Police chief in Ferguson resigns post
Move comes after report says racial bias widespread
FERGUSON, Mo. — The police chief in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson resigned Wednesday in the wake of a scathing U.S. Justice Department report prompted by the fatal shooting of an unarmed, black 18-year-old by a white police officer.
Mayor James Knowles III announced at a news conference that the city had reached a mutual separation agreement with Chief Thomas Jackson, who will get a severance payment of one year of his roughly $96,000 salary and a year of health insurance.
Lt. Col. Al Eickhoff, who joined the force in August, will become acting chief March 19 while the city searches for a replacement. Jackson is staying on until then to aid in the transition.
Jackson’s resignation Wednesday came a week after the Justice Department report found the St. Louis suburb to have a profit-driven court system and widespread racial bias in the police force.
Jackson had previously resisted calls by protesters and some of Missouri’s top elected leaders to step down over his handling of the August shooting of Mi-
chael Brown and the weeks of sometimes-violent protests that followed. He was widely criticized from the outset, both for an aggressive police response to protesters and for his agency’s erratic and infrequent releases of key information.
He took nearly a week to publicly identify officer Darren Wilson as the shooter and then further heightened tension in the community by releasing Wilson’s name at the same time as store security video that police said showed Brown stealing a box of cigars and shoving a clerk only a short time before Brown’s death.
Jackson’s release of the surveillance video reignited tensions after calm briefly returned to the streets when the Missouri State Highway Patrol took charge of the city’s policing. The new clashes between police and protesters ended with clouds of tear gas.
The mayor said that after much “soul-searching,” Jackson resigned with hopes of helping the community heal from racial unrest. Knowles called him an “honorable man.”
Jackson submitted a four-sentence letter in which he said he was announcing his resignation with profound sadness.
He said Wednesday that he felt it was time for the city to move on.
“I believe this is the appropriate thing to do at this time,” Jackson said. “This city needs to move forward without any distractions.”
Jackson becomes the sixth employee to resign or be fired after the release of the Justice Department report last week.
Justice Department officials had previously said that they were willing to work with whatever leadership the Police Department had.
A U.S. law enforcement official said Wednesday that the Justice Department had not pressured or encouraged Jackson to resign during meetings with him but also had not resisted the idea. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing meetings between the Justice Department and the Police Department.
The resignation was welcomed by a state lawmaker who represents Ferguson.
“There would be a lot of people that would approve of that,” Democratic state Rep. Sharon Pace said.
Jackson oversaw the Ferguson force for nearly five years before the shooting that stirred months of unrest across the St. Louis region and drew global attention to the predominantly black city of 21,000.
Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster and U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill were among those working behind the scenes to get him to resign, but Jackson stood firm.
Since the Aug. 9 shooting, he has spoken of a desire to work with community members and described efforts to bolster the hiring of minority-group members in the Police Department, which had just three black officers at the time of Brown’s death.
But he struggled to manage a local crisis that turned into an international event and explain his decision-making at news conferences disrupted by angry protesters and grieving community members.
Then the Justice Department issued its report, which found that Ferguson’s police and court systems functioned as a money-making enterprise rather than one meant to ensure public safety.
The report found black drivers in Ferguson were more than twice as likely as others to be searched during routine traffic stops and more likely to face excessive force from police, often during unwarranted stops.
In addition, the report criticized the Police Department for not having adequate accountability systems in place for documenting use-of-force incidents and pedestrian checks. It also took the department and Jackson to task for holding people in jail for more than 72 hours at a time as well as using canines only on black suspects.
The report also heavily criticized Jackson for his role in using the city’s police force to generate revenue, quoting emails in which he lobbied to switch to 12-hour shifts that would put more officers on the streets and increase traffic enforcement. The report said such schedules are shown to diminish community policing efforts.
Investigators noted that Ferguson was counting on revenue from fines and fees to generate nearly a quarter of its total $13.3 million budget for the 2015 fiscal year. Many residents ended up in jail after missing court dates or failing to pay fines for minor violations.
In an email from March 2010, the year Jackson took his post, Jeffrey Blume, the city’s finance director, wrote to the chief that “unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year. What are your thoughts?” according to the report.
The chief responded that fines would increase once the city hired more officers and that he was considering the different shift schedule.
The next year, when Jackson reported to John Shaw, then the city manager, that court revenue for February 2011 was more than $179,000, the highest monthly total in four years, Shaw responded in an email, “Wonderful!” the Justice Department report said.
The City Council on Tuesday agreed to a separation agreement with Shaw, who hired Jackson.
The Justice Department report also uncovered evidence that three employees — a court clerk and two police officers — had sent racially biased emails.
The clerk was fired last week and two officers resigned. The judge who oversaw the court system also resigned, and a state appellate judge is overseeing Ferguson’s cases.
Questions remain over the future of the city’s Police Department. Some residents and political leaders have said that it should be dissolved and that the St. Louis County Police Department should take over, as it has with other surrounding municipalities.
St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger has discussed that possibility with Knowles, he said.
“The county executive basically let Mayor Knowles know that, if in fact St. Louis County’s help was needed, we would be willing to look at that possibility,” said Cordell Whitlock, a spokesman for Stenger. “We are here to help in any way that we can.”