Deep in the heart of the "Show Me State," today, there's "broad change" for Ferguson's city courts being heralded on the front page of Tuesday's New York Times...
Ferguson Sets Broad Change for City Courts
By FRANCES ROBLES
NEW YORK TIMES (PAGE A1)
SEPT. 8, 2014
FERGUSON, Mo. — In the first major sign of change in this small city since last month’s police killing of an unarmed black teenager, the Ferguson City Council said Monday that it would establish a citizen review board to provide guidance for the Police Department.
It also announced sweeping changes to its court system, which had been criticized as unfairly targeting low-income blacks, who had become trapped in a cycle of unpaid tickets and arrest warrants…
…
… On the eve of what was expected to be a tense City Council meeting on Tuesday, the first meeting since the shooting, the city instead pre-emptively announced many changes activists have long sought…
• Tuesday evening, the Ferguson City Council is “…scheduled to vote on capping how much of the city’s revenue can come from fines…”
• Per the article, “About 20 percent of the city’s $12 million budget is paid through fines,” noted Thomas B. Harvey, executive director of legal aid activist group Arch City Defenders. The story continues, “Under the proposal announced Monday, the city will cap that at 15 percent and spend any excess on special community projects.”
(What’s not reported in today’s Times is that, 18 years ago, the State of Missouri passed a law capping traffic ticket collections at 35 percent of a town's revenue, on an annualized basis. The reality is that this is a statewide problem—and not just in Missouri, but in many other states throughout the U.S.—and it’s certainly problematic throughout many areas in St. Louis County, as the NYT does note that fact farther down in the story.)
• …“The city also announced a one-month window to quash pending warrants, a major victory for the activists and lawyers who had pressed for change and were expected to force the issue at Tuesday’s meeting.” (I believe this is the repeated further along in the story, where it’s noted that, upon a request from the City Council, the municipal judge has just “established a one-month warrant recall program.”)
• In-line with the proposed cap on fines, the city’s committing “to funding a community improvement program and to holding ward meetings to elicit community input on what other changes should be made.”
• The Ferguson City Council is planning upon introducing “…an ordinance to repeal the ‘failure to appear’ offense in municipal court, eliminating the additional fines imposed on those who do not attend court, and abolish administrative fees, such as the $25 fee to cover the cost of police personnel who arrange for the towing of abandoned vehicles.”
(Interestingly, per the NYT, Harvey noted that “some of the fees the city planned to eliminate, such as the $50 charge to revoke a warrant, were illegal in the first place…”)
• It’s also being announced that “the municipal judge had established a special docket for defendants who are having trouble making monthly payments on outstanding fines, the city said, giving people the opportunity to renegotiate their payment plans.”
Readers are informed that today’s announced changes …”were about three-quarters of what they [the Arch City defenders] had requested…Although it’s not exactly what we asked for, it’s a substantial step forward,” he [Harvey] said.
…Mr. Harvey said he was concerned about whether the fines would actually decrease and expressed skepticism over the fact that the City Council was endorsing a community service penalty that does not currently exist. “That’s still $1.7 million in fines collected, but it is a million-dollar drop,” he said…
…
…Lawyers and activists cautioned that the change could be truly meaningful only if other municipalities followed suit, because Ferguson is not alone in its predatory tactics, said Julia Ho, a community organizer at Hands Up United, an organization that formed after Mr. Brown’s killing.
“The bench warrants and traffic fines were a regressive tax on the poor and criminalization of poverty,” Ms. Ho said. “If people no longer receive these charges, that’s huge: It keeps people from getting stuck in modern debtor’s prisons.”
The Arch City Defenders, a nonprofit legal group, and law professors at the St. Louis University School of Law recently wrote a letter to the mayor, James Knowles III, asking him to waive all pending fines and warrants for nonviolent offenses. The letter said that the warrants served as barriers to employment and housing and that waiving them would be an important conciliatory gesture to the community…
Ferguson City Council member Mark Byrne is quoted in the
NYT’s Tuesday lead making the following statement,
“The overall goal of these changes is to improve trust within the community and increase transparency, particularly within Ferguson’s courts and police department…We want to demonstrate to residents that we take their concerns extremely seriously.”
The article reminds readers of a previous NYT report, where it was noted, “Ferguson, a city of just 21,135 people, issued 24,532 warrants for 12,000 cases last year, the group said in a recent report. That amounts to three warrants per Ferguson household…”
…The city’s traffic fine revenue has increased 44 percent since 2011, city records show. When drivers who could not pay failed to show up for court, the city issued warrants and increased the penalties...
I’m sure the world will soon see just how
“seriously” the small town’s leadership takes both its citizens’ and the world’s “concerns,” as this story relates to the brutal murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown by one of “Fergsuon’s Finest” (that really is the Ferguson P.D.’s slogan, by the way), on August 8th. But, as of this evening, the public’s heard absolutely
nothing regarding any dismissals of the
13% of the Ferguson Police Department that have either been--or are being--investigated for use of excessive force. And, of course, the public has also heard absolutely
nothing about any effort, overall or otherwise, by that city’s elected
almost entirely white leaders to transform Ferguson’s 94%+ white police department into an organization that reasonably reflects the city’s racial makeup, which is 69% African-American.
Come to think of it, if the elected leaders of the City of Ferguson were truly “serious” about their citizens’ concerns, the white mayor, along with his city council members (five out of six of whom are white), and his school board (which is entirely white save for one member who claims Hispanic “ancestry”), should seriously consider resigning, en masse, and announce a special election to take place in November.
In any event, as Tuesday's NYT also reminds us, the U.S. Department of Justice…“continues its own civil rights investigation into the shooting and the Police Department’s practices.” So, in conjunction with the new voter-activism group, Heal St. Louis, perhaps the DoJ might legally impose a fix, either directly or indirectly, to remedy this electoral travesty--one that would speed-up "change," instead?
That would show me there’s “broad change” actually happening with regard to the status quo and their oversight of municipal policing throughout the “Show Me State.” But, just as it is with regard to the grand jury investigation of FPD officer Darren Wilson’s heinous killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown early last month, despite plenty of spin by the folks in Ferguson to the contrary--as noted on the front page of today’s NYT--please pardon me for curbing my enthusiasm. The jury’s still out on all of this, and it will be for quite awhile.
We must take this status quo exercise one day at a time. And, today is certainly better than yesterday in Ferguson. But, to be quite blunt about it, as far as Tuesday's "good news" from the Times is concerned, we’re ALL in a “show me state” when it comes to seeing whatever good might transpire from this tragic story. That’s because the almost entirely white city government, municipal court system and--especially--police department in Ferguson continues to spin this story in their feeble attempts to hold on to their jobs.
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