After Ferguson, Eric Holder looks to better police-community relations

Following the weeks of unrest in Ferguson, Missouri that followed the shooting death of a black teenager by a white police officer, Attorney General Eric Holder announced Wednesday that he is launching a program to combat distrust and hostility between law enforcement and the communities they serve.

"As we saw all too clearly last month as the eyes of the nation turned toward Ferguson, Missouri, whenever discord, mistrust and rolling tensions are allowed to fester just under the surface, interactions between law enforcement and local residents are more likely to escalate into confrontation, unrest and even violence," Holder said.

As a law enforcement leader, he said he believes he has an "essential obligation" to "ensure fairness, eliminate bias, and build community engagement."

The program, called the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, will train law enforcement and communities on bias reduction and procedural fairness, according to the Justice Department, and will begin at five pilot sites around the country. It is being funded through a $4.75 million grant.

The program will also establish a clearinghouse for information, research and technical assistance on the subject available to law enforcement, community leaders and people involved with the criminal justice system.

The grant was awarded to a group of national law enforcement experts from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Yale Law School, the Center for Policing equity at the University of California Los Angeles and the Urban Institute. A board of advisers will be comprised of national leaders from law enforcement, academia, faith-based groups, community stakeholders and civil rights advocates.

"What I saw in Ferguson confirmed for me that the need for such an effort was pretty clear," Holder told the Associated Press Tuesday when he announced the initiative.

The shooting death of Michael Brown back in August highlighted longstanding concerns about racial disparities in policing. The Ferguson police force is overwhelmingly white even though population of the city, located in the suburbs of St. Louis, is roughly 70 percent black.

A 2013 report by the Missouri attorney general's office found that Ferguson police stopped and arrested black drivers nearly twice as often as white motorists, but were less likely to find contraband among the black drivers.