“Officer Wilson, in recognition of outstanding police work while
investigating a suspicious-vehicle call,” Chief Thomas Jackson
says in making the presentation. “Acting alone, you struggled
with one subject and [were] able to gain control of the subject
and his car keys until assistance arrived. Later, during the
interview, it was discovered that the subject was breaking
down a large quantity of marijuana for sale.”
Jackson adds, “Great job, Darren.”
But there is another, unnoticed irony in the venue itself.
Three times a month—one day and two nights—the City Council
chamber also serves as home to the incredibly busy and
extremely profitable Ferguson Municipal Court.
A report issued just last week by the nonprofit lawyer’s group
ArchCity Defenders notes that in the court’s 36 three-hour
sessions in 2013, it handled 12,108 cases and
24,532 warrants. That is an average of 1.5 cases
and 3 warrants per Ferguson household.
Fines and court fees for the year in this
City of just 21,000 people totaled
$2,635,400.
The sum made the municipal court the city’s second-biggest
source of revenue. It also almost certainly was a major
factor in the antagonism between the police
and the citizenry preceding the tragedy that
resulted when Wilson had another encounter with
a subject six months after he got his commendation.
And any complete investigation into how Michael Brown came
to be sprawled dead in the street with a half-dozen bullet wounds
must consider not just the cop but the system he served,
a system whose primary components include a minor
Court that generates major money, much of it from
poor and working people.
Five of the six City Council members who meet in
this chamber are white, even though the city itself is
more than 70 percent black. The City Council appoints
the Municipal Judge, currently Ron Brockmeyer, who is
also white.
But when this same chamber serves as Ferguson
Municipal Court, a disproportionate number
of the defendants are black.
The immediate explanation is that the bulk of the cases
arise from car stops. The ArchCity Defenders report notes:
“Whites comprise 29% of the population
of Ferguson but just 12.7% of vehicle stops.
After being stopped in Ferguson, blacks are almost
twice as likely as whites to be searched
(12.1% vs. 6.9%) and twice as likely to be
arrested (10.4% vs. 5.2%).”
Lest anyone contend that blacks inherently merit greater
police attention than whites, the report offers another statistic.
“Searches of black individuals result in
discovery of contraband only 21.7% of the
time, while similar searches of whites
produce contraband 34.0% of the time.”
That would suggest both that whites were more likely to be
stopped when there was actual probable cause, and that
blacks were more likely to be stopped when there was not.
And the antagonism sure to be generated by such
racial disparities was magnified by the sheer number of cases.
The report cites a court employee as saying the docket for
a typical three-hour court session has up to 1,500
cases. The report goes on to say that “in addition to such
heavy legal prosecution,” the Ferguson court and others
like it in nearby towns “engage in a number of operational
procedures that make it even more difficult for defendants
to navigate the courts.”
The report goes on, “For example, a Ferguson court employee
reported that the bench routinely starts hearing cases
30 minutes before the appointed time and then locks the
doors to the building as early as five minutes after the
official hour, a practice that could easily lead a defendant
arriving even slightly late to receive an additional charge
for failure to appear.”
The lawyers of ArchCity Defenders specialize in representing
the indigent and the homeless. They noticed that many of
their clients had multiple warrants on minor charges issued
by municipal courts in Ferguson and the other 80
municipalities in St. Louis County that have their
own courts and police.
“They didn’t just have one case, they had 10 cases,”
says Thomas Harvey, the organization’s 44-year-old
executive director.
The warrants too often precluded the clients from securing
shelter and services, and access to job programs. The lawyers
sought some remedy in the issuing courts.
“It kept being about the money,” Harvey recalls. “We were
telling the court, ‘They don’t have any money because
they’re homeless.’”
That same venue where Wilson received his commendation and the City Council members applauded is where justice is insulted wholesale three times a week.
The clients felt sure they
were being targeted because
they were black and poor,
and told the lawyers tales of unfair
treatment by everybody from the
cops to the bailiffs to the judges.
“I’ll be real honest, I didn’t believe
them,” Harvey says.
With the help of college students,
ArchCity Defenders started a
Court watch program eight
months ago. They concluded that much of what their clients had
been saying was all too true. Impoverished defendants were
frequently ordered to pay fines that were triple their
monthly income. Some ended up with no income at all
as they sat in jail for weeks, awaiting a hearing.
ArchCity decided to focus on what seemed to be three of the
worst Cities.
“Three courts, Bel-Ridge, Florissant, and Ferguson, were
chronic offenders and serve as prime examples of
how these practices violate fundamental rights of
the poor, undermine public confidence in the judicial
system, and create inefficiencies,” the subsequent report says.
The report was all but complete and just needed an
introduction when Harvey went on summer vacation. He
chanced to return the day after Michael Brown was shot
to death by Officer Darren Warren.
“I got off the plane saying, ‘I got to finish this and get
it out,'” Harvey recalls.
Harvey understood that whatever the particular details
of the tragedy, there was also a larger context.
“It’s not just about Michael Brown and this officer,” Harvey says.
The statistics assembled for the report concerning race and
car stops in Ferguson were no great surprise, especially
considering that its police department is proportionately
even whiter than its City Council, with just three
blacks among its 52 Cops. The number that jumped
out was the huge revenue, big bucks for a little burg.
“Anybody who makes a revenue source a line of a budget
becomes dependent on it,” Harvey suggests.
But if the system’s objective was money, the result was
still that many people felt targeted because of race and class.
