When revenue becomes the central focus, then the system is broken and
needs to be replaced.
Suggesting that it can be "adjusted" is merely to passively support
the existing process.
What should be the expectations of citizens of their police departments?
Shouldn't it be the responsibility of our police to ensure a safe community?
If so, then are the actions of police forces attaining this goal, or
are their policies and interactions with the citizens promoting
suspicion and mistrust? Making police officers into revenue
generators is one sure way of driving wedges between citizens and the
goal of the police to ensure a safe community.
Isn't the layman's definition of insanity, doing the same thing over
and over and expecting different results? How long will we send our
police out to defend and advance safe communities through the use of
fines and penalties, waiting for new positive results? When a system
fails to do its assigned task, it is time long past due to toss the
old aside and try new systems.
I have a pile of potentially positive solutions, but I'd like to hear
what others think.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/9/16, S. Kashdan <skashdan@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi All,
The below article was written one year ago and is still relevant.
For justice and peace,
Sylvie
Police Shootings Won't Stop Unless We Also Stop Shaking Down Black People
The dangers of turning police officers into revenue generators.
By Jack Hitt
Mother Jones, Thursday, July 30, 2015 12:11 PM EDT
http://www.motherjones.com/print/280321
The dangers of turning police officers into revenue generators.
In April, several days after North Charleston, South Carolina, police
officer Michael Slager stopped Walter Scott [1] for a busted taillight and
then fatally shot him, the usual cable-news transmogrification of victim
into superpredator ran into problems. The dash cam [2] showed Scott being
pulled over while traveling at a nerdy rate of speed, using his left turn
signal to pull into a parking lot and having an amiable conversation with
Slager until he realized he'd probably get popped for nonpayment of child
support. At which point he bolted out of the car and hobbled off. Slager
then shot him. Why didn't the cop just jog up and grab him? Calling what the
obese 50-year-old Scott was doing "running" really stretches the bounds of
literary license.
But maybe the question to ask is: Why did Scott run? The answer came when
the New York Times revealed [3] Scott to be a man of modest means trapped in
an exhausting hamster wheel: He would get a low-paying job, make some child
support payments, fall behind on them, get fined, miss a payment, get jailed
for a few weeks, lose that job due to absence, and then start over at a
lower-paying job. From all apparent evidence, he was a decent schlub trying
to make things work in a system engineered to make his life miserable and
recast his best efforts as criminal behavior.
Recently, two more deaths of African Americans that have blown up in the
media follow a pattern similar to Scott's. Sandra Bland [14] in Texas and
Samuel DuBose [15] in Cincinnati were each stopped for minor traffic
infractions (failing to use turn signal, missing front license plate),
followed by immediate escalation by the officer into rage, and then an
official story that is obviously contradicted [16] by the video (that the
officer tried to "de-escalate" the tension with Bland; that the officer was
dragged by DuBose's car). In both cases, the perpetrator of a minor traffic
offense died.
When incidents of police violence come to light, the usual defense is that
we should not tarnish all the good cops just because of "a few bad apples."
No one can argue with that. But what is usually implied in that phrase is
that the "bad" officers' intentions are malevolent--that they are morally
corrupt and racist. And that may be true, but they are also bad in the
job-performance sense. These men are crummy cops, sometimes profoundly so.
Slager had a record for gratuitously using his Taser. Timothy Leohmann, who
leapt from his car and instantly killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice [17], had
been deemed "weepy" and unable to "emotionally function" by a supervisor at
his previous PD job, who added: "I do not believe time, nor training, will
be able to change or correct these deficiencies." Ferguson's Darren Wilson
was also fired [18] from his previous job--actually, the entire police force
of Jennings, Missouri, was disbanded for being awful.
When you ask why such "bad" cops are nevertheless armed and allowed to
patrol the streets, one begins to see that lurking beneath this violence is
a fiscal menace: police departments forced to assist city officials in
raising revenue, in many cases funding their own salaries--redirecting the
very concept of keeping the peace into underwriting the budget.
We saw a glimpse of this when the Justice Department released its report
[19] on Ferguson in March. In his statement, then-Attorney General Eric
Holder referenced a lady in town whose life sounded Walter Scott-like. She
had received two parking tickets totaling $151. Her efforts to pay those
fines fell so behind that she eventually paid out more than $500. At one
point, she was jailed for nonpayment and--eight years later--still owes $541
in accrued fees.
The judge largely responsible for the extraction of these fees from
Ferguson's poor, Ronald J. Brockmeyer [20], owed $172,646 in back taxes, a
sum orders of magnitude greater than any late fine coming before his bench.
Even as he was jailing black ladies for parking tickets, Brockmeyer was
allegedly erasing citations for white Ferguson residents who happened to be
his friends. After the report's publication, he resigned so that Ferguson
could "begin its healing process."
When you ask why such "bad" cops are armed and allowed to patrol the
streets, one begins to see that lurking beneath this violence is a fiscal
menace.
But consider: In 2010, this collaboration between the Ferguson police and
the courts generated $1.4 million in income for the city. This year, they
will more than double that amount--$3.1 million--providing nearly a quarter
of the city's $13 million budget, almost all of it extracted from its
poorest African American citizens.
Evidence also suggests that this new form of raising
revenue--policiteering?--goes far beyond Ferguson. Remember the recent
Oklahoma case involving Robert Bates [21], a 73-year-old millionaire
insurance broker with scant law enforcement background who was allowed to go
out on patrol--likely because he had donated lots of money and equipment to
the local sheriff's office? He killed an unarmed black suspect when he
grabbed his gun instead of his Taser. In the days that followed, we learned
that other deputies had long resented this guy's freelance incompetence.
"Essentially, these small towns in urban areas have municipal infrastructure
that can't be supported by the tax base, and so they ticket everything in
sight to keep the town functioning," said William Maurer, a lawyer with the
Institute for Justice who has been studying the sudden rise in
"nontraffic-related fines."
Take the St. Louis suburb of Pagedale, where, among other Norman
Rockwell-worthy features deemed illegal, "you can't have a hedge more than
three feet high," Maurer says. "You can't have a basketball hoop or a wading
pool in front of a house. You can't have a dish antenna on the front of your
house. You can't walk on the roadway if there is a sidewalk, and if there is
not a sidewalk, they must walk on the left side of the roadway. They must
walk on the right of the crosswalk. They can't conduct a barbecue in the
front yard and can't have an alcoholic beverage within 150 feet of a
barbecue. Kids cannot play in the street. They also have restrictions
against pants being worn below the waist in public. Cars must be within 500
feet of a lamp or a source of illumination during nighttime hours. Blinds
must be neatly hung in respectable appearance, properly maintained, and in a
state of good repair."
Where did this Kafkaesque laundry list come from? Maurer explains that in
2010, Missouri passed a law that capped the amount of city revenue that any
agency could generate from traffic stops. The intent was to limit small-town
speed traps, but the unintentional consequences are now clear: Pagedale saw
a 495 percent increase in nontraffic-related arrests. "In Frontenac, the
increase was 364 percent," Maurer says. "In Lakeshire, it was 209 percent."
It is probably no coincidence that when you examine the recent rash of
police killings, you find that the offenses the victims were initially
stopped for were preposterously minor.
This racket now has many variants. South Carolina hosts "Operation Rolling
Thunder [22]," an annual dragnet in which 21 different law enforcement
agencies swarm stretches of I-85 and I-26 in the name of catching drug
dealers. In 2013, this law enforcement Bonnaroo netted 1,300 traffic
citations and 300 speeding tickets. But after everyone had paid up, the
operation boasted exactly one felony conviction.
A different strategy in San Diego simply tacks on various fees to an
existing fine. A 2012 Union Tribune investigation [23] revealed that while
speeding is a simple $35 fine, other government agencies can tack on as many
as 10 other surcharges, including: a state penalty assessment, $40; county
penalty assessment, $36; court construction, $20; state surcharge, $8; DNA
identification, $16; criminal conviction fee, $35; court operations, $40;
emergency medical air transportation penalty, $4; and night court, $1. When
it's all said and done, that $35 ticket comes to $235.
Another report [24] released earlier this year connects the dots: African
Americans and Latinos make up less than a third of San Diego's population
but represent 64.5 percent of those searched during a traffic stop.
There is still no comprehensive study to determine just how many cities pay
their bills by indenturing the poor, but it is probably no coincidence that
when you examine the recent rash of police killings, you find that the
offenses they were initially stopped for were preposterously minor. Bland's
lane change signal, DuBose's missing plate. Walter Scott had that busted
taillight--which, we all later learned, is not even a crime in South
Carolina. Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes. When Darren Wilson was
called to look into a robbery [25], the reason he initially stopped Michael
Brown was for walking in the street--in Ferguson, an illegal act according
to Section 44-344 [26] of the local code. Between 2011 and 2013, 95 percent
of the perpetrators of this atrocity were African American, meaning that
"walking while black" is not a punch line. It is a crime.
And not just a crime, but a crime that comes with fines that are strictly
enforced. In 2014, Ferguson's bottom-line-driven police force issued 16,000
arrest warrants to three-fourths of the town's total population of 21,000.
Stop and think about that for a moment: In Ferguson, 75 percent of all
residents had active outstanding arrest warrants. Most of the entire city
was a virtual plantation of indentured revenue producers.
Back in Pagedale, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Jennifer Mann recently
calculated [27] a 500 percent increase in petty fines over the last five
years. "Pagedale handed out 2,255 citations for these types of offenses last
year," Mann wrote, "or nearly two per household."
"Once the system is primed for maximizing revenue--starting with fines and
fine enforcement," Holder said apropos Ferguson, "the city relies on the
police force to serve, essentially, as a collection agency for the municipal
court rather than a law enforcement entity."
In Alabama, a circuit court judge, Hub Harrington, wrote a blistering
opinion [28] three years ago asserting that the Shelby County Jail had
become a kind of "debtors' prison" and that the court system had devolved
into a "judicially sanctioned extortion racket." This pattern leads to a
cruel paradox: One arm of the state is paying a large sum to lock up a
person who can't pay a small sum owed to a different arm of the state. The
result? Bigger state deficits. As the director of the Brennan Center's
Justice Program put it, "Having taxpayers foot a bill of $4,000 to
incarcerate a man who owes the state $745 or a woman who owes a predatory
lender $425 and removing them from the job force makes sense in no
reasonable world."
When the poor come to understand that they are likely to be detained and
fined for comically absurd crimes, it can't be a surprise to the police that
their officers are viewed with increasing distrust. In this environment,
running away from a cop is not an act of suspicion; it's common sense.
Cops like to talk about "good police." They say, "That guy is good
police"--a top compliment, by which they mean cool under the pressure of the
street and cunning at getting people to give up the details of a crime. Good
police look bad when sharing the street with crummy police. But when
budgetary whims replace peacekeeping as the central motivation of law
enforcement, who is more likely to write up more tickets, the good cop or
the crummy one? When the mission of the entire department shifts from
"protect and serve" to "punish and profit," then just what constitutes good
police?
More MoJo coverage on policing:
* Chokeholds, Brain Injuries, Beatings: When School Cops Go Bad [4]
* Why No One Really Knows a Better Way to Train Cops [5]
* How Cleveland Police May Have Botched a 911 Call Just Before Killing Tamir
Rice [6]
* Native Americans Get Shot By Cops at an Astonishing Rate [7]
* Here Are 13 Killings by Police Captured on Video in the Past Year [8]
* The Walter Scott Shooting Video Shows Why Police Accounts Are Hard to
Trust [9]
* It’s Been 6 Months Since Tamir Rice Died, and the Cop Who Killed Him Still
Hasn't Been Questioned [10]
* Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men? [11]
* The Cop Who Choked Eric Garner to Death Won't Pay a Dime [12]
* A Mentally Ill Woman's "Sudden Death" at the Hands of Cleveland Police
[13]
Source URL:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/police-shootings-traffic-stops-excessive-fines
Links:
[1]
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/us/former-south-carolina-officer-is-indicted-in-death-of-walter-scott.html?_r=1
[2]
http://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2015/04/09/tsr-dash-cam-walter-scott-police-shooting.cnn
[3]
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/20/us/skip-child-support-go-to-jail-lose-job-repeat.html
[4]
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/police-school-resource-officers-k-12-misconduct-violence
[5]
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/09/police-training-reform-research
[6]
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/06/tamir-rice-police-killing-911-call-investigation
[7]
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/native-americans-getting-shot-police
[8]
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/police-shootings-caught-on-tape-video
[9] http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/04/walter-scott-michael-slager
[10]
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/tamir-rice-investigation-cleveland-police
[11]
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/police-shootings-michael-brown-ferguson-black-men
[12]
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/01/police-misconduct-payments-eric-garner-nypd
[13]
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/tanisha-anderson-killing-cleveland-police
[14]
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/texas-waller-county-sandra-bland-racial-tensions
[15]
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/video-shows-police-shooting-samuel-dubose
[16]
http://gawker.com/video-of-sam-duboses-death-drastically-different-from-t-1720896658
[17]
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cleveland-officer-shot-tamir-rice-within-seconds-of-pulling-up-in-patrol-car/
[18]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/darren-wilsons-first-job-was-on-a-troubled-police-force-disbanded-by-authorities/2014/08/23/1ac796f0-2a45-11e4-8593-da634b334390_story.html
[19] http://www.motherjones.com/documents/2191006-doj-ferguson-report
[20]
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/06/ferguson-judge-owes-unpaid-taxes-ronald-brockmeyer
[21]
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/volunteer-tulsa-deputy-robert-bates-sold-company-went-back-to/article_7f23ccc3-4bcb-52a4-826d-c06103a42786.html
[22]
http://ij.org/south-carolina-police-seized-nearly-100-000-in-crackdown-but-stopped-few-criminals
[23]
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&biw&bih&q=cache:gLaPZ1TIbc0J:http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2012/aug/18/courts-how-your-35-speeding-ticket-becomes-a-235/%2BCourt+officials+say+that+San+Diego+County+law+enforcement+agencies+have+recently+been+issuing+fewer+tickets+than+in+the+past&gbv=2&&ct=clnk
[24]
http://cdn.sandiegouniontrib.com/news/documents/2015/02/25/SDPD_traffic_stops_report.pdf
[25]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/08/15/ferguson-police-releasing-name-of-officer-who-shot-michael-brown/
[26]
https://www.municode.com/library/mo/ferguson/codes/code_of_ordinances?searchRequest=%7B%22searchText%22:%22manner%20of%20walking%20in%20roadway%22,%22pageNum%22:1,%22resultsPerPage%22:25,%22booleanSearch%22:false,%22stemming%22:true,%22fuzzy%22:false,%22synonym%22:false,%22contentTypes%22:%5B%22CODES%22%5D,%22productIds%22:%5B%5D%7D&nodeId=PTIICOOR_CH44TRMOVE_ARTVIIPE_S44-344MAWAALRO
[27]
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/municipalities-ticket-for-trees-and-toys-as-traffic-revenue-declines/article_42739be7-afd1-5f66-b325-e1f654ba9625.html
[28]
http://www.motherjones.com/documents/2191007-court-order-in-dana-burdette-v-town-of
