Officer in fatal Ferguson shooting quit without severance: mayor

The white police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, this summer, resigned from the force without any severance deal, the mayor of the St. Louis suburb said on Sunday.

The officer, Darren Wilson, announced his resignation late Saturday, saying he feared for his own safety and that of his fellow police officers after a grand jury decided not to indict him in the fatal August 9 shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

“The city manager has accepted Officer Wilson’s resignation and, as of yesterday, Officer Wilson is no longer an employee with the City of Ferguson. There is no severance agreement with Officer Wilson and the City of Ferguson. The City of Ferguson will not be making a severance payment to Officer Wilson,” Mayor James Knowles said at a news conference in which he outlined new incentives to bring more African-Americans into the Ferguson police force and to reconcile the community and police.

Wilson resigned after Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson told him there had been credible threats against the department, the former officer’s attorney, Neil Bruntrager, said.

In a letter published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Wilson said he had wanted to wait until after the grand jury’s decision before deciding whether to quit.

Even so, his departure was long anticipated because of the potential risks to his own safety and the deep rifts that have surfaced between Ferguson’s police and the African-American community since the shooting.

The fatal shooting of the unarmed teenager has galvanized critics of the way police and the U.S. criminal justice system treat African-Americans and other minority groups, and led to months of sometimes violent protests in Ferguson and major cities around the country.

Knowles said he wanted to heal the rifts in the community.

“Our number one goal is to bring together our police department and our community, to bridge the gap between those who feel there is a divide between them and law enforcement. I have convened a task force made up of residents, businesses and law enforcement to create a civilian review board that will review complaints and provide citizen input to Ferguson police polices and procedures,” he said.

Wilson, who said he was acting in self-defense and that his conscience is clear, had been on administrative leave and in seclusion since the incident.

The mayor said he had not asked for Wilson’s resignation, and even though the officer expressed an interest “in a future here,” Knowles said he wanted the city to turn a page and did not have an estimate on how much the violence had cost the city.

“There’s not a damage estimate at this point. That’s something we’ll be working on along with other cities in the region. As you know, there were other cities that were damaged as part of the Monday night events,” he said.

The mayor said his focus was on how to rebuild trust in the city, where the shooting exposed long-standing grievances about race relations both in Ferguson and across the country.

“I’m not looking to point fingers and blame at any individual at this time, I think it’s important that we look at, going forward, how we can stop this from happening in the future, that we can start to bring the community together to bring a more stable environment here for us in this region. And I think it is important to look back at some point and figure out what we did, right and wrong, and what we can do better in the future,” Knowles said.

Some critics now want the police chief to resign as well, to promote reconciliation in the St. Louis suburb, where most residents are black and the police force is mostly white.

During the news conference in Ferguson, Jackson said he had no plans to resign, and the mayor said no changes in the department’s leadership were in the works.