In the biggest flare up in the city since a grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson for the killing of unarmed black teen Michael Brown, the release of a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) report on policing in Ferguson sparked another series of protests.
Perhaps more importantly, it prompted a string of resignations and firings due to the report’s conclusions: the city administration did in fact have practices that amounted to systemic racism.
Among those to resign following the release of the report was the City Manager John Shaw. As Ferguson’s top bureaucrat, Shaw took the fall for the St. Louis suburb’s policy – which was repeatedly highlighted in the report as among the most damning signifiers of racially biased practices – of urging city departments to “generate revenue.”
According to the DOJ Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the city’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs. This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson’s police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the Ferguson community.”
In short, the DOJ saw – correctly – that the city’s emphasis on generating income by fines laid out by police and enforced through the courts, meant that officers began to heavily ticket residents, and especially black residents. The investigation accounts for this by numbers, as well as through emails and other correspondence, which leaves no doubt that police were instructed to ensure significant increases in income for the city through these means.
Given this revelation, it is hard not to see this directive as a factor in the events that led up to Michael Brown’s killing: former officer Darren Wilson allegedly stopped the young man because he and a friend were walking in the middle of the street in what amounted to a violation of Municipal Code Sec. 44-344. It is, perhaps, too audacious to think that if no instructions had been given to city police to generate revenue, that the 18-year-old would be alive today.
Nonetheless, by highlighting this policy and ostensibly axing the public employee responsible for issuing it, both the Department of Justice and the City of Ferguson are indeed acknowledging that this must be considered to have played a role not only in the youth’s death, but also in the toxic relationship between city officials and the majority black population.
What the report negates to expand upon, however, are the reasons why senior public servants ordered departments to engage in this policy in the first place. Likewise, neither federal nor state officials are acknowledging how widespread such policies have become in Missouri and in the United States as a whole, as cities attempt to balance their budgets under the weight of budget cuts and instructions from higher levels of government.
Austerity Led to Revenue Generation Directive
The Department of Justice report leaves little room for doubt about the extent to which Ferguson officials directed – and even pressured – police to generate revenue for the city coffers.
“Unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year,” read a 2010 email from city Finance Director to Police Chief Thomas Jackson, in one of numerous examples of city officials telling police that they needed to bring in more revenue.
The DOJ outlines that individual evaluations often boiled down to these metrics, leading to city authorities treating “some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.”
As ordered, the police and courts significant increased the revenue stream from fines, both in dollar amounts and as percentages of the city’s overall income. In 2010, of Ferguson’s US$11 million general revenue, US$1.4 million, or 12 percent, came from fines and fees collected by the court. Projections for 2015 released in June 2014, however, showed anticipated revenues from fines raking in some US$3.1 million, or 24 percent of the city’s US$13.3 million.
Under state laws in Missouri, municipalities are only allowed to generate up to 30 percent of their income from fines and tickets, a target Ferguson officials were hoping to get close to.
Again, the issue of whether Ferguson officials did this is hardly in dispute.
Ferguson’s directive, however, was neither isolated nor incidental.
For a number of years, Ferguson and other municipalities in Missouri were coping with decreased federal and state aid (or rather, income transfers), including those that came as part of Democrat Governor Jay Nixon’s budget cuts.
In 2010, the city registered US$1.1 million “Intergovernmental Revenue,” a figure which decreased to US$1 million by 2012. This was coupled with the already tough condition for Missouri municipalities, which, according to a 2008 study by the National League of Cities, received only 7 percent of their overall budgets through state aid: well below the national average of 19 percent.
Other cities in Missouri - perhaps with the exception of Kansas City and St. Louis, which were allowed to also use tax income - had also been feeling the crunch. One example, Windsor, Missouri, a small town of less than 3,000 inhabitants, garnered some unusual media attention when city employees were apparently told to bring their own toilet paper to work as a result of budget shortages.
While Governor Nixon has pushed back against aggressive, Republican-led tax cutting initiatives, Nixon himself has been pushing for cuts throughout his term in Jefferson City. Nixon boasted about making US$1.5 billion in cuts between 2008-2010, proposed an additional US$170 million in cuts in 2011, along with a 2.5 percent cut in 2012.
In 2014, Nixon paradoxically proposed a US$400 million cut in anticipation of a Republican bill, which he opposed, that would cut business taxes by half.
Nevertheless, this issue cannot even be laid at the feet of the politicians, as it is a much wider phenomenon in municipalities across the United States.
Not Just a Missouri Problem
In its 2013 members survey, the National League of Cities, which represents 19,000 cities and towns in the United States, cited that municipal finance officers widely acknowledged cuts in state and federal aid as among the main factors pressuring city budgets.
While increasing costs are no doubt part of the challenges cities face, it is also evident that job cuts were significant across municipalities. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that total local government employment in the U.S. dropped more than 500,000 jobs from 2008 to 2013.
So in spite of cuts that cities themselves had to make, city finance officers also saw the need to increase revenues to make up for the funding gap.
The same survey also outlined that 39 percent of cities had raised fee levels, while one in four cities increased the number of applied to city services. In addition, 39 percent of city finance officers said their cities had seen state transfer cuts, one-quarter reporting revocation or reduction of reimbursement programs as well as one in five saying responsibility for a state program had been downloaded onto their city.
This brand of municipal neoliberal austerity - cutting funds from higher branches of government, downloading services and limiting revenue options beyond property taxes and fees - had become common place in the U.S., and in fact, in a lot of the world.
So if this practice has been deemed unacceptable and even dangerous in Ferguson, why would it still be permitted in other cities facing the same issues, and probably also guilty of disproportionately targeting black, latino, or other “minorities”? Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, who beyond John Shaw is to blame for all of this?
Where Does the Buck Stop?
Ferguson’s city manager quickly tendered his resignation following the media storm in the wake of the report’s release, and its focus on the municipal decisions that he was ultimately responsible for. However, it was also Ferguson’s City Council (the folks who accepted his resignation) that is responsible for passing budgets from year to year and for asking questions from and giving directives to its staff. To date, neither the mayor nor any council members have taken responsibility, let alone resigned.
However, it is evident that the decisions were also driven by decision made at other levels of government. Missouri’s tax-cutting legislature though, including Governor Nixon, has also not acknowledged any blame in this, despite the evidence showing a correlation between cuts to state transfers with Ferguson’s directive to its police.
But would it be fair to shift blame from municipal to state decision-makers? Certainly not, as both these levels of government are liable for the policy that has recently been exposed, along with its consequences.
Yet, perhaps there is a reason the DOJ report - thorough in its analysis otherwise - negating to hypothesize on the rationale behind the policy it so comprehensively blasted.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in 2013 there was a US$55 billion shortfall in federal aid to states, which like the cities dealing with cuts from their superiors would have to deal with the budget gap. For the state of Missouri, this amounted to US$800 million for the same year.
As such, U.S. states have been burdened by the federal government with cuts in the same way as U.S. cities have been unloaded on by states. Again, this is not just a U.S. reality, but an experience common to places that are being dismantled by neoliberal policies set in place by lawmakers.
None of this is to minimize the obvious dynamic of institutional racism directed at black people by authorities and in particular police in Ferguson and elsewhere. Even if officer Wilson had not been instructed to issue more fines, he might have still harassed and subsequently shot the black teen dead. However, as in Ferguson, the policies that lead to racism and violence against black people and others need to be identified and at their source.
