Ferguson City Manager Cited in Justice Department Report Resigns

The city manager of Ferguson, whom a Department of Justice report blamed for overseeing the financially driven policies that led to widespread discrimination and questionable conduct by the police and the courts here, has agreed to resign. The announcement came during a City Council meeting on Tuesday, about a week after the scathing Justice Department report was released.

The manager, John Shaw, 39, had held the post since 2007. As Ferguson’s chief executive, he was the city’s most powerful official.

Mr. Shaw, who has not spoken publicly since the report was issued, offered a staunch defense in a page-long letter to the community that city officials distributed during the Council meeting.

 “And while I certainly respect the work that the D.O.J. recently performed in their investigation and report on the City of Ferguson, I must state clearly that my office has never instructed the Police Department to target African-Americans, nor falsify charges to administer fines, nor heap abuses on the backs of the poor,” he wrote. “Any inferences of that kind from the report are simply false.”

The resignation was announced about 30 minutes into the Council meeting, with members voting 7 to 0 to approve a “mutual separation agreement” with Mr. Shaw.

As people in the packed Council chamber began to understand what was happening, a buzz shot through the room as onlookers mumbled and a few let out quiet cheers.

“We wanted to move forward as a community,” Mayor James Knowles III said during a brief news conference after the meeting.

Until the Justice Department report was released, Mr. Shaw had remained largely in the background, while Mr. Knowles and the city’s police chief became the public faces of turmoil in Ferguson. But the report highlighted Mr. Shaw as the head of the city’s operations as it engaged in racially biased and unconstitutional policing practices.

Mr. Shaw, whose resignation was effective at midnight Tuesday, was not at the meeting. NY Times