WASHINGTON • In what may have been his valedictory remarks as attorney general, the activist and often-criticized Eric Holder ended where he began his six years in office — with a challenge on race.
Ferguson is the focus, but the scope is far broader.
“As these discussions have unfolded,” Holder said after the Department of Justice released long-awaited actions on Ferguson, “I have repeatedly seen that although the concerns that we are focused on today may be particularly acute in Ferguson, they are not confined to any one city, state or geographic region. They implicate questions about fairness and trust that are national in scope.”
For seven months, fairness and trust have been on trial in Ferguson, in media, in politics, in street demonstrations and in everyday encounters.
That will continue long after Holder leaves office. His replacement, Loretta Lynch, is awaiting approval by the Senate, and that could come any day. But Department of Justice involvement in municipal police practices, from East Haven, Conn., to Los Angeles, has gone on for years.
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And the challenges of race relations that Holder talked provocatively about in his first days in office have, if anything, intensified in his last.
On Wednesday, even as the Department of Justice was handing down what Holder described as a “searing” condemnation of the practices of Ferguson police and courts, he acknowledged there could not be universal satisfaction with the DOJ’s actions.
Some have long claimed Ferguson would be a scapegoat for the Justice Department’s inability to bring a case against former Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson for fatally shooting Michael Brown. Wednesday’s DOJ actions reignited those assertions.
Coupled with a St. Louis County grand jury’s November decision to not indict Wilson, the DOJ decision to not prosecute Wilson culminated a season of cold discontent among those who wanted him charged.
Holder said he knew those in the latter group would not understand how the facts, as they understood them, did not lead to an indictment.
In that breach, Holder, the nation’s first black attorney general, reached for a broader accountability, a wider explanation. The DOJ found, he said, broad patterns of racial disparity in the way police and courts in Ferguson enforce the law, and in creating a “pervasive, corrosive and deeply unfortunate lack of trust” in Ferguson police.
It is at that nexus that Holder, rhetorically, linked the Justice Department’s decision to not prosecute Wilson with its other decision to come down hard on Ferguson itself. Almost all of his half-hour speech was spent on the Ferguson reforms that DOJ is proposing.
Holder’s DOJ investigators, after interviewing hundreds of witnesses and going through 35,000 pages of documents and substantial physical evidence, found that initial reports that Brown was surrendering or running away from the officer were not true and that Brown, instead, was coming toward Wilson when the fatal shots were fired.
Holder conceded the DOJ’s work will leave “some to wonder” about why those official findings “differ so wildly from some of the initial, widely reported accounts of what transpired.”
He had an answer: a 102-page pattern and practices report filled with statistics and anecdotes DOJ says shows racial bias in Ferguson policing. A page of racist emails purportedly between city employees was included, to back up long-held claims by black residents about unequal justice.
“A possible explanation for this discrepancy was uncovered during the course of our second federal investigation,” Holder said, which revealed “a community that was deeply polarized; a community where deep distrust and hostility often characterized reactions between police and area residents.”
At one point, Holder seemed to be speaking directly to the demonstrators in Ferguson, even those who participated in violence.
“Of course, violence is never justified,” he said. “But seen in this context — amid a highly toxic environment, defined by mistrust and resentment, stoked by years of bad feelings, and spurred by illegal and misguided practices — it is not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson, like a powder keg.”
Holder began his tenure as attorney general declaring that America was “a nation of cowards” on race.
He is ending it with a declaration of understanding of how “powder kegs” such as Ferguson can go off.
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