Among the crucial contributions of the report was documenting a little acknowledged fact of life for the modern American poor: Any encounter with law enforcement can set in motion a series of events that can devastate the already precarious livelihoods of those with meager resources, something you are far more likely to experience if you are black.

The federal government’s authority to investigate and oversee reforms in local police departments comes from a law passed in the aftermath of the 1991 beating of Rodney King by four Los Angeles police officers, and their subsequent acquittal, despite video evidence showing cops striking a dazed and helpless King repeatedly with batons. Then as now, many viewers were shocked by a vivid representation of police brutality faced by black Americans, while others refused to see any problem worth addressing at all.

The purpose of that law was to address systemic problems in police departments that could lead to such incidents, by giving the federal government the power to investigate local authorities for systemic problems, then enter into court-enforced agreements known as “consent decrees” to compel changes if necessary. On March 31, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was cynically sold by his defenders as a champion of civil rights, ordered a review of the Justice Department’s approach to policing, asserting that “it is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies.” During his confirmation hearing, Sessions said federal investigations of police departments were bad for “morale,” and waved away the idea that police abuses could be systemic, rather than the actions of a few bad apples.

As attorney general, Sessions said he read a summary, but not the full Ferguson report, which found that “95% of Manner of Walking charges; 94% of all Fail to Comply charges; 92% of all Resisting Arrest charges; 92% of all Peace Disturbance charges; and 89% of all Failure to Obey charges” were filed against black residents. But on the basis of the summary alone, Sessions concluded that the report was “pretty anecdotal” and “not scientifically based.”

The refusal to believe police abuse could be systemic rather than individual is, in the aftermath of all the data collected by the very agency Sessions now leads, a form of denial. Nor can Sessions’s decision be justified by the familiar excuse that police reforms lead to higher crime rates—the notion that “it is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies,” is a normative standard that would eschew federal oversight of local police regardless of the crime rate or the gravity of any abuse that might occur.

The Obama-era Justice Department’s report on Ferguson did more than simply outline the abuses of a local government and its police force—it served as a crucial and near-unimpeachable witness to the abuse of black Americans by entities meant to protect and represent them. Ferguson was hardly the only city where such dynamics persisted as a haunting echo of Jim Crow—in big cities all over the country, black Americans daily confront both the painful consequences of street crime and the terrifying possibility of violence at the hands of agents of the state sworn to protect them.