Lurking beneath the violence too often found in the interaction between law enforcement and minorities is the fiscal menace of police departments forced to assist city officials in raising revenue. In many cities the police are funding their own salaries -- redirecting the very concept of keeping the peace into underwriting budgets. In the most recent year of full reporting, the Ferguson [MO] Police Department collected $3.1 million in fines and fees, providing almost a quarter of the city's $13 million budget, almost all of it extracted from the poorest African American citizens. In 2014, the Ferguson police force issued 16,000 arrest warrants to three-fourths of the town's total population of 21,000. [1] According to ABC News, in 2013 Ferguson police filed more than 12,000 cases charging ordinance violations -- everything from loitering to petty larceny. Between 2011 and 2013, the U.S. Justice Department reported that ninety-four percent of the people arrested in Ferguson were African American. The Justice Department also reported that the Ferguson police routinely performed "pedestrian checks" in which residents were stopped on the street, often without proper legal justification. [2] (Notably, police logs show that Darren Wilson performed a "pedestrian check" right after the initial confrontation with Michael Brown, furthering my belief that Wilson's story of discovering two possible robbers is a made-up story, which unfortunately, was widely believed.) As hard as it is to believe, when the Justice Department conducted its in investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, seventy-five percent of Ferguson's residents had active outstanding arrest warrants.
In Pagedale, Missouri, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Jennifer Nunn recently calculated a 500 percent increase in petty fines over the last five years. "Pagedale handed out 2,255 citations for these types of offenses last year," Nunn wrote, "or nearly two per household." "Having taxpayers foot a bill of $4,000 to incarcerate a man who owes the state $745 or a woman who owes a predatory lender $425 and removing them from the job force makes no sense in no rational world." [3]
ADDENDUMS:
*Police Training - A recent survey by the Police Executive Research Forum revealed that cadets usually receive fifty-eight hours of training in firearms, forty-nine in defensive tactics, ten in communication skills and eight in de-escalation tactics. In 2014, Ferguson spent four times as much money on police uniforms as it did on police training. [4]
*Black Rage - "At the very least, the public expression of black rage has allowed communities and people who have felt isolated in their own anger to know that they are not alone." "but the particular brand of black rage that Obama represented was one that united black rage, and its possibilities, altogether." "But even when he's risen to the task, Obama has done so by making the perceived moral failings of black Americans as much a part of that story as racism itself. His rhetoric provides further ammunition for those who believe that black people's anger at racism is unjustified." "Black anger is back, cutting to the core of white supremacy, and demanding that America change." "But a decade later, the resurgence of black rage in the political sphere is finally ready to make America face its racist past and present." [5]
Footnotes
[1] Jack Hitt, "To Collect and Serve," Mother Jones, September/October, 2015.
[2] Jake Halpen, "The Cop," The New Yorker, August 10/17, 2015.
[3] Hitt.
[4] Halpen.
[5] Mychal Denzel Smith, "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People," The Nation, August 31/September 7, 2015.
No comments:
Post a Comment