Lessons from Ferguson

ON THE night of March 11th a nervous, edgy crowd gathered outside the police headquarters in Ferguson, Missouri. Police in riot gear faced them. By the early hours of March 12th, two officers had been shot. Ever since the shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer last August, and the riots that followed, the city has seemed unable to settle down. In the interim, however, there have been two investigations by the Department of Justice (DoJ); and these have shown that the real scandal in Ferguson was not the August shootings, but the finances of the city’s municipal courthouse.

The DoJ concluded on March 4th that there was no case against Darren Wilson, the cop who fired the fatal bullets. Investigators could not disprove his claim that he acted in self-defence when attacked by Michael Brown, a violent thief. Nor could they find evidence that the officer had deliberately broken the law. The DoJ also concluded, in a separate investigation, that to plug a hole in the city’s finances Ferguson’s police department had engaged in something very much like extortion. The report was so bad that both the police chief and the city manager have resigned.

In principle, recovering the cost of crime from people who commit it makes sense. Some American prisons have long charged their inmates for their incarceration. But some cities, cramped by shrinking tax bases, have gone further. An article in Police Chief magazine in 2010, “Generating new revenue streams”, suggested, among other things, introducing fees for sex-offenders to register when they moved to a new area, increasing fines by 50% and allowing department names “to be used for advertisement and branding”—which is probably no longer an option for Ferguson.

One problem with this approach, says Peter Moskos of John Jay College in New York, a criminologist and former police officer, is that “very few of the people that cops arrest have money”. Many end up imprisoned because they cannot pay fines for offences that would not ordinarily result in their incarceration.

A federal court in Alabama is testing whether this ought to continue in the case of Varden v City of Clanton. Christy Varden, a 41-year-old mother of two who was unemployed at the time, was arrested outside a Walmart and charged with four non-violent offences. She was told that she had to post $500 in bail for each offence. She could not, and went to prison.

In Ferguson the acquisitive approach to justice was taken even further. The police department was set aggressive targets each year to increase revenues from fines. The DoJ unearthed an e-mail exchange between the police chief and the city manager from March 2011 that gives a flavour of how this worked. The chief boasted that his department “beat our next biggest month in the last four years by over $17,000”, to which the city manager responded: “Wonderful!” The court which processed these fines got through 1,500 offences in a typical two- or three-hour session. A municipal court in St Louis County, which contains Ferguson, brings in an average of $711,506 in revenue from fines and fees each year and costs $223,149 to operate, according to Better Together, a Missouri campaign group. “Not surprisingly,” it concludes, “many in the community view the courts as revenue centres.”

The fragmented nature of America’s police forces, many of which have only a handful of officers, makes it impossible to determine how widespread the Ferguson approach to policing is. Examples of other departments where officers have responded to pressure from above to write as many tickets as possible have come to light, but only when something really egregious has happened. In 2013 the Miami Herald publicised the case of Earl Sampson, who had been arrested 62 times for trespassing at the convenience store where he worked. It turned out that the police department responsible, Miami Gardens, had made a habit of this sort of thing.

Once identified, turning around a corrupt or failing police department can be done quickly with determined leadership. Where the problem is officers shooting too many people, introducing a proper review process for each shooting seems to work. Las Vegas’s police department managed to reduce fatal shootings by officers from a peak of 25 in 2010 to eight last year with improved training, and also by investigating police shootings seriously. Both Georgia and Wisconsin have recently adopted a similar approach in the fatal police shootings of two unarmed black men, handing the investigations over to an agency independent of the police force. Los Angeles reduced both crime and the use of force by the police. The key to success was monitoring individual officers closely, and investigating those who attracted more complaints from civilians or resorted to force more often than their peers.

A watched cop never boils over

Even recalcitrant police forces can usually be made to change if Uncle Sam steps in. The federal government has lately made a habit of securing court orders to force bad ones to accept intrusive monitoring. Yet the problem of identifying failing, corrupt or avaricious police departments remains. Bad policing in big cities is fairly easy to spot, but not in small places like Ferguson. America needs earlier signals to show when something is going wrong, instead of waiting for a fatal shooting followed by a riot to do the job.