What strikes me most about this story about mismanagement in FPD is that it is one of only two I have seen, and it goes back 5 years, long before the current chief was brought in from St Louis to fix issues in the FPD.
It is very possible that I have missed others, but if there were a systemic problem there, it seems I'd have seen more than just these two given as proof every time I've seen the subject come up.
The other claim definitely concerns me, if it pans out, since it was specific and apparently from last year. It was something about the ratio of stops and searches between AAs vs Whites, even though the whites were more often found to have illegal items. Details, like what areas, and any explanations would be interesting.
Just a little quibble I have with surveys of stops or arrests that I've seen recently that compare black vs. white residents in a community vs. black/white traffic stops.
Let's look at the suburb to the North of where I live. We'll call it Northwood. If I had to guess, I'd say it's about 75 percent white, 21 percent Asian/Middle Eastern, 2 percent African American, 2 percent all other races combined. Now suppose we got their traffic stop data and analyzed it and we found that say 15 percent of the traffic stops were African American individuals, 60 percent were white individuals, 10 percent were Hispanic individuals, and 15 percent were Asian/Middle Eastern Individuals. From what has been said lately in the media, obviously this city is racist against black and hispanic drivers, and favors white and asian drivers.
But here's the problem: There's no giant wall around Northwood keeping their residents in or others out. People work in Northwood who don't live there. One of the biggest and most popular malls in our area is there, so lots of people come to shop. There are a lot of businesses in Northwood, where people from other towns might find employment. People come to visit relatives and friends, or go to church. Not only that, but the people of Northwood, sometimes do crazy things like working or shopping or visiting or playing outside of Northwood. There's a major interstate that runs through Northwood. People from whole other states drive through every hour of the day.
In a town with little industry or commerce, where the area is almost entirely residences and there's not a lot of through traffic such statistics might be a relatively accurate figure. But otherwise, you would pretty much have to look at not who lives in your city, but who drives in and through your city and compare that to who is stopped. Which is hard, if not impossible, so I see why it's not done that way. But just looking at residents of your city vs. traffic stops, unless you throw out the traffic stops of all non-residents, and just look at how many of your residents were stopped vs. the make-up of your residents, you're not comparing anything close to apples to apples.
I have no idea what Ferguson is like, other than it's more urban/suburban than rural. I don't know what amount of industry, commerce, major thruways, etc. exist there, so I'm not saying any numbers from Ferguson are accurate/non accurate. Just something to keep in mind.
I sometimes worry about what goes where, how far OT we should stray, and what areas *here* can be referred to. KWIM? 
