Convert the brave, honest officers of your navy into pimping tide-waiters and colony officers of the customs. Let those who in the time of war fought gallantly in defense of their countrymen, in peace be taught to prey upon it. Let them . . . scour with armed boats every bay, harbor, river, creek, cove, or nook throughout your colonies; stop and detain every coaster, every wood-boat, every fisherman. . . . Thus shall the trade of your colonists suffer more from their friends in time of peace, than it did from their enemies in war. . . . O, this will work admirably!
Animus built toward the most famous incident of the pre-Revolutionary period, the Boston Tea Party. Like the bromides about taxation and representation, the Boston Tea Party doesn’t actually make sense today without understanding the context of enforcement. The cargo dumped from aboard several ships of the British East India Company was legal tea. Contrary to what you may have learned, this tea was relatively cheap for consumers to purchase, even after including the price of the import tariff. The Crown had granted the East India Company sole monopoly of the import of this tea, making it the single legal competitor to the vast armada of smugglers of illegal Dutch tea that flooded the colonies. And in fact, what so enraged the revolutionary mob that defiled this shipment was that the Crown had recently lowered the import tariff on this legal tea, making it more economically competitive with smuggled tea. In other words, the Tea Party was triggered not by taxes being raised but rather by a tax cut. Our common understanding of the tea party as a revolt against taxes renders this basic truth invisible, but the event only makes sense in the broader context of an enforcement regime whose abuses and excesses had destroyed the government’s legitimacy.
Escalating conflict between smugglers and the officers who policed smuggling was one of the chief drivers—perhaps the chief driver—toward the outbreak of violent insurgency that led to the country’s founding. It was the point of the spear, where the inherent contradictions of colonial rule were made most acutely, painfully, and sometimes violently manifest. When the colonial insurrectionists railed against the king, it was his customs officers who embodied his tyranny. And sure enough, in the Declaration of Independence, in the list of petty indignities and offensive tyrannies of the Crown, we find an excoriation of the king for the fact the he has “sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”
SO WHAT DOES ALL of this have to do with Ferguson, Missouri? When you zoom out past the precipitating incident of Michael Brown’s death and look at the Ferguson police as a whole, you find an enforcement regime strikingly similar to the British Crown’s. The fundamental offense of British customs policing was that its driving rationale was revenue. Like the customs officers who interdicted smugglers to bring in tariffs, the police in Ferguson were ordered to write tickets to bring in money. That kind of law enforcement had nothing to do with public safety or welfare, and the public knew it. As the Department of Justice (DOJ) wrote in its report on the patterns and practices of the department:
Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs. This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson’s police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the Ferguson community.
Like the regime in the American colonies, the enforcement regime in Ferguson had a lot to do with the lack of democratic accountability.
Here’s a snapshot of Ferguson’s history. It was built as a railroad town, but in the 1960s, as desegregation came to St. Louis schools, whites fled north from the city proper for the inner ring suburbs of St Louis County. Ferguson is just one of a number of surrounding municipalities that took in the influx of working-class whites. For a generation, the towns in St. Louis County were, in the words of one local, “white blue-collar Democrats. Military families. Union families.”
And then in the inexorable migratory logic of white fear, when black people started to move into those same inner ring suburbs, whites who had been living there moved out farther into the sprawling exurbs. In 1990 Ferguson was 73 percent white and 25 percent black. A decade later African Americans were a slim majority, and by the time Michael Brown was shot and killed, African Americans comprised about two-thirds of the town’s 21,000 residents. The white people who stayed had a certain pride in their own enlightenment and open-mindedness. “It’s ironic this happened in Ferguson, because Ferguson had the reputation of being one of the most progressive [towns] in north St. Louis County,” native Umar Lee told me. “Where you do have a strong contingent of white people . . . that are kind of committed to diversity, and you know, we’ve got the Ferguson farmers’ market right down the street.”