Ferguson.....Dios Mio.

[marmar]

Ferguson Digs In Its Heels
Colin Gordon ▪ February 17, 2016


Nineteen months have passed since the death of Michael Brown, and less than a year since the release of the Justice Department’s scathing examination of predatory racism in the Ferguson Police Department. The problem—amply documented by Justice, as well as local groups Arch City Defenders and Better Together St. Louis—was not just the starkly disproportionate impact of local courts on African Americans, but the ways in which Ferguson and other St. Louis County municipalities relied on fines and forfeitures as a source of revenue. “The residents of Ferguson do not have a police problem,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates summed it up last year, “They have a gang problem. That the gang operates under legal sanction makes no difference. It is a gang nonetheless, and there is no other word to describe an armed band of collection agents.”

The political response was slow but meaningful. Missouri Senate Bill 5, signed by Governor Nixon in July, introduced a spate of reforms, including a cap on court fines as a share of municipal revenues. Negotiations between Ferguson and the Justice Department proceeded fitfully, slowed by the city’s fiscal anxieties (“We feel that what they are asking would financially ruin the city,” as one city councilor complained just before the anniversary of Brown’s death). In January, Ferguson officials finally agreed to a settlement that would bolster community policing and meet the modest expectation that municipal code enforcement be animated by a concern for public safety rather than the city’s budget.

Last week, that deal crumbled. To the palpable dismay of community members in attendance, the Ferguson city council amended the consent decree, most notably pulling back on commitments to raise police salaries and asserting that the terms of the deal would not apply to outside agencies if the city decided to contract out policing or collections. The Justice Department wasted no time filing suit, citing the city’s “routine violation of constitutional and statutory rights, based in part on prioritizing the misuse of law enforcement authority as a means to generate municipal revenue over legitimate law enforcement purposes,” and the unlikelihood that “that the City will remedy these patterns and practices of unlawful conduct absent judicial mandate.”

It is a distressing turn of events. Ferguson’s petulant retreat is certainly animated in part by uneven citizenship that prevails in North St. Louis County, by which local authorities (as the Justice report concluded) “see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders.” But it is also animated by mundane budgetary anxieties, by a fiscal desperation that pressed the Ferguson police—under clear and unambiguous direction from city officials—to also see those offenders as “sources of revenue.” How did it come to this? ....................(more)

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/ferguson-justice-department-consent-degree-standoff