Washington attorney Clark Kent Ervin resigned in September after serving over a year as lead monitor overseeing the consent agreement between the U.S. Department of Justice and Ferguson.
Ferguson has paid about a half million dollars to the team that oversees the police and court reforms in the St. Louis suburb, where in 2014 a police officer shot Michael Brown, but the city officials now question what they’ve gotten for the money. The questions arose after Ervin resigned. Boston attorney Natashia Tidwell has now replaced him, the Associated Press reports.
According to the city attorney Apollo Carey, Ervin’s departure slowed a court audit and other reforms. Meanwhile, city manager De’Carlon Seewood explains that concerns on both sides led to the resigning of Ervin, while the mayor James Knowles III says that the Washington attorney failed to follow through on some projects like opening an office in Ferguson and surveying residents.
“It begs the question: What are residents getting out of (monitoring)? They’re supposed to be getting transparency. They’re supposed to be getting regular updates and engagement from the monitor. They haven’t gotten any of it.The survey should have been done in the first year and it wasn’t done. You can’t have a baseline survey of the community to see how it feels about progress if you don’t know what the baseline is,” Knowles says.
Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot the black 18-year old unarmed Brown on August 8, 2014 and the incident put Ferguson under Justice Department scrutiny. The officer was not charged and the shooting drew attention to allegations about mistreatment of African-Americans by the police and the court system in Ferguson.
The investigation of the Justice Department led to a civil rights lawsuit which was settled last year with a consent agreement that calls for reforms like hiring more black officers, requiring diversity training for police, and court reforms that include easing financial burdens for minor offenses such as traffic violations. The whole process is expected to take up to three years with oversight by a team of independent monitors.
The records show that Ferguson paid 350,000 dollars for the first 12-month period, and has another 145,000 dollars since July of this year. Of the initial 350,000 dollars, 291,192 dollars was paid to Ervin’s law firm, but, according to Seewood, it isn’t clear if he received all of that money or if some was shared with other monitors or assistants.
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