A Visit to the Numerous ‘Fiefdoms’ of St. Louis County

If you read only one more
analysis of the state of government and policing in the St. Louis
area today (besides this blog post) make it former Reason editor
Radley Balko’s
lengthy look today over at The Washington Post.

Before delving in to some of Balko’s observations, a somewhat
relevant disclosure: I lived for nearly a decade in St. Louis
County during my college years and I have family who still live
there. I haven’t written much about St. Louis from a first-person
perspective in the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting for the same
reason I haven’t written about Sanford, Florida, where I went to
middle and high school, from a first-person perspective: Despite
all my time there as a lower-middle-class white guy, I never ran in
the same circles as my minority peers in these compartmentalized
communities. I can’t even claim to extrapolate the kinds of things
they went through. I don’t believe I ever even set foot in Ferguson
during my entire time there.

And that is partly what Balko’s piece, focusing on how
communities in St. Louis County are balancing their books on the
backs of their poor residents, is about. St. Louis is a
compartmentalized—almost Balkanized—community. It’s
segregated not just by race, but by class and a whole host of other
signifiers. Googling “Where
did you go to high school?” is a good way to understand the odd
ways in which St. Louis’ culture manifests. I had a friend who
spent most of his life in St. Louis County and had been downtown
fewer times than I had been. The sports teams, toasted ravioli, and
really bad pizza are all that unite the city.

Balko’s piece focuses on how all the dozens of little
municipalities within St. Louis County popped up, the racial
politics and migration patterns behind them, and the consequences
of each of these municipalities looking for ways to bankroll the
government jobs they’re insisting they need. Ferguson isn’t an
anomaly. Ferguson is the system. Balko opens with the
story of what happened to Nicole Bolden, a woman who was in a crash
that wasn’t her fault but was nevertheless arrested:

The officer found that Bolden had four arrest warrants in three
separate jurisdictions: the towns of Florissant and Hazelwood in
St. Louis County, and the town of Foristell in St. Charles County.
All of the warrants were for failure to appear in court for traffic
violations. Bolden hadn’t appeared in court because she didn’t have
the money. A couple of those fines were for speeding, one was for
failure to wear her seatbelt, and most of the rest were for what
defense attorneys in the St. Louis area have come to call “poverty
violations” — driving with a suspended license, expired
plates, expired registration, and a failure to provide proof of
insurance.

The Florissant officer first took Bolden to the jail in that
town, where Bolden posted a couple hundred dollars bond and was
released at around midnight. She was next taken to Hazelwood and
held at the jail there until she could post a second bond. That was
another couple hundred dollars. She wasn’t released from her cell
there until around 5 pm the next day. Exhausted, stressed, and
still worried about what her kids had seen, she was finally taken
to the St. Charles County jail for the outstanding warrant in
Foristell. Why the county jail? Because the tiny town of 500 isn’t
large enough to have its own holding cell, even though it does have
a mayor, a board of aldermen, a municipal court, and a seven-member
police department. It’s probably most well-known locally for the
speed trap its police set along I-170.

By the time Bolden got to St. Charles County, it had been well
over 36 hours since the accident. “I hadn’t slept,” she says. “I
was still in my same clothes. I was starting to lose my mind.”
That’s when she says a police officer told her that if she couldn’t
post bond, they’d keep her in jail until May. “I just freaked out,”
she says. “I said, ‘What about my babies? Who is going to take care
of my babies?” She says the officer just shrugged.

“It’s different inside those walls,” Bolden says. “They treat
you like you don’t have any emotions. I know I have a heavy foot. I
have kids. I have to work to support them. I’ve also been taking
classes. So I’m late a lot. And when I’m late, I speed. But I’m
still a human being.”

Balko notes that most of these municipalities, not just
Ferguson, rely on citations against its own citizens in order to
balance its budget. He notes that in some communities, the number
of outstanding arrest warrants exceeds the number of residents.

The racial politics of the migration of whites and blacks within
St. Louis County is fully documented in Balko’s piece, but there’s
more. Black migration to Ferguson is relatively recent, which helps
explain why black residents are not well represented in government
and police. But what about other communities where blacks are well
represented in government? Turns out those communities are still
looking to fines and fees to pay for its employees:

The town of Berkeley, for example, has unusually high black
political participation. For about a century, there was a
historically black enclave in northwest St. Louis County called
Kinloch. In the 1980s, most of Kinloch was erased due to an
expansion of the St. Louis airport. Much of Kinloch’s population
wound up in nearby Berkeley, infusing the town with black residents
who had been in the area for generations, and had well-established
traditions of political participation and self government.
Currently, Berkeley has an all-black city council, a black mayor, a
black city manager, and majority-black police force.

If any town could overcome the legacy of structural racism that
drew the map of St. Louis County, then, it would be Berkeley. And
yet this town of 9,000 people still issued 10,452 traffic citations
last year, and another 1,271 non-traffic ordinance violations. The
town’s municipal court raised over $1 million in fines and fees, or
about $111 per resident. The town issued 5,504 arrest warrants last
year, and has another 13,436 arrest warrants outstanding. Those are
modest numbers for St. Louis County, but they’re high for just
about anywhere else.

What makes Balko’s research additionally compelling is that he
also explores the horrific business regulatory schemes that make it
next to impossible for the poor to turn to entrepreneurship to
improve their fate. Remember, the City of St. Louis managed to

fine a Lyft driver within 90 minutes of them launching their
services.

I do bring up the regulatory burdens because of a personal
connection (which is why I broke from my pattern of non-comment).
Balko brings up a horrific case in 2008 where a black businessman,
unable to deal with the regulatory burdens placed on businesses by
the City of Kirkwood, snapped and shot up a Kirkwood City Council
meeting:

In 2008, Charles Lee “Cookie” Thornton shot up city
hall in the town of Kirwood, killing two city council members,
a city planner, and two police officers. He also badly wounded the
mayor. When the mostly white Kirkwood annexed the unincorporated
black community of Meacham Park 15 years earlier, the construction
business Thornton had built and run out of his home ran afoul of
his new town’s zoning regulations. Thornton didn’t have the money
to move his business to another part of town. Over the next decade,
he accumulated $20,000 in fines, lost his business, declared
bankruptcy, and was reduced a community punchline. He was the guy
with the signs on his van, who interrupted city council meetings
with grand conspiracies, and filed lawsuits that were barely
readable. His friends and family say the constant harassment cost
him his sanity.

My family lives in Kirkwood. I didn’t know any of the victims of
the shooting, but my family did, and I endured the dreadful
experience of having to call them to make sure they were okay.
Balko brings it Thornton up in the context of describing the
absolutely insane experiences of a black man in Pine Lawn who keeps
getting cited for having operating a business without a license,
even though he does actually have a license. (I hope Los Angeles
residents read that section and keep it in mind as the city moves
forward with its
administrative citation program, but I doubt it.)

I’ve probably quoted far too much of Balko’s piece beyond basic
fair use. I recommend everybody read it, especially those who want
to simply classify St. Louis’ problems as racial issues. That’s not
untrue, but it’s incomplete. It’s the power of government to
implement policies that end up making life miserable and nearly
impossible for poor people that has a devastating impact on
minorities.

And below, when Reason TV went to Ferguson, residents were quick
to describe how they had been targeted for minor problems by
police: