President Barack Obama speaks during a town-hall meeting about the importance of community involvement on Friday, March 6, 2015, at Benedict College in Columbia, S.C. (AP Photo/Rainier Ehrhardt)
COLUMBIA, S.C. – President Obama said Friday 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, making his most extensive comments about a Justice Department report showing that the police department in Ferguson showed a pattern of racial bias and constitutional violations, said the department was “systemically biased” against African-American 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 emails, some of which cited Obama.
[Ferguson fires city court clerk over racist e-mails ]
“What happened in Ferguson is not a complete aberration. It’s not just a one-time thing. It’s something that happens,” Obama said. People were outraged not only by Brown’s death, he said, but because they had been putting up with these issues for years, and their complaints weren't believed.
“We weren’t just making this up,” he said.
Obama said he stands “completely behind” the decision by Attorney General Eric Holder, who was in the audience here, not to charge Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in August.
“That was an objective, independent, thorough investigation,” Obama said, when asked at the town hall event why Holder did not charge Wilson.
The president’s visit here to historically black Benedict College here comes the day before Obama’s historic trip to Selma, Ala., to mark the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” when peaceful civil rights protesters marching from Selma to Montgomery were stopped by police, brutally beaten, poked with cattle prods and shrouded in tear gas.
“What happened in Selma was a quintessentially American experience,” Obama said last week 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. Stubbornly refused to accept the world as it is and transformed not just the country but transformed the world,” he said.
He said that people must also come together now, and not get caught up in concerns that the system is rigged or people’s attitudes will not change.
“That’s not what the folks in Selma did, they have the confidence to change things,” he said.
At least 95 members of Congress and cabinet secretaries, including Labor Secretary Tom Perez, will be on hand for the event. Obama will make the trip with First Lady Michelle Obama and their daughters.
Obama said Friday that the struggle for civil rights is not over.
“Part of what I want Malia and Sasha to understand is that this an unfinished project,” Obama said on the Tom Joyner radio show earlier Friday. “There is work to be done right now. ... It is a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this country of ours. And we shouldn’t shy away from that work, and we shouldn’t be complacent about it.”
Katie Zezima covers the White House for Post Politics and The Fix.
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