More Reflections on Why The Poor Can't Trust Our Institutions

by Brian Howe

Why would you trust authority figures in municipalities where one of the primary functions of the police force appears to be extracting revenue from the poor in the form of onerous fines for petty offenses? 

 As the Washington Post reported:

"There are 90 municipalities in St. Louis County, and more in the surrounding counties. All but a few have their own police force, mayor, city manager and town council, and 81 have their own municipal court. To put that into perspective, consider Jackson County, Mo., which surrounds Kansas City. It is geographically larger than St. Louis County and has about two-thirds the population. Yet Jackson County has just 19 municipalities, and just 15 municipal courts — less than a quarter of municipalities and courts in St. Louis County.

Some of the towns in St. Louis County can derive 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from the petty fines and fees collected by their municipal courts. A majority of these fines are for traffic offenses, but they can also include fines for fare-hopping on MetroLink (St. Louis’s light rail system), loud music and other noise ordinance violations, zoning violations for uncut grass or unkempt property, violations of occupancy permit restrictions, trespassing, wearing “saggy pants,” business license violations and vague infractions such as “disturbing the peace” or “affray” that give police officers a great deal of discretion to look for other violations.  In a white paper released last month, the ArchCity Defenders found a large group of people outside the courthouse in Bel-Ridge who had been fined for not subscribing to the town’s only approved garbage collection service. They hadn’t been fined for having trash on their property, only for not paying for the only legal method the town had designated for disposing of trash."

The Washington Post story by Radley Balko is fantastically depressing and worth reading in full to get a real idea of the scope of the abuse in St. Louis County.  But of course this  is not a uniquely St. Louis problem as NPR recently reported:

"If you get caught drinking and driving in Wisconsin, and it's your first offense, you lose your license for nine months. For a hit-and-run, the punishment is suspension for one year.

But if you don't pay a ticket for a minor driving offense, such as driving with a broken tail light, you can lose your license for two years.

"It's an incredible policy," says John Pawasarat of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. It's "a policy of punishing people who can't pay their fines."

The practice — repeated in states across the country — is mostly affecting the poor and creating a spiral of bad consequences.

NPR's recent "Guilty and Charged" investigation found that rising court fines and fees — reaching hundreds or even thousands of dollars per person — often hurt poor people the most.

Systematic abuse of power by authority figures, against anyone, is a human rights issue.  But the most pernicious part of this problem is the fact that these policies are uniquely (and perhaps, intentionally) focused on a subsection of poor and minority communities.  The mistrust these policies foster is also then limited to that same narrow subset, which leaves the problem entirely off the radar for most Americans.  Most Americans will never have to deal with this kind of intentional abuse from authority figures.  That makes it too easy to dismiss this as a minor or overblown problem, and to dismiss the mistrust of authority as an overreaction.  One has to hope that bringing these abuses to light, through reporting like that described above, is a first step in taking a more honest look at the ways in which some parts of our system have earned that mistrust.