The New York times ran a fascinating story today–fascinating if you call sad and outrageous fascinating–about how the police department and courts in Ferguson, MO, and in many, many other towns across the country, stick it to the poor.
The Ferguson police, with the complicity of the court system, collect much of their budget in the form of fines and fees imposed on people–primarily minorities–they stop for routine traffic violations. Because that’s where their funding comes from, there is a perverse incentive to keep stopping people for minor (or trumped-up) offenses, and to add court fees on top of the fines, and penalties on top of that for people who can’t pay. Although this country supposedly does not have debtors prisons, too many people end up serving jail time for failing to pay fines. It’s an inherently racist system.
And Ferguson is hardly the only community that operates in this fashion; it’s just the one that the Justice Department singled out in its investigation of the Michael Brown shooting.
What the Times story didn’t do was connect this horrendous practice with the broader national issues of government funding and taxation. Police forces aren’t the only public institutions which the relentless push by conservatives to cut taxes and starve government have shortchanged.
As federal tax rates have fallen over the years, more and more services that used to be borne by all of us have fallen to the states; and, as state governments have been taken over by the anti-tax crowd, on municipalities in turn. Budgeting by fees and fines is by far the most regressive form of taxation–it falls most heavily on those least able to pay. The wealthiest keep more of their money, and the poorest are made to pay even more. The dirty little secret in all of this is that what’s being done is largely invisible outside impoverished communities like Ferguson. It took the tragedy there to reveal to the rest of the country how the city really functioned.
My hope is that the Times’ investigation inspires journalists all over the country to take a long, hard look at how their their own communities operate. Only by shining a cleansing light can we ever hope to change.
