CarrieJohnsonNPR

Those emails are really toxic and awful - comparing the president to a "chimpanzee" and saying he won't serve a full term because "what black man holds a steady job for four years." And they were written by people in the Ferguson police with supervisory authority!

Aside from the emails, what stands out for me is the way in which the police department and the courts worked hand in hand to operate what AG Holder called a "collection agency" to target often impoverished and vulnerable people. The whole system not just one person.

The Justice Department found Ferguson police routinely violated people's First Amendment rights to speech and association, by cracking down on folks who recorded police and punishing them for "talking back" to officers. And that's not including the protesters who were arrested in Ferguson after the shooting - the ACLU has been doing a lot of litigating to protect their rights.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder both say Ferguson is actually NOT an outlier, that if you look at many police departments all over the country, you will find evidence of systemic disparities in ticketing and arrests of minorities. DOJ has investigated about 20 law enforcement agencies since Obama took office for alleged excessive force or otherwise unconstitutional policing.

Thanks very much for listening to NPR. Rather than go over the state grand jury prosecution with a fine-toothed comb, the federal prosecutors at Justice say they did an independent analysis of physical evidence and interviewed 100 people who said they were eyewitnesses to the shooting of Michael Brown. Top aides to Attorney General Eric Holder said he had privately been very critical of the county prosecutor, but very little of that second-guessing showed up in the DOJ report. That federal report focuses on whether civil rights prosecutors could find any evidence to disprove Officer Darren Wilson had reason to fear for his safety--and they came up with nothing. Many of those witnesses, Justice said, were unreliable and some recanted their testimony that Michael Brown had his hands up, as if to surrender.