Obama on Ferguson: 'They weren't just making it up' President Obama upholds decision not to charge Ferguson officer while denouncing police racism.

President Barack Obama on Friday defended the Department of Justice’s decision not to charge a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer in the shooting death of an unarmed African American teenager last year – but he said a federal investigation proved the community was justified in its concerns about racial bias in Ferguson’s police department.

Obama gave a measured, lengthy analysis of the Ferguson tragedy at a town hall forum at a historically black college in Columbia, South Carolina, a day before he heads to Selma, Alabama to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act which guaranteed African Americans the right to vote.


Although Obama tried to frame his speech as a call for young people to honor that march by getting involved in today’s politics, the question and his answer showed how much the incident in Ferguson is viewed by many Americans as a powerful example of social injustice.

When a questioner asked Obama why the Justice Department declined this week to file federal civil rights charges against Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown last summer, Obama played down the emotional and moral urgency of the incident and stuck to the law. He explained that since it’s up to state prosecutors to bring criminal charges, the federal government could only have stepped in if it found specific evidence of a civil rights violation. A grand jury declined to indict Wilson in November.

“You can’t just charge him anyway because what happened was tragic,” Obama said, adding that he had “complete confidence and [stands] fully behind the Justice Department on the decision that was made.”

At the same time, though, Obama said the separate Justice Department report this week about widespread racism within the Ferguson police department – and specific practices that singled out African Americans, like arresting them disproportionately and using unreasonable force – proved that Ferguson residents had valid complaints about the police force.

“It was an oppressive and abusive situation,” Obama said, noting that the report found that Ferguson used traffic citations as a “revenue generator.” He said Ferguson “has a choice to make”: It can reach an agreement with federal officials to fix “a clearly broken and racially biased” system, or it can refuse and face a possible lawsuit.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who accompanied Obama to South Carolina, told reporters after the trip that he found the results of the investigation “appalling.” He said the Justice Department is “prepared to use all the powers that we have, all the power that we have, to ensure that the situation changes there” — and he didn’t rule out the possibility of dismantling the Ferguson police department.

“If that’s what’s necessary, we’re prepared to do that,” he said.

Obama urged the crowd not to let the Ferguson report make them hostile toward police officers around the country. “I don’t think that what happened in Ferguson was typical,” he said. Most police officers, he said, “have a really hard and dangerous job, and they do it well … I strongly believe that.”

But he said the report did suggest that the problems in the Ferguson police department itself, and the widespread mistreatment of African Americans, go well beyond Brown’s death.

“What happened in Ferguson is not a complete aberration,” Obama said. “It turns out they weren’t just making it up. It was happening.” The lesson for police departments around the country, he said, is that when they get enough complaints about unfair treatment of African Americans or other minority groups, “you’ve got to listen, to pay attention.”

The job now, Obama said, is for police departments and communities to “work together to solve the problems, and not get caught up in the cynicism of, ‘Oh, it’s never going to change, everything’s racist,’” Obama said. “It’s achievable, but we’ve got to be constructive going forward.”