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Ferguson City Manager Cited in Justice Department Report Resigns

John Shaw in 2014.Credit...Scott Olson/Getty Images

FERGUSON, Mo. — 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. The assistant city manager, Pam Hylton, sat in his place.

“I’m surprised,” said Brian P. Fletcher, who was the mayor of Ferguson when Mr. Shaw was hired. But ultimately, Mr. Shaw needed to resign, added Mr. Fletcher, who sat in the back of the Council chambers. “I think he made the right decision for the time. I think that for what’s happened, that obviously somebody has to take responsibility. He ran the day-to-day operations, and he ultimately is responsible.”

Melissa McKinnies, who has lived in Ferguson for 25 years, said after the meeting that Mr. Shaw’s resignation was “the best news I could have heard.”

Because he was responsible for hiring city officials, Ms. McKinnies, 43, said, he had to be held accountable. “If he’s not part of the solution, he’s part of the problem,” she said. “But now it’s like, what’s next?”

Mr. Shaw was just the latest Ferguson official to fall.

Last Wednesday, the day the Justice Department’s report was issued, the Municipal Court clerk was fired for sending racist emails. Two police supervisors later resigned for sending racist emails as well.

On Monday, the Missouri Supreme Court took what it called the “extraordinary action” of assigning all of Ferguson’s Municipal Court cases to a state appellate judge. The municipal judge, Ronald J. Brockmeyer, whom the report accused of ticket-fixing and instituting unconstitutional fees, resigned.

The Justice Department report accused city officials of running the Municipal Court system as a moneymaking venture and having a racially biased police force that regularly violated people’s constitutional rights.

In another instance outlined in the report, Mr. Shaw acknowledged a Council member’s complaints that the municipal judge was not doing a good job, but noted that “the city cannot afford to lose any efficiency in our courts, nor experience any decrease in our fines and forfeitures.”

The detailed report confirmed many of the grievances aired last year by blacks in protests after the deadly police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black resident. Though the Justice Department separately concluded that the officer, Darren Wilson, who is white, violated no federal laws in that shooting, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said investigations had revealed the root of the anger that sent people into the streets.

Ferguson police officers routinely harassed and abused people, jailing or using Tasers on them without just cause, the report said.

“City and police leadership pressure officers to write citations, independent of any public safety need, and rely on citation productivity to fund the city budget,” the report said.

In an email from March 2010, the year Chief Thomas Jackson took his post, the city’s finance director wrote to the chief that “unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year.”

“What are your thoughts,” he added, according to the report.

The chief responded that fines would increase once more officers were hired and that he was considering a different shift schedule that would put more officers on the street and increase traffic enforcement.

The next year, when Chief Jackson reported to Mr. Shaw that court revenue for February 2011 was more than $179,000, the highest monthly total in four years, Mr. Shaw responded in an email, “Wonderful!” the Justice Department report said.

As part of his job, Mr. Shaw recommended department heads — including Chief Jackson and Mr. Brockmeyer — to their jobs, and the City Council voted to approve them.

Many residents and political leaders said they hoped that the Justice Department’s affirmation of their grievances would lead to change. And some of that appears to be happening.

Over the past several months, Mr. Shaw had been the city’s lead official in discussions with the federal authorities over ways to improve the city. The Justice Department in its report did commend him and the mayor for trying to make changes once the investigation started.

“I believe that the City of Ferguson has the resolve to overcome the challenges it faces in the coming months,” Mr. Shaw wrote in his letter, “and emerge as a stronger community for it.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Official Quits Amid Blame in Ferguson. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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