{"id":185747,"date":"2014-08-23T20:30:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-24T01:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/08\/23\/a-fact-of-ferguson-that-is-finally-getting-mainstream-notice\/"},"modified":"2014-08-23T20:30:00","modified_gmt":"2014-08-24T01:30:00","slug":"a-fact-of-ferguson-that-is-finally-getting-mainstream-notice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/08\/23\/a-fact-of-ferguson-that-is-finally-getting-mainstream-notice\/","title":{"rendered":"A Fact of Ferguson that is Finally Getting Mainstream Notice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The fact that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/business\/hiltzik\/la-fi-mh-the-ferguson-crisis-20140821-column.html\">more than 20% of the budget of the town of Ferguson comes from tickets and warrants issued by police<\/a> shows that the police are not there to protect the populace, they are there to extract tribute from them:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Scratch any social crisis, and you&#8217;re likely to find economics not far  below the surface. Via ArchCity Defenders, a St. Louis legal-aid  nonprofit, we can see how this has worked to create the dismaying  spectacle of the breakdown of justice in Ferguson. (H\/t <a href=\"http:\/\/marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2014\/08\/ferguson-and-the-debtors-prison.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Alex Tabarrok<\/a>, via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/kevin-drum\/2014\/08\/ferguson-cops-hand-out-three-warrants-household-every-year\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kevin Drum<\/a>.)<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">According to the group&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/bit.ly\/1tl5qo8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">recent report on the municipal court system<\/a>  in St. Louis County, the Ferguson court is a &#8220;chronic offender&#8221; in  legal and economic harassment of its residents. There&#8217;s not much of a  secret why: the municipality collects some $2.6 million a year in fines  and court fees, typically from small-scale infractions like traffic  violations. This is the second-largest source of income for that small,  fiscally-strapped municipality.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">For a low-income community&#8211;and for a black community subjected to the  racial profiling, as the report documents&#8211;these fines can gather force  like a boulder rolling downhill.&nbsp;<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Tabarrok points to the report&#8217;s observation that the Ferguson court  processed the equivalent of three warrants and $312 in fines per  household in 2013.<\/span><\/p>\n<aside data-content- data-content-size=\"small\" data-content-subtype=\"storygallery\" data-content-type=\"story\" data-load-method=\"innerHtml\" data-load-type=\"comment\" data-role=\"socialshare_item  delayload imgsize_ratiosizecontainer \" data-state=\"  \">  <\/aside>\n<p><span style=\"color: blue;\">&#8220;You  don&#8217;t get $321 in fines and fees and 3 warrants per household from an  about-average crime rate,&#8221; he notes. &#8220;You get numbers like this from  [B.S.] arrests for jaywalking&#8221; and what the report calls &#8220;low level  harassment involving traffic stops, court appearances, high fines, and  the threat of jail for failure to pay without a meaningful inquiry into  whether an individual has the means to pay.&#8221;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The reason that the minorities in Ferguson do not see the police as their defenders and their protectors, it&#8217;s because they aren&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>This arrangement, where peace officers have as their <b>primary<\/b> function tax collections, is fundamentally pathological and corrupt, and it needs to stop.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i.imgur.com\/6rKKPF0.png\" width=\"500\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The fact that more than 20% of the budget of the town of Ferguson comes from tickets and warrants issued by police shows that the police are not there to protect the populace, they are there to extract tribute from them: Scratch any social crisis, and you&#8217;re likely to find economics not far below the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1038,970,972,1174,988],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-corruption","category-justice","category-policing","category-race"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185747"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}