By Marc Jampole
The U.S. Department of Justice Report on the Ferguson,Missouri police department (FPD) makes clear that the City of Ferguson made
raising revenue the primary objective of the FPD and the Ferguson court system.
In budgets, memos, emails, commands to police and meeting minutes, the DOJ
found an explicit collective program to fund city operations with traffic and
parking tickets and public safety fines for minor offenses such as not keeping
a tidy lawn. The DOJ documents that Ferguson’s fines are much higher than other
Missouri cities of the same size, as are the percentage of all city revenues that
comes from fining citizens.
Rural counties in Texas, West Virginia and elsewhere have
long had a history of stopping those driving cars with out-of-state plates to
pump up the local treasury. Ferguson has taken this gambit one step further by
going after its own citizens.
But no one should be surprised or shocked to learn that the
Ferguson, Missouri city government financed its operations on the backs of the
poor and middle class. It happens all
the time, although usually not with the overtly racist element. When
municipalities use tax dollars to build new stadiums with more luxury boxes but
fewer cheap seats, as happened in New York, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and
elsewhere, it represents a convoluted form of taxing the poor and middle class
to fund municipal benefits to the wealthy. When states and local governments
decide to fund activities by issuing bonds that constitute safe investments for
rich folk and pay off those bonds through taxing everyone, it’s another
complicated way to shift financing burdens to the poor and middle class. The report
of the National
Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform a few years back didn’t suggest much to help balance the budget but
did propose giving rich folk big fat tax breaks while increasing taxes on the
poor and middle class, thus shifting to the latter the burden of paying for
government. The net effect of the several
tax breaks and tax hikes over the past 35 years has been to make the poor and
middle class pay a larger share of the cost of government and government
services.
These and other
mechanisms for making the poor and middle class pay more are far more subtle
than the naked wealth grab we have seen in Ferguson. The headlines in the DOJ
report depict a contemporary version of highway robbery:
·
FPD
Engages in a Pattern of Unconstitutional Stops and Arrests in Violation of the
Fourth Amendment
·
FPD
Engages in a Pattern of First Amendment Violations
·
FPD
Engages in a Pattern of Excessive Force in Violation of the Fourth Amendment
·
Court
Practices Impose Substantial and Unnecessary Barriers to the Challenge or
Resolution of Municipal Code Violations
·
The
Court Imposes Unduly Harsh Penalties for Missed Payments or Appearances
We can assume that city officials knew that Afro-Americans
were arrested and fined at a much higher rate than their representation in the
population, but it doesn’t matter one way or the other: the result of using the
criminal justice system as a source of revenue and overtly discriminating
against blacks in arrests and court treatment pretty much defines the kind of
institutional racism that transcends whatever laws are in place to protect
against discrimination.
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