Across the United States, police
departments, like many other public-funded services, are increasingly short of
money. As a result, cities look for more sources of revenue. One such source is
arresting and fining people for petty offenses.
In “Collect and Serve” (Mother Jones,
September/October), Jack Hitt points out that many of the victims of police
shootings were apprehended for petty offenses. In April, police officer Michael
Slager stopped Walter Scott for a busted taillight and then fatally shot him.
When the Justice Department released its
report on Ferguson, Mo., in March, then-Attorney General Eric Holder referenced
a woman in that town whose life sounded Walter Scott-like, writes Hitt. “She
had received two parking tickets totaling $151. Her efforts to pay those fines
fell so behind that she eventually paid out more than $500. At one point, she
was jailed for nonpayment and—eight years later—still owes $541 in accrued
fees.”
The
judge largely responsible for extracting these fees from Ferguson’s poor,
writes Hitt, was Ronald J. Brockmeyer, who “owed $172,646 in back taxes. … Even
as he was jailing black ladies for parking tickets, Brockmeyer was allegedly
erasing citations for white Ferguson residents who happened to be his friends.”
Is this just one person’s bad personal
ethics, or is it part of a pattern? In 2010, the Ferguson police and courts
generated $1.4 million for the city. This year, they expect to make $3.1
million.
And it’s not just Ferguson doing this. In
Oklahoma, Robert Bates, a 73-year-old millionaire insurance broker with scant
law enforcement background, was allowed to go out on patrol, “likely because he
had donated lots of money and equipment to the local sheriff’s office,” writes
Hitt. He killed an unarmed black suspect when he grabbed his gun instead of his
Taser.
“Essentially, these small towns in urban
areas have municipal infrastructure that can’t be supported by the tax base,
and so they ticket everything in sight to keep the town functioning,” says
William Maurer, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice.
Thus you get laws like these (in Pagedale,
Mo.): You can’t have a hedge more than three feet high or a basketball hoop or
a wading pool in front of your house. You can’t walk on the roadway. Pants may
not be worn below the waist in public. Blinds must be neatly hung.
Why
such laws? Maurer says that in 2010, Missouri passed a law that capped
the amount of city revenue any agency could generate from traffic stops.
Pagedale saw a 495 percent increase in nontraffic-related arrests.
Scott’s busted taillight is not even a crime
in South Carolina. Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes. Michael Brown was
walking in the street. Between 2011 and 2013, 95 percent of the perpetrators of
this act were African American, writes Hitt, “meaning that ‘walking black’ is
not a punch line. It is a crime.”
Police forces have become collection
agencies for the municipal court. Jails have become debtors’ prisons. And who
pays? We do.
Hitt quotes the director of the Brennan
Center’s Justice Program: “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 sense in no reasonable
world.”
The mission of police departments have shifted from “protect
and serve” to “punish and profit.” That’s just wrong.
