I strangely find myself hearkening back to one of my favorite adolescent movies, Pump Up the Volume. It’s a movie about a loner who – alone and disaffected in the days prior to the internet – starts a pirate radio station where he finds, much to his surprise, that he has a ready audience of disaffected, disenfranchised malcontents.
However, while the movie hits on global themes of teen alienation, you quickly learn that the problems here are not about growing up so much as they are about a corrupt high school principal.
That is what Ferguson is starting to feel like. At first, this was a story about a police officer who ended up killing a young, unarmed black man. It started a narrative on police-community relations. And, now that the officer has at least been criminally exonerated both by a Grand Jury and the US Department of Justice, we learn that the real problem in Ferguson is extreme municipal corruption.
John Shaw, who is just 39, was hired back in 2007 as city manager, and now he has resigned after the Justice Department accused city agencies of systematically discriminating against African-American residents. Resigned is probably the wrong word, as the Ferguson City Council on Tuesday voted 7-0 to approve a mutual separation agreement.
The report detailed a number of instances in which Mr. Shaw saw the revenue from court fees and fines as a positive thing.
In a way, the Justice Department report, which hammered Ferguson officials, seems like a sort of a cop out, even in light of articles that note that Ferguson tactics were neither unique nor extreme by regional standards.
Digging up a Post-Dispatch editorial, however, it is a mistake to dismiss the severity of the findings. As a March 7 editorial in the St. Louis paper notes, there is the case of Ferguson municipal court Judge Ronald Brockmeyer. While he seemed to be “one of the people who understood that things had to change,” he was actually “hiding a secret.”
“While he was busy sentencing poor, black defendants to fines they would never be able to afford, he had conspired with a racist court clerk and prosecutors in other cities to fix traffic tickets for friends, family and himself,” they write.
“Ferguson has allowed its focus on revenue generation to fundamentally compromise the role of Ferguson’s municipal court,” the DOJ report reads. “The municipal court does not act as a neutral arbiter of the law or a check on unlawful police conduct. Instead, the court primarily uses its judicial authority as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees that advance the City’s financial interests. This has led to court practices that violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection requirements. The court’s practices also impose unnecessary harm, overwhelmingly on African-American individuals, and run counter to public safety.”
Writes the Editorial Board, “For anybody paying attention the past seven months, or for the African-Americans who have been constantly harassed for Driving (or Walking) While Black in Ferguson and surrounding communities, the report came as no surprise. The Ferguson protests, beyond the immediate anger over Mr. Brown’s death, were — and are — a manifestation of decades of anger. Anger over oppression, anger over the casual violation of civil rights, all detailed in painful precision in black and white in the DOJ report.”
If you’re white, ask yourself this:
- Have you ever received a ticket for telling an officer your name is Mike, instead of Michael?
- Ever been arrested for improper “Manner of Walking in Roadway”? That’s a charge the Ferguson police department issued frequently. In Ferguson, Walking While Black isn’t a sardonic joke. It’s an actual offense.
But here you go – you have to ask yourself, is this just Ferguson? Are they simply the bad guys here and we can forget the global lessons? That might be your temptation, but, as the editorial points out, “If you watched the protests on television, if you didn’t understand why black people in Ferguson and St. Louis and Cleveland and New York were and are upset, please read the DOJ report. It is chock-full of real-life examples of police and court harassment that should anger people of all colors and backgrounds. It is damning and it is real.”
We had a reader a few weeks ago cite a 15-year-old report from New Jersey that cited data to suggest that racial profiling doesn’t happen. There is a reason why we have terms like Driving While Black, Walking While Black, and, at least in Davis, Mowing While Black.
Ferguson made the mistake of being too blatant about it. But the reason that the anger rose from coast to coast is that it resonated.
I understand that people are going to look at the particulars of the Darren Wilson shooting of Michael Brown and argue that Darren Wilson was justified in his actions. I still largely believe that, had Darren Wilson handled the situation more adroitly, the incident could have been avoided.
But, regardless, you can’t ignore the context of that interaction – the distrust globally between police and young black man. And the distrust that had built up over the years due to local factors that have only now really come to light.
Of course, none of the rest of the country knew of any of this when the city of Ferguson exploded back in August. But knowing what we do now, can we really be surprised?
—David M. Greenwald reporting
No it isn’t an actual offense.
This is an interesting, thought provoking article. It is really not much of a surprise. We are taught, at a young age, that everything must be quantified. I’m not surprised that Ferguson had a monetary reward system based on court fees and fines. Our own school system is based on grades. Often, grades are bases on the quantity of work. For example, do we really teach excellent writing skills, when a writing assignment dictates the essay must be 200 words, single spaced?
What happens if it is a slow day in Ferguson, and no one commits a fine or even a minor traffic violation? Do the cops feel pressure to have a certain amount of moving violations or to catch someone for a failure to appear? I’m curious about Davis cops, too. Must they pull over a certain amount of people each day? What happens if they don’t?
Most of my jobs, in public sector and private, rewarded workers bases on the quantity of work produced. One job actually gave promotions, monetary rewards and a really expensive rewards banquet for the workers who produced the most. This caused all sorts of nasty competition, and did nothing for team building and employee morale. It even caused nice people to cheat on their statistics, do very sloppy work, and back stab their friends.
We need to worry more about the quality of policing, and crime prevention. We need to base work rewards on cooperation, and customer service, and an excellent work product, not competition.
I wonder what Ferguson will do, budget wise, if they have a reduction of fines. Also, might they also see a reduction in incarcerations, and that revenue source, if they are under more scrutiny?
“I still largely believe that had Darren Wilson handled the situation more adroitly, the incident could have been avoided.”
I wholeheartedly agree.
Fixing tickets for family and friends happens in jurisdictions everywhere, it’s never right, but it has nothing to do with racism.
How do we know the clerk is racist? I read the article and the link and didn’t see that.
I was curious about that comment as well – “racist clerk” – I’ll have to do more research on that one.
As for the fixing tickets part, I think it’s the juxtaposition that the judge is sentencing poor, black defendants to fines they can’t afford while helping his friends who can afford it, avoid theirs. It’s not that the practice is racist in and off itself, it’s that it’s likely to engender mistrust in the system that I think is far more important.
BP
“Fixing tickets for family and friends happens in jurisdictions everywhere, it’s never right, but it has nothing to do with racism.”
Actually I do not think that we have any more evidence that it does not have anything to do with racism than we do to support the assertion that it does. Do we know the race of this clerk. If we know for instance that he is black, I would say that it is statistically more likely that more of his family and friends would also be black and therefore the bulk of the people he was getting favors for would also be black. I would say the same if he were white. This may not be overt racism, but it certainly would be an example of disparate impact on individuals and communities based on race.
Life has a disparate impact for countless reasons. If the clerk was passing out favors, I don’t really care what their race was, put a stop to it.
People will bribe someone just to avoid the paperwork. Maybe the clerk was making more by fixing than doing the paperwork?
A guy in Woodland rode by the old Police Station on Court doing a wheelie, and got pulled over by the railroad, got a ticket for Reckless driving, took it home to a wife’s friend, and it got “deleted” the next day at her computer.
Though he may have liked the revenue no where have I read that Shaw told police to specifically target blacks for tickets.
Which is not surprising. His sin was turning a blind eye to the impact of implementing his revenue vision.
Did you know that the Brown family attorney is a black man named Anthony Gray who was also the prosecutor for over seven years in a local community named Pine Lawn until recently and last year that police dept issued over 17k tickets and over 5k warrants in a town of only 3200 residents. Why was Anthony Gray turning a blind eye?
actually he was police chief at pine lawn
http://www.kmov.com/news/investigates/Attorney-for-Michael-Browns-family-was-also-head-of-troubled-police-department-290378321.html
interesting – so a corrupt police chief and prosecutor.
Well, according to the article you posted he’s back at prosecutor now. So prosecutor for 71/2 years, police chief last year and now back to the town’s prosecutor. So where’s the outrage, where’s the DOJ, is this town practicing black on black racism? Is that racism or just bad policy?
where’s the outrage? there’s plenty of outrage, however, right now brown’s attorney isn’t the focus of the justice department report. at some point, hopefully, the justice department will help to clean this entire mess up. trying to turn this on anthony gray or deflect isn’t going expedite this process. however, the genie is now out of the bottle and as the new york times article from last week shows, ferguson is only one of many.
So the misguided policies of liberals and social engineers, combined with the corrupt Democrat politician payouts to the public sector employees killed Mike Brown.
That seems to be the point being made here.
i don’t know the party of those involved, in many cases they are non-partisan offices anyway. i may agree with your point about corrupt politicians but making it partisan makes it far less likely that people who might otherwise agree with you, will here.
Yes Frankly, it wasn’t so much about racism as it was about policy. Though the liberals and the DOJ would love to lead you to believe that.
i think it’s about both. but i still find it fascinating how hard you guys continue to look for explanation other than racism.
the term you want which you have avoided is disparate impact – it doesn’t mean the policies were intentionally or intended to be racist, but their effect is.
“City officials have frequently asserted that the harsh and disparate results of Ferguson’s law enforcement system do not indicate problems with police or court practices, but instead reflect a pervasive lack of “personal responsibility” among “certain segments” of the community. Our investigation has found that the practices about which area residents have complained are in fact unconstitutional and unduly harsh.”
so you are trying to split a hair that doesn’t split.
No, it’s you guys or girls who are looking for any reason to keep calling it racism.
actually i’m not. disparate impact is what we are talking about here (or should be). the policies here reflect the reality that race wasn’t the target of the policies but rather their effect.
ironically disparate impact is what was invalidated by the scotus on the housing front.
This is what wdf accurately called ‘partisan trolling’ the other day with regard to your comment on another thread.
Not at all, I’m just shooting holes through the whole theory that the Ferguson police dept is blatantly racist which is being thrown out there by the DOJ and liberals. You might call it trolling, I call it the facts.
no, you’re reading is partial and incomplete because you are trying to avoid the key point – the key is that the policies created a “disparate impact” on the black community. they were likely not intended to do so. they likely were in fact intended to generate revenue. the problem is that as the justice department stated, they are “unconstitutional and harsh.”
What would the DOJ find if they had 40 FBI agents looking through 10 years of records in Sacramento, Davis, or any city or agency?
The biggest “disparate impact” on the poor black communities is caused by crappy education and crappy job opportunities. In addition, there is the crappy family values where 70% of black children are conceived out of wedlock and raised without a father around.
These are the root causes of the problems. What you and others continue to do is to point to symptoms to deflect from the truth.
you’re doing everything you can to avoid this conversation and turn it to your partisan agenda.
No, DP, you don’t understand. The city manager of Ferguson resigned because of crappy schools/job opportunities/family values/out of wedlock (quaint term) babies, Democrats, liberals, and public unions. That’s why he resigned. 😉
You are doing everything you can to avoid the truth and perpetuate the false “the law enforcement and judicial system is racist” narrative that ensures that we will never solve the very problems that primarily contributed to the death of Mike Brown.
How about a narrative that the law enforcement and judicial system in Ferguson, and in a lot of other places, come down heavily on poor people and people of color with excessive enforcement and fines for trivial offenses?
Sure, but what does this have to do with Mike Brown being dead?
And why is this news or a surprise? Like I wrote, government at all levels does this overreach thing. You are not going to solve many, if any, problems dealing with this on a transactional basis. It is a systemic problem. It is a problem that emanates from a political view that government is the solution for everything, and that leads to government being out of control.
And if you want to continue down this nuanced path that it is not big government per se, it is just this need to fix the problem of excessive enforcement and fines for “trivial” offenses, then there are two related questions:
1. What do you do about it?
2. What will ALL the consequences be related to #1?
The statement from law enforcement and the judicial is basically that the areas where more blacks live are also areas most lacking in personal responsibility (more violations). The cops spend more time in these neighborhoods with more violations and are more likely to crack down.
Think about a summer camp for kids where one cabin is filled full of kids breaking the rules and another has mostly rule-following kids. Wouldn’t it be logical to expect that the RA of the cabin of greater rule-breakers would establish harsher penalties to motivate good behavior? When compared it would seem there is unfair rule enforcement bias between the cabins… but only if we ignore the consequences of forcing the exact same rule enforcement to both cabins even though one has a higher incidence of rule breaking than the other.
I guess we have to debate the broken window theory here. If there is greater leniency in these high-violation neighborhoods will it lead to more violations? And will it lead to more non-minor violations? Will these violations bleed out into other neighborhoods and create more victims of crime?
I think law enforcement still operates under the premise to catch law breakers early to prevent them from breaking more laws.
L.A. Times, quoting the DOJ report: “African Americans accounted for 95% of manner of walking along roadway charges from 2011 to 2013, according to the report.”
So what do you do about it?
Stop citing and arresting and fining people for “Manner of walking along roadway.” I don’t think that’s fundamental to the “broken window theory.” Basically, stop harassing people. And if there is a community that believes they are being harassed, perhaps establish better communication to understand why they feel that way and what policy changes could be implemented to reduce the perception and the reality of harassment.
Citizens in those areas often clamor for more police whenever another often young Black man is killed, usually via black-on-black crime.
Citizens clamor for police to take drug dealers off of corners, they ask for help at church, at community meetings.
HEATHER MAC DONALD: The Myth of Racial Profiling
There’s no credible evidence that racial profiling exists, yet the crusade to abolish it threatens a decade’s worth of crime-fighting success.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_2_the_myth.html
“Sure, but what does this have to do with Mike Brown being dead?”
they investigated ferguson when they investigated the death of brown. they found insufficient evidence to charge brown, but found a lot of problems with the way the police and public officials were conducting themselves. don has laid it out well, so no need for me to repeat.
trueblue: why do you keep reposting the link to the same faulty article? there is plenty of evidence that racial profiling exists. the article was written in the spring of 2001. two years later the california highway patrol radically changed their policies on pretext stops (as david posted in response to your comment about) to eliminate the kind of phishing expeditions that were common almost exclusively for blacks and hispanics. that’s just one example. this report documents another example. so nothing from 2001 is going to debunk the doj’s report.
DP, what do you think of the PC police policies Eric Holder has shoved down the throats of the Seattle Police Department, which has lead to a 21% increase in murder and an over 40% increase in car theft? (See new post at the bottom, with quotes and link.)
i read the article you posted written by the hoover fellow in the nypost. it’s a fairly biased account. however i’m largely in support of such efforts.
the author that you post below seems to believe that stopping these kinds of stops has led to an increase in crime, i happen to believe that in the long run improving the community trust in the police will be a huge improvement. it’s hard to know what’s true and what’s not true through the bias, but if his account is accurate, one of the problems appears to be that the police overreacted to the decree and so they essentially did what happened in new york and stopped doing basic police tactics – that’s poor leader and lack of training, not the decree. no need for the police stop stop wearing tasers or responding to back up calls, that’s not the problem. the problem is the police using their discretionary power in a biased manner and singling our blacks.
Point me to where any local GOP politicians are funded by public sector unions. Until and unless we stop being so hypersensitive to criticism of the party responsible for these practices that causes cities to be cash-strapped, and until we admit that it is liberals and Democrats primarily protecting the crappy education status quo and pushing for more and more regulations that tax success thus chasing away capital from economic development investment, and protect labor and the environment to excess at a cost of economic growth and job supply… we will never address the root cause of these problems. And we will see all sorts of other unintended consequences as government gets creative to bring in more revenue to the beast.
Check what is happening at the federal level. Instead of demanding we cut the pay and benefits of federal government workers to match the general labor market (because that would piss off the public sector unions and the unions would take it out on their political benefactors that are generally 100% Democrat), more and more agencies are free wheeling going after business to extort cash with frivolous penalties and claims to bring in more revenue.
This is a problem of politics. There isn’t a nuanced solution until and unless we admit that.
public sector unions as opposed to industry that is supposed to be regulated by government agencies. it’s all the same. but i’d rather stay on topic.
I run a business that is the private side of a public-private partnership with a federal program for economic development and jobs. It is not all the same. I have an overseer. I am regulated and audited to extreme… usually with rules set by attorneys and job security risk-averse bureaucrats that lack any common business sense. However, nobody really oversees the agencies. Except when there is some political storm and then other attorneys and bureaucrats in other agencies start pounding on the subordinate agency and then they pound harder on us. But again, there is a general lack of transparency because there is no entity with higher authority.
And they overreach because they can.
This is why Hillary Clinton uses her personal email account. There is nobody keeping tabs. The press/media used to help, but at least the main media is really part of the same organism now as is Washington.
And at the local level it is not much different.
How does this relate to Mike Brown? All that tax revenue being sucked up by your public sector worker friends retiring in their 50s with a six figure pension is money that could otherwise be used for programs that would have given Mike Brown a better education, and stronger moral compass and better economic prospects. It is big government that is responsible for much of the problems in the black communities. And the GOP is consistently advocating for smaller and less expensive government.
If Mike Brown’s community had better schools and a stronger economy where he and his family had greater economic prospects, I think it is likely he would not be dead today. That is all about politics.
Let’s say we can turn back the hands of time to before Mike Brown was born and we could establish an agenda for helping to prevent this tragic event. What would we do? I suppose we could put a lot more effort into racial sensitivity training for the Ferguson cops. Or maybe we implement a racial quota control… that the cops have to lighten up on the number of encounters with black residents when they hit a certain metric that keeps the number balanced with other demographic groups in their precincts. Do you really think that these types of changes would help Mike Brown? Do you really think it would help the community?
If not these things, then what would you do? I know what I would do… and it would start with making it illegal for public employees to form a union.
What programs would you support being paid by the tax dollars that would be freed up by paying public employees less?
I recall Jack Kemp advocating for enterprise zones, back many years ago.
Honestly, though, I think the history of many cities – including Sacramento – involves a long period of housing segregation created by intentional policies of municipal governments over many years. Businesses were unwilling to locate in those minority neighborhoods long before “big government.” Except that there was also a pattern in some areas of locating the worst-polluting industries in minority areas. So those “environmental regulations” you are always bemoaning often were a response to grotesque pollution of people who were least able to resist that treatment. Finally, schools in poorer areas are always poorer funded and have fewer resources.
You don’t seem to acknowledge the racial patterns in housing and economic development, and even government policy, that lead to many of the problems we have today.
I don’t know the full history of every city in America, but I do know that hundreds and thousands of businesses went out of business, closed, or fled, after riots ravaged many urban cities in the 1960s.
This pattern has existed til today where a riot or lawlessness can start at the drop of a hat, often spurred by outside agitators, often young foolish boys / men, anarchists and opportunists. I don’t know if the last two groups also took advantage in the 1960s, but they do today in Oakland and Berkeley.
Businesses have to evaluate these risks of a riot every 5 years, and the risk of losing everything. Insurance rates skyrocket.
I have spent plenty of time in urban area businesses, and in some neighborhoods the staged “slip and fall” customer is a weekly occurrence.
Yes, some of those polluting industries also provided well-paying jobs that fed and clothed large families, allowed them to buy homes and start businesses, and send kids to college.
You hit on it.
Economic development programs. Jobs programs. Education enhancement programs (but not just money that will be sucked up by the teachers union for greater pay and benefits and more administrators). Local tax incentives to attract and retain business. Better mental health and drug treatment services. There are a myriad of things we could do to help the people in these poor neighborhoods extracting the premium we are paying big government and grossly over-compensated government workers.
Ironically, the local government was doing the opposite… fining the poor people for more revenue to keep paying the grossly overpaid government workers.
Again, this is a political problem.
You think the public employees in Ferguson, Missouri, are grossly over-compensated? Are they unionized?
You think the public employees in Ferguson, Missouri, are grossly over-compensated? Are they unionized?
I do know that Ferguson employees claim they are underpaid compared to other surrounding cities, and that the city has started giving raises to help improve morale and retention.
But you are missing the point here. It is a government systemic problem. The feds give less to the states, the states give less to the counties and the cities. The total number of government employees, and the total cost-per-employee has skyrocketed. It is like a giant growing leech on the side of general societal well-being sucking it dry.
The people of Falluja Iraq were pissed off at the US for their work and sacrifice to remove the menacing hostiles that the people of Falluja cried about needing help removing.
Why people feel a certain way is often at odds with what is actually good for them. And if you look at the situation for many people in low income circumstances, it is absolutely demonstrative of a tendency to chose direction based on feeling rather than rational and objective considerations of what leads to good or bad outcomes.
What I find fascinating is this tendency for the big government lovers to wring their hands over sub-optimization of service on a transaction-by-transaction basis, but be so tone deaf to the point that it is the commonality for government service to be sub-optimized and to deliver less than top-level service and outcomes.
We are paying Nordstrom prices for KMart service, but the system will never deliver Nordstrom service because it lacks the business model and incentives to do so.
Last time I checked the job of police was simply law enforcement. So you want them to apply some nuanced larger social perspective working to prevent residents from feeling harassed? See the kids walking down the middle of the street impacting traffic and think “I should just leave them alone since it will just seem like I am harassing them to demand that they walk on the sidewalk.” That isn’t a workable expectation unless you are willing to accept that to make it happen, you would just need to decrease the amount of time that law enforcement spends in these neighborhoods. In other words, like for Falluja we just pull out.
We destroyed 60% of the buildings in Fallujah and reduced the population by 30 – 50%. Great example. And irrelevant, as usual.
I wonder if you could possibly be more patronizing. Nope. You couldn’t.
Yes. That is exactly what I think. Police have discretion as to how, how often, against whom, and how rigorously they enforce minor code violations. If they are doing it in a manner that provably affects people of color more than others, they should look at their policies. That is a top-down issue that needs to be addressed.
I’m not acquainted with anyone who meets that description. Is it some new kind of fetish?
Valerie Jarrett, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama exploded social spending with no way to pay for it. And the jobs haven’t returned.
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
[moderator] off topic.
Just think if the Indian clerk at the gas station had a gun or a taser, the choir boy Michael Brown might still be alive, the officer would still have his job, businesses would not be burned down, Brown’s parents wouldn’t be lined up for felony battery / theft, and the union corruption would continue.
“Just think if the Indian clerk at the gas station had a gun or a taser, the choir boy Michael Brown might still be alive,:
Just think if our society did not glorify the use of force, bullying and violence combined with a might makes right attitude, perhaps Michael Brown would still be alive. Perhaps he would not have bullied the clerk. Perhaps the policeman who ultimately shot him might have sought to de escalate rather than escalate the situation long before it got to the point of a struggle for the gun. Perhaps the evening might have ended with a polite request to step out of the middle of the street and perhaps grudging compliance of that request.
What if we were not conditioned by our society to expect the worst from others and constantly be suspicious and on guard. If so would Trayvon Martin still be alive, or the 12 year old playing with his toy gun, or the young man walking down a staircase when two police just happened to be on patrol with a drawn gun ? If we are going to address these issue, we are going to have to go beyond race to address the issue of suspicion and violence in our society, not think of better ways to arm all of us.