The person said the investigation could be announced as early as Thursday afternoon. Missouri officials
were notified Wednesday of the probe.

The investigation will look at the practices in the past few years of the police department, including
patterns of stops, arrests and use-of-force, as well as the training the officers receive, the person
said.

The inquiry is separate from an ongoing civil rights investigation the Justice Department is conducting
into the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9. A local grand jury is
also investigating the shooting, which set off about two weeks of unrest in the streets of Ferguson and
became a flashpoint in the national discussion of police treatment of minorities across the country.
Attorney General Eric Holder two weeks ago visited the St. Louis suburb, where he met with investigators
and Brown’s parents and shared personal experiences of having himself been mistreated by the police.

The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation, first reported by The Washington
Post, had not yet been announced.

Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson did not immediately return a call seeking comment about the Justice
Department investigation.

Police have said the shooting followed a scuffle that broke out after Wilson told Brown and a friend to
move out of the street and onto a sidewalk. Police say Wilson was pushed into his squad car and
physically assaulted. Some witnesses have reported seeing Brown’s arms up in the air before the shooting
in an act of surrender. An autopsy paid for by Brown’s family concluded that he was shot six times,
twice in the head.

The new investigation, though, goes far beyond the circumstances of the shooting. It will look at the
actions of a police department that is predominantly white even though Ferguson is about 70 percent
black.

Some in Ferguson have said police disproportionately target black motorists during traffic stops. A 2013
report by the Missouri attorney general’s office found that Ferguson police stopped and arrested black
drivers nearly twice as frequently as white motorists but were also less likely to find contraband among
the black drivers.

The Justice Department’s civil rights division routinely investigates individual police departments when
there are allegations of systemic use-of-force violations, racial bias or other problems. The department
says it’s opened more than twice as many investigations into police department in the past five years as
were opened in the previous five years. Among those that have recently come under investigation is the
Albuquerque, New Mexico, department, which was the subject of a harshly critical report in April that
faulted the police for a pattern of excessive force and called for an overhaul of its internal affairs
unit.

Normally, the federal investigation encourages significant changes to policies and practices. The
investigations sometimes end in an agreement known as a consent decree, which lays out changes that the
department must make.

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