Justice Department’s Ferguson report resonates across the US

FILE - In this Feb. 18, 2015 file photo, a protest sign is displayed in front of City Hall in Pasco, Wash., the city where Antonio Zambrano-Montes, an unarmed man who was running away from police at a crowded intersection, was fatally shot by police on Feb. 10, 2015. Ferguson, Mo., has become an emblem of the tensions between minorities and police departments nationwide since Darren Wilson, a white officer, shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, last summer. A U.S. Justice Department report released the first week of March, 2015, cleared Wilson of criminal wrongdoing. Though the study centered on Ferguson, its findings have resonated nationwide as residents in some communities across the country say they feel they face the same struggles with their police departments and city leadership. (AP Photo/Nicholas K. Geranios, File) FILE - In this Feb. 18, 2015 file photo, a protest sign is displayed in front of City Hall in Pasco, Wash., the city where Antonio Zambrano-Montes, an unarmed man who was running away from police at a crowded intersection, was fatally shot by police on Feb. 10, 2015. Ferguson, Mo., has become an emblem of the tensions between minorities and police departments nationwide since Darren Wilson, a white officer, shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, last summer. A U.S. Justice Department report released the first week of March, 2015, cleared Wilson of criminal wrongdoing. Though the study centered on Ferguson, its findings have resonated nationwide as residents in some communities across the country say they feel they face the same struggles with their police departments and city leadership. (AP Photo/Nicholas K. Geranios, File)

By Associated Press March 8, 2015 5 min read

SEATTLE (AP) – Felix Vargas read the Justice Department’s report on Ferguson, Missouri, and thought some of it sounded awfully familiar: a mostly white police department overseeing a mostly minority town; questionable uses of force; officers ill-equipped to deal with mentally ill residents.

They’re the same issues his heavily Hispanic community, the agricultural Washington city of Pasco, has confronted since the fatal police shooting of an immigrant farmworker last month.

“We know Pasco is only the most recent area where this has happened,” said Vargas, chairman of a local Hispanic business organization called Consejo Latino. “We have a national problem. We continue to struggle with this issue of policing.”

Ferguson has become an emblem of the tensions between minorities and police departments nationwide since Darren Wilson, a white officer, shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, last summer. The Justice Department cleared Wilson of criminal wrongdoing, but in its report last week, it made numerous allegations against the city’s police department that included racial disparities in arrests, bigotry and profit-driven law enforcement – essentially using the black community as a piggy bank to support the city’s budget through fines.

Though the report centered on Ferguson, its findings have resonated beyond the St. Louis suburbs as residents in some communities across the country say they feel they face the same struggles with their police departments and city leadership.