But if they are relatively enlightened, the white citizens of Ferguson are also disproportionately empowered: despite the fact they are a minority of the municipality, they dominate its political leadership.
In Ferguson, just about every single black person I spoke to had at least one story (often many) about humiliating traffic stops by Ferguson police officers that had nothing to do with public safety. And the statistics bear them out. In 2009, in a city of just 22,000, there were 24,000 traffic cases in the Ferguson municipal court, and by October 31, 2014, that figure had grown to 53,000. Nearly all levels of Ferguson’s municipal government had pushed for the increase. In March 2010 the city’s finance director warned the police chief, Tom Jackson, that “unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year. What are your thoughts? Given that we are looking at a substantial sales tax shortfall, it’s not an insignificant issue.” By 2014, the year of Michael Brown’s death, tickets and citations were still increasing as rapidly as they ever had. The DOJ found evidence that black residents of Ferguson received speeding tickets “at disproportionately high rates overall” and that the Ferguson police department’s “enforcement practices on African Americans is 48% larger when citations are issued not on the basis of radar or laser, but by some other method, such as the officer’s own visual assessment.”
The model of cops as armed tax collectors didn’t stop with simple traffic stops for speeding: the entire municipal court system was designed to function like a payday lending operation. Relatively small infractions quickly turned into massive debts. Many traffic citations required the ticketed person to make court appearances, but the local court would hold sessions only three to four times a month for just a few hours. Because of the limited hours, the court couldn’t process everyone who came for their court date. Those left outside were cited for contempt for failing to appear. Not coming to court triggered another fine, and failure to pay that fine counted as its own form of contempt, adding to the total.
Here, from the DOJ report, is one particularly enraging example of how it all works:
We spoke, for example, with an African-American woman who has a still-pending case stemming from 2007, when, on a single occasion, she parked her car illegally. She received two citations and a $151 fine, plus fees. The woman, who experienced financial difficulties and periods of homelessness over several years, was charged with seven Failure to Appear offenses for missing court dates or fine payments on her parking tickets between 2007 and 2010. For each Failure to Appear, the court issued an arrest warrant and imposed new fines and fees. From 2007 to 2014, the woman was arrested twice, spent six days in jail, and paid $550 to the court for the events stemming from this single instance of illegal parking. Court records show that she twice attempted to make partial payments of $25 and $50, but the court returned those payments, refusing to accept anything less than payment in full. One of those payments was later accepted, but only after the court’s letter rejecting payment by money order was returned as undeliverable. This woman is now making regular payments on the fine. As of December 2014, over seven years later, despite initially owing a $151 fine and having already paid $550, she still owed $541.
By 2015, fines and fees would make up more than one-fifth of the city of Ferguson’s total revenue. The local leadership class clearly saw tickets and citations as a convenient source of cash that would fill the city’s treasury without their having to do the politically difficult work of raising taxes. The problem with raising, say, property taxes is that the most engaged, empowered citizens will revolt against it. So instead, why not just squeeze all you can out of a smaller, less powerful group of citizens by raising the revenue through enforcement? The citizens receive municipal services, and the subjects have to pay for them. King George III succumbed to the same temptation.
Of course, just as with the colonial customs officers, a policing regime designed to extract revenue and stamp out petty, nonviolent offenses is going to need ever-grander grants of power. The British Crown issued formal writs of assistance that allowed anyone to be searched at any time. The Ferguson police department used its expansive municipal code for the same ends. In addition to the “failure to comply” statute so abused by Ferguson cops (as I discussed earlier), cops could marshal a bevy of other municipal infractions—such as “manner of walking in roadway” violations—for their purposes.
This meant that the black citizens of Ferguson lived in a different country than their white neighbors. They lived in a country without a Fourth Amendment, without the fundamental right to privacy, the right to be “secure” in one’s personal effects, whether in one’s body, house, or car. They lived (and continue to live) the contingent existence of the occupied. And here’s what that looks like (again, an incident recorded in the DOJ report):
Lieutenant: Get over here. Get the f*** over here.
Man at bus stop: Me?
Lieutenant: Yeah, you.
Man at bus stop: Why? What did I do?
Lieutenant: Give me your ID.
Man at bus stop: Why?