just can’t be true.”
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