The Ferguson police officer who shot Michael Brown dead once worked for a police department that was deemed to be so racist that the entire department was fired.
Darren Wilson is at the epicenter of a racially-tinged shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old would-be college student, even though he has been in exile and unseen since the deadly shooting on Aug. 9.
And much like in his previous employment in Jennings, Mo., he was employed by a department that was predominantly white in a city that was overwhelmingly black and was the site of rampant racial tension.
The Washington Post investigative report reveals that the small town of Jennings, Mo., whose officers’ relationship with the public was so bad the city council decided to take the highly unusual step of firing all of its 45 officers three years ago.
Wilson, once again, did not have any disciplinary problems, and the move was due to a combination of corruption within the department and problems between the nearly all-white department and the community that was 90 percent black.
The “straw that broke the camel’s back” was when an another officer, who was white, chased a woman outside of the city’s limits and shot at her vehicle with a child in the backseat, Rodney Epps, an African American city council member in Jennings, told the Post.
“You’re dealing with white cops and they don’t know how to address black people,” Epps said.
Wilson then went to work at Ferguson, where he has not had any disciplinary action and received a commendation by the Ferguson council for subduing a man involved in a drug transaction, the newspaper reports.
But he appeared to have family issues growing up as his parents divorced when he was a toddler in Texas. He later moved to St. Peters, Mo., and his mother, who in 2001 pleaded guilty to forgery and stealing, died when Wilson was 16.
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