Petty Law Enforcement and Its Effect on Ferguson

Walter Olson
writes at Cato’s blog on an interesting angle on the background
that went into the people of Ferguson’s attitudes about police:

Reading through this Newsweek article on
the troubled relations between police and residents in Ferguson,
Mo. before this month’s blowup, this passage jumped out at
me: 

“Despite Ferguson’s relative poverty, fines and court
fees comprise the second largest source of revenue for the city, a
total of 2,635,400,” according to the ArchCity
Defenders report. And in 2013, the Ferguson Municipal Court
issued 24,532 arrest warrants and 12,018 cases, “or about 3
warrants and 1.5 cases per household.”

The town gets nearly a quarter of its municipal revenue
from court fees – the figure in some neighboring towns
is even
higher – and according to the ArchCity Defenders
report quoted in Newsweek, Ferguson’s municipal court is among the
very worst in the way it adds its own hassle factor to the
collection of petty fines:

ArchCity Defenders, which has tracked ticketing of St.
Louis area residents for five years and focused primarily on
vehicle violations, started a court-watching program because so
many of its clients complained of traffic prosecution wreaking
havoc on their lives. Defendants routinely alleged that a
racially-motivated traffic stop led to their being jailed due to
inability to pay traffic fines, which in turn prompted people to
“los[e] jobs and housing as a result of the incarceration.”
… One resident quoted in the study said, “It’s ridiculous how
these small municipalities make their lifeline off the blood of the
people who drive through the area.”

Racial antagonism between residents and law enforcement is bad
no matter what, but it’s worse when residents wind up interacting
constantly with law enforcement because of a culture of petty
fines. (If you doubt that law enforcement in Ferguson has been
touched by a culture of petty fines, read this Daily
Beast account of how the town sought to charge a
jail inmate for property damage for bleeding
on its officers’ uniforms – even though the altercation
with jailers arose after the town had picked up the wrong guy on a
warrant issued on a common name.)

My colleague Scott Shackford says that in his examination of
Ferguson’s finances he thinks the figure about percentage of
revenue from court fees is more like 10 percent, not nearly a
quarter, but the larger point remains.

I written before in Reason on the ways petty law
enforcement mess with the lives of especially the poor,
here and
here.

If indeed more people’s usual interactions with police had
anything to do with “protecting and serving” and less with
violently messing up your life for reasons that can seem petty and
pointless, from people whose version of respect is “do
everything I say the way I’m comfortable with or you might
die,” the atmosphere that fed into what happened in
Ferguson would likely be less toxic.

I remember a few years ago lecturing on libertarianism to a
group of community college kids in downtown Atlanta. They sniffed a
bit of anarchism around what I was discussing, though I wasn’t
explicit about it. How would society work without police, a student
asked me? I asked them this Zen question: contemplate for a moment
that, in any respect in which it helped rather than harmed your
life, there pretty much already are no police. 

No one argued much.