Reacting to the Justice Department report on the Ferguson, Mo., police department, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorializes in favor of reforms suggested this week by President Obama’s task force on 21st-century policing. The newspaper says today’s police forces “must turn away from a ‘confrontation’ model to a ‘guardian’ model,” as suggested by the task force. “The focus should be on building trust, not piling up statistics.”
The Post-Dispatch says that in “progressive police forces, swaggering macho cops are being transformed… into better educated, better trained, more community-oriented, more diverse and more effective police forces. They're trained to recognize their own biases. They're using sophisticated data models to identify individual criminals instead of patrolling entire communities like occupying forces.” In Ferguson itself, the newspaper says, “Let the firings begin. And let them begin at the top.”