A federal civil rights investigation into the Ferguson, Missouri police department has found that the Ferguson police and officials routinely discriminate against black people.
Part of the report found that city officials made racist jokes about black people on official email accounts, The New York Times reports. About 35,000 police records were analyzed.
The Department of Justice report could be released by Wednesday, The Associated Press reports.
The report said black people were twice as likely as white people to have their cars searched, according to the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch.
From 2012 to 2014, blacks in Ferguson (two-thirds of the city's population) experienced:
- 85 percent of the vehicle stops
- 90 percent of the citations
- 93 percent of the arrests
- 88 percent of police use-of-force
The investigation follows the police shooting death of Michael Brown, 18, by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9, 2014. Ferguson was rocked by several nights of protests and arson after a grand jury chose not to indict Wilson in the death of Brown.
Gavin Stern is a national digital producer with the Scripps National Desk.
