Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson
As the Department of Justice prepares to release its full report into the Ferguson Police Department and Municipal Court System,
it is becoming increasingly clear that the entire Ferguson Police Department may be forced to shut down.
"My guess is it's going to be so expensive to the city of Ferguson, they're going to have to make a survival decision,” Tim Fitch, the former head of the St. Louis County Police Department, said in a recent interview with The Huffington Post. "Financially, I don't believe they're going to be able to do one of two things: Either they're going to fight it, and not be able to afford that, or to implement all of the changes that DOJ is going to require is going to be so expensive, they're not going to be able to do it."
The thing is, though, the last department that Darren Wilson worked for, before he was allowed to transfer to the Ferguson Police Department,
was also disbanded over severe issues of racism and corruption.
In fact,
The small city of Jennings, Mo., had a police department so troubled, and with so much tension between white officers and black residents, that the city council finally decided to disband it. Everyone in the Jennings police department was fired. New officers were brought in to create a credible department from scratch.
All of this begs some hardcore questions on what happens when entire departments, full of racism to their very core, are disbanded, but the officers are then allowed to dart off and get hired 3-4 miles down the road. Jeff Roorda, now the spokesman for the St. Louis Police Union,
was fired as an officer outside of St. Louis for falsifying reports, but was then actually hired to become a police chief just a few miles away.
Shouldn't fired officers not be allowed to be in law enforcement anymore? If your department is disbanded for racism and corruption, shouldn't it actually impact whether or not you are hired as an officer again?