It’s beginning to look more likely that the St. Louis region may finally start to get its act together in the aftermath of a devastating Department of Justice investigative report on the Ferguson Police Department, released on March 4. The report documents, with the unique extensive investigative reach and legal authority of the DOJ, what advocacy attorneys such as Thomas Harvey of Arch City Defenders and Brendan Roediger of Saint Louis University have claimed for years: that St. Louis County municipal courts are predatory, borderline criminal mechanisms for taxing the poor, using municipal police as armed enforcers and collectors.
It’s a system that degrades everyone, at every level, as the report documents in excruciating detail. Most egregiously, it is low-income people who are most affected by unexpected expenses such as traffic tickets and court costs. They are then treated like dangerous criminals, locked up for at times indefinite periods because of their simple inability to pay the fine imposed for a harmless violation of the law. The police are driven to issue tickets to generate municipal revenue, as the DOJ showed in direct email exchanges between city manager John Shaw, who no longer works for Ferguson, and police chief Thomas Jackson, who was right behind him in the exodus out of Ferguson government. It’s fitting that municipal judge Ronald Brockmeyer was the first to go, as the robed overlord who pounded the gavel on this scheme. The Missouri Supreme Court has put the Ferguson courts in the hands of an appellate judge and encouraged him to enact reforms.
Harvey and Roediger have led the way in pushing the state Supreme Court to use its powers to order more sweeping reforms throughout the region’s municipal courts. This is badly needed, because it’s not just Ferguson that is revealed in this report. According to research by Arch City Defenders and Better Together St. Louis, Ferguson is a typical St. Louis County municipality in its reliance on cops and courts to pay the bills. In fact, Brockmeyer played judge or prosecutor in a handful of other municipalities – though after a Guardian report showed the judge and prosecutor owes some $170,000 in federal taxes, it is getting more and more untenable for him to earn a living locking up people who can’t afford to pay their government. Brockmeyer may be run out of one town after another, Jackson is not likely to lead another police department. and Shaw may be unemployable as a city manager – except, perhaps, in Richmond Heights, where the city manager rued the loss of Shaw’s dynamism and “ethics” (that’s what she tweeted) after he resigned. But the dysfunction is much deeper than a few bad or negligent actors.
A close reading of the DOJ report shows that the underlying problem is the proliferation of all of these municipalities, so many of them without a legitimate tax base. A major global think tank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, warns that “when there is a mismatch between functional boundaries and administrative boundaries,” the region’s economy suffers and governing is less efficient. Although duplication of public services and wasteful spending on non-creative government jobs are bad enough in and of themselves, the DOJ report on Ferguson shows that this inefficient redundancy in government functions and facilities is ultimately driving the police to harass the poor and branding the non-criminal poor as criminals. And this is setting the stage for damaging public disruptions like what we saw in Ferguson – and could see in many areas of this region, if we do not change how we organize our governments.
The DOJ had standing in the Ferguson matter for a very tragic reason, and that is the demographics of poverty in the St. Louis region. The non-criminal low-income people being treated as criminals, and in effect criminalized, in Ferguson are overwhelmingly African-American. That makes this a case for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, because the federal government should not tolerate any form of American government to effectively treat people disparately along racial lines. The greatest tragedy for our community – that these are almost entirely black people being degraded in this way – is precisely the chink of light in the prison wall, because it gave President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder the standing to authorize this investigation. This region owes a debt to their leadership and the diligence of Christy Lopez, who directed a team of DOJ investigators that have documented our dysfunction in unmistakable detail.
What is it that the protestors chant? “The whole damn system is guilty as hell”? It seems that, as Holder said when he released the DOJ report, “Some of those protestors were right.” The question to each and every one of us now must be: What are we going to do about it?
