reporter: i ve talked to everyone, i ve given you literally every opportunity. we ve been talking for days and days and days. all we want is an answer from you. i ll analyze the report and take action where necessary. reporter: does that mean you re going to stay around? i ll take action where necessary. thank you. reporter: thank you. conversation over. we ll get back to him on that. hopefully he ll get back to us. so that is just ferguson, missouri, population, 21,000. what about the rest of the country? what do most americans think about race relations, say, since the country s first black president took office? there s a good spot to start the poll and that s exactly what we did. cnn poll found nearly 4 of 10 people in america think that race relations have actually become worse in the obama years. 15% think the opposite is true and the rest say that relations between black america and white america pretty much stayed the same, just unchanged. the president himself spok
a lot of people thought he should have been fired a long time ago. what does the ferguson, missouri, police chief have to say about a brand-new federal report that outlines rampant racism throughout his department? cnn exclusive interview right there and you ll hear it next.
morning about exactly that, race relations in america, particularly with the ferguson police department report so fresh in our memories. you just saw the ferguson report come out. i don t think that is typical of what happens across the country, but it s not an isolated incident. i think that there are circumstances in which trust between communities and law enforcement have broken down. and individuals or entire departments may not have the training or the accountability to make sure that they are protecting and serving all people, and not just some. again, that interview was president obama s first reaction in public to that federal report that uncovered the systematic police abuse against the african-american community in ferguson, missouri. coming up, it only takes one
of the justice department, that its officers systematically discriminate against and treat unfairly the people that they are sworn to serve and protect. ferguson, missouri, if a federal investigation found that your officers were racist and actively stopped black people for traffic stops and arrests, would you still have a job? this is the ferguson police chief still employed today and you ll see this only on cnn because no one else has been able to get an on-camera interview with him for his reaction to that awful federal report about his department and what he plans to do about it. but our sara sidner sure did. she tried to get a straight answer out of him. reporter: don t you think you should have known some of the things that came out, the racist e-mails, the numbers were you just trying to bilk people out of money instead of protecting them, telling your department to go ticket them? okay, thank you. i will be in touch. get ahold of jeff.
including for not wearing his seat belt and for giving his name mike instead of michael. this african-american man ended up losing his job because he worked for the federal government at the time. shocking. another thing they say in the report is 95% of those who received some minor infraction like jaywalking for example, 95% of those people were african-americans. that s right. you know that matters because without that kind of practice at the ferguson police department we are not here talking about anything. michael brown was stopped by officer darren wilson because he was jaywalking. so because this is the practice at ferguson police department you end up having a confrontation that really should never have gone anywhere. this is a result of that a young man is dead and a police officer has lost his job. despite all that history, the justice department in washington the federal government they decided there wasn t evidence to file civil rights charges or any charges against th