WASHINGTON – On Wednesday, May 27, the MacArthur Foundation announced that St. Louis County is one of just 20 jurisdictions across the county that will receive $150,000 to develop a multi-step plan to improve the local justice system, with the goal of reducing unnecessary over-incarceration. As part of the effort, 10 of those 20 jurisdictions will receive up to $2 million annually for two years to bring their plan to fruition.
St. Louis County was one of 191 jurisdictions from 45 states that applied for the Safety and Justice Challenge. Along with several other counties, the cities of Philadelphia, New York and New Orleans were also selected. Combined, the selected jurisdictions have a jail capacity of nearly 100,000 and hold 11 percent of those behind bars nationwide, according to the MacArthur Foundation.
“You had to have leadership commitment, motivation and the acknowledgement that you have a problem and that you were seeking solutions,” said Laurie Garduque, director of justice reform for the MacArthur Foundation. “That’s what made [St. Louis County] competitive.”
Frank Vatterott, a municipal court judge who spearheaded the effort to apply for the MacArthur grant, said the Ferguson unrest in August and the subsequent national coverage of municipal courts in St. Louis County highlighted the issue.
“Ferguson has shown that there is a lot of unnecessary incarceration here. I think everybody agrees to that. It isn’t always that the incarceration is unconstitutional, it’s just unnecessary,” Vatterott said.
St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said the county’s fragmentation – into “92 governments, and 60 some odd police departments and 83 or so courts” – makes the situation “very difficult to manage.”
“It was patently obvious that certainly not all, but some agencies, some governments here in St. Louis County were using traffic fine revenue to prop their cities up and prop their police departments up,” Belmar said. “Unfortunately, we do have police departments here in St. Louis County that exist, I believe, for the wrong reasons.”
T.R. Carr, a member of the St. Louis County Board of Police Commissioners as well as the Ferguson Commission, said the grant “will help us reduce the number of nonviolent individuals being [unnecessarily] incarcerated.”
“Once the discontent began to emerge in Ferguson, everything shifted,” Carr said. “Why is the public so upset with law enforcement? It’s really the way they’re treated in terms of municipal courts. They perceived that police departments, some of these small municipal police departments, were just acting as an arm of the court as a way to generate revenue.”
St. Louis County will be working with officials from the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL) as part of the effort.
“These lower municipal offenses have kind of been washed aside in some of our larger discussions on corrections and policing, but I think this is where we can make a huge impact,” said Beth Huebner, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at UMSL.
Belmar said it is simply unrealistic for law enforcement to enforce the hundreds of thousands of outstanding warrants in the county, many in connection with missed court dates for minor violations of municipal codes.
“I’m looking at cities that have 50,000, 39,000, 30,000 outstanding warrants today. You’re never going to catch up to that,” Belmar said. “You might have a city like Pine Lawn, which is 360 acres, that has 30,000 outstanding warrants. How can that be? The math doesn’t work.”
Belmar acknowledged that the protests in Ferguson have given a voice to populations that had been overlooked in the past.
“If you went to a very affluent area in St. Louis County, how long do you think a program would last where speed cameras were put up on arterial roads coming into subdivisions, and people were given letters saying they were going to be arrested? It would last about five hours,” Belmar said.
“Yet in areas that are not as affluent, and where folks really are struggling with issues of poverty and education and crime and everything else that goes along with it – unemployment – they don’t have the ability really to voice that opinion. They can’t leverage change. So that’s a good thing that’s come out of all this.”
Edited for length and reprinted with permission from The Huffington Post.