Former Indiana police chief finalist for Ferguson chief spot
EAST CHICAGO, Ind. (AP) – A former northwest Indiana police chief who’s in the running to become the next top officer in Ferguson, Missouri, says leading that department would be a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Mark Becker stepped down as East Chicago’s police chief on Friday, the same day Ferguson officials named the former FBI agent one of four finalists for its vacant police chief post. Becker had announced his departure last month after four years as chief.
“I always said I had one more rodeo in me. I just didn’t expect it would be this soon,” he said.
Ferguson drew national attention after the fatal August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, who was black, 18 and unarmed when he was shot to death by white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson during a confrontation in a street. The U.S. Justice Department later cleared Wilson. Brown’s death helped spawn the national “Black Lives Matter” movement rebuking police treatment of minorities.
Becker said the Missouri city’s next police chief will face a “tremendous challenge,” The (Munster) Times reported.
He also said the U.S. Department of Justice’s report on Ferguson offers a valuable lesson on the importance of community policing. That report found Ferguson police disproportionately targeted black residents with stops and searches and arrested many without legal justification. The city remains under a Department of Justice consent decree that lays out more than 60 initiatives.
Ferguson’s city manager is expected to announce the city’s new police chief by April.
Becker has a long history in northwest Indiana, working on numerous high-profile cases as an FBI agent. He was part of a multi-agency task force that investigated the random killings of seven people in the region in 1991.
Christopher Peterson, now known as Obadyah Ben-Yisrayl, was arrested in that so-called “shotgun killer” case. He’s serving a 120-year sentence for his conviction in four of those murders.
Becker retired from the FBI in 2007 after nearly 32 years of service, and was later police chief for the city of Portage and then East Chicago.