Holder's police-shooting hypocrisy

There are no Ferguson-style probes when black police shoot blacks

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is enjoying a tidal wave of laudatory press coverage for his activism on the Ferguson, Mo., shooting and subsequent protests. In the 1990s, though, Mr. Holder ignored plenty of cases of District of Columbia black cops killing unarmed black civilians — even when policemen lied about the shootings.

Mr. Holder was appointed in 1993 by President Clinton as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. At that time, D.C. police were killing more civilians than any other large city police force, based on population. The number of killings by D.C. police quadrupled between 1989 and 1995, when 16 civilians died as a result of police gunfire.

Mr. Holder never noticed that the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department failed to count almost half the people killed by their officers between 1994 and 1997. Mr. Holder commented in 1998: “I’m not really sure I discerned any patterns [in police shootings] — at least none I remember.” A 1998 Pulitzer-prize-winning Washington Post investigation concluded: “The rise in police shootings in the mid-1990s went largely unnoticed among the top officials charged with policing the police.”

More