Despite the uncertainty surrounding the killing of Michael Brown, many black residents of Ferguson, Missouri, immediately thought that he was the victim of a wrongful death at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson, who shot him after a scuffle.

This week, the Department of Justice concluded that there is no evidence to disprove Officer Wilson's claim that he feared for his life during the encounter. And the federal agency also presented context that explains why so many black residents assumed foul play and took to the streets in protest: For years, Ferguson's police force has meted out brutality, violated civil rights, and helped Ferguson officials to leech off the black community as shamelessly as would mafia bosses.

So far, a disproportionate amount of press attention has focused on racist emails circulated by Ferguson officials, causing two to be fired and one to be placed on leave. While the correspondence in question is deeply offensive and worthy of condemnation, it is nowhere close to the most objectionable transgression documented in the DOJ report, which ought to prompt multiple Ferguson officials to resign in disgrace and provoke condemnations from across the political spectrum. Nearly every page shocks the conscience.

Ferguson officials repeatedly behaved as if their priority is not improving public safety or protecting the rights of residents, but maximizing the revenue that flows into city coffers, sometimes going so far as to anticipate decreasing sales tax revenues and urging the police force to make up for the shortfall by ticketing more people. Often, those tickets for minor offenses then turned into arrest warrants.

Police officers were judged not only on the number of stops they made, but on the number of citations they issued. "Officers routinely conduct stops that have little relation to public safety and a questionable basis in law," the report states. "Issuing three or four charges in one stop is not uncommon. Officers sometimes write six, eight, or, in at least one instance, fourteen citations for a single encounter." Some officers compete to see who can issue the most citations in a single stop.

In one email, the police chief, who also oversees the municipal court, brags to the city manager about how much revenue it is generating. Ignoring that conflict of interest is a recipe for a justice system that bleeds the powerless of their meager resources.

Ferguson's municipal court judge, Ronald Brockmeyer, who is appointed by the city council, is well aware that his job performance is evaluated partly based on how much revenue he generates from the bench. One 2011 internal report in Ferguson notes that Judge Brockmeyer made a list of  “what he has done to help in the areas of court efficiency and revenue.” The next year, a city council member suggested that he should not be reappointed, arguing that he "does not listen to the testimony, does not review the reports or the criminal history of defendants, and doesn’t let all the pertinent witnesses testify before rendering a verdict.”

If you think those shortcomings disqualified him, think again.

The report continues:

Establishing these glaring perverse incentives—effectively compromising the city's criminal-justice system to increase revenue—is enough to disgrace Ferguson's leaders all on its own, whether one regards them as civic imbeciles or moral cretins. But the consequences of these misdeeds and other transgressions against residents can only be fully understood with stories of Ferguson's many victims.   

While I recommend reading the whole DOJ report—I'd gladly see it assigned to every high schooler, college student, and state legislator in America—I'll focus the rest of this post on those stories and a few other particularly alarming findings. As you read on, keep in mind that this is but a selection of horrors from the DOJ report, which describes a tiny selection of all police misconduct stories in Ferguson.

One passage describes the way that Ferguson officials have criminalized being too poor to pay a ticket:

Here's how Ferguson officials wreak havoc on people's lives over the tiniest of infractions:

Older folks face an extra burden, but seem to get no slack: