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[benjipwns]

After reading this whole thing I felt like it needed to get bumped outside the Ferguson thread. Full hat-tips and credit to calder for originally posting it there.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...t-louis-county-missouri-profits-from-poverty/

The officer found that Bolden had four arrest warrants in three separate jurisdictions: the towns of Florissant and Hazelwood in St. Louis County and the town of Foristell in St. Charles County. All of the warrants were for failure to appear in court for traffic violations. Bolden hadn’t appeared in court because she didn’t have the money. A couple of those fines were for speeding, one was for failure to wear her seatbelt and most of the rest were for what defense attorneys in the St. Louis area have come to call “poverty violations” — driving with a suspended license, expired plates, expired registration and a failure to provide proof of insurance.

The Florissant officer first took Bolden to the jail in that town, where Bolden posted a couple hundred dollars bond and was released at around midnight. She was next taken to Hazelwood and held at the jail there until she could post a second bond. That was another couple hundred dollars. She wasn’t released from her cell there until around 5 p.m. the next day. Exhausted, stressed, and still worried about what her kids had seen, she was finally taken to the St. Charles County jail for the outstanding warrant in Foristell. Why the county jail? Because the tiny town of 500 isn’t large enough to have its own holding cell, even though it does have a mayor, a board of aldermen, a municipal court and a seven-member police department. It’s probably best known locally for the speed trap its police set along I-70.

By the time Bolden got to St. Charles County, it had been well over 36 hours since the accident. “I hadn’t slept,” she says. “I was still in my same clothes. I was starting to lose my mind.” That’s when she says a police officer told her that if she couldn’t post bond, they’d keep her in jail until May [from March 20th]. “I just freaked out,” she says. “I said, ‘What about my babies? Who is going to take care of my babies?’” She says the officer just shrugged.

...

The Foristell warrant stemmed from a speeding ticket in 2011. As mentioned before, Bolden didn’t show up in court because she didn’t have the money to pay it and feared they’d put her jail. It’s a common and unfortunate misconception among St. Louis County residents, especially those who don’t have an attorney to tell them otherwise. A town can’t put you in jail for lacking the money to pay a fine. But you can be jailed not appearing in court to tell the judge you can’t pay — and fined again for not showing up. After twice failing to appear for the Foristell ticket, Bolden showed up, was able to get the warrant removed and set up a payment plan with the court. But she says that a few months later, she was a couple days late with her payment. She says she called to notify the clerk, who told her not to worry. Instead, the town hit her with another warrant — the same warrant for which she was jailed in March.

Bolden’s bond was set at $1,700. No one she knew had that kind of money. Bolden broke down; she cried, she screamed, and she swore. She was given a psychological evaluation, and then put on suicide watch. She finds that memory particularly humiliating. Bolden would remain in jail for two weeks, until Foristell’s next municipal court session. She wouldn’t let her children come visit her. “I didn’t want them to see me like that,” she says. “I didn’t want them to think it was normal, that it was okay for one of us to be in jail. I missed them so much. But I wasn’t going to let them see me like that.”

...

Voss was able to get Bolden’s bond reduced to $700, but that was still too much for Bolden or her family to pay. The judge also told Voss that he wouldn’t consider an indigency motion until the next session, which meant another two weeks in jail. Bolden was taken back to her cell. The next day, her mother borrowed against a life insurance policy to post her daughter’s bond. “It doesn’t just affect you,” Bolden says. “It affects your family. Your kids. Your friends. My mother is disabled. And she had to help me out. My sister had to put her life on hold to watch my kids.”

Stories like Bolden’s abound across the St. Louis area. And despite the efforts of the ArchCity Defenders and legal aid clinics like those at Saint Louis University and Washington University, the vast majority of the people swept up into the St. Louis County municipal court system don’t have attorneys to inform them of their rights or to negotiate with judges and prosecutors.

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 (PDF), 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.

...

Locals say the cops and court officers often come not only from different zip codes, but from completely different cultures and lifestyles than the people whose fines and court fees fund their paychecks. “It was always apparent that police don’t usually have a lot in common with the towns where they work,” says Javad Khazaeli, whose firm Khazaeli Wyrsch represents municipal court clients pro bono. (Disclosure: Khazaeli is also a personal friend.) “But I think Ferguson really showed just how much that can be a problem.” A recent St. Louis Post-Dispatch survey of the 31 St. Louis County municipalities where blacks made up 10 percent or more of the population found just one town where black representation on the police force was equal or greater than the black presence in the town itself. Some towns where shockingly disparate. In Velda City, for example, blacks make up 95 percent of the town, but just 20 percent of the police. In Flordell Hills, it’s 91 percent and 25 percent respectively. In Normandy, 71 and 14. In Bellefontaine Neighbors, 73 and 3. In Riverview, 70 and 0. Residents of these towns feel as if their governments see them as little more than sources of revenue. To many residents, the cops and court officers are just outsiders who are paid to come to their towns and make their lives miserable. There’s also a widely held sentiment that the police spend far more time looking for petty offenses that produce fines than they do keeping these communities safe.

If you were tasked with designing a regional system of government guaranteed to produce racial conflict, anger, and resentment, you’d be hard pressed to do better than St. Louis County.

...

Florissant is one of the larger towns in the county, with a population of about 52,000. It’s also a bit more affluent, which an average household income above the state average, although its employment rate is slightly lower. Last year the town issued 29,072 tickets for traffic offenses. Florissant collected about $3 million in fines and court costs in fiscal year 2013, about 13 percent of its 2013 revenue. As of June of last year, Florissant’s municipal court also held more than 11,000 outstanding arrest warrants.

For comparison, consider Lee’s Summit, a suburb of Kansas City in Jackson County with a population of 92,000. Yet despite being nearly twice Florissant’s size, in 2013 Lee’s Summit issued a third as many traffic tickets (9,651), and collected less than half as much revenue from its municipal court ($1.44 million) as Florissant. As of June of last year, Lee’s Summit held 2,872 outstanding arrest warrants, only one fourth as many as Florissant.

There are many towns in St. Louis County where the number of outstanding arrest warrants can exceed the number of residents, sometimes several times over. No town in Jackson County comes close to that: The highest ratios are in the towns of Grandview (about one warrant for every 3.7 residents), Independence (one warrant for every 3.5 residents), and Kansas City itself (one warrant for every 1.8 residents).

Just inside the courthouse/gymnasium door in Florissant, two police officers and a court clerk check people in. In the middle of the gym, about 200 chairs sit neatly aligned in rows. Court has been in session for over an hour now, but most of the seats are still occupied. About 80 percent of the people in the gym tonight are black, even though blacks make up just 27 percent of the town. According to statistics compiled by Missouri’s attorney general’s office, 71 percent of the people pulled over by Florissant police in 2013 were black. The search and arrest rates for blacks were also twice as high as those rates for whites, even though whites were more likely to be found with contraband, a contradiction that has also been widely reported in Ferguson.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, blacks make up less than eight percent of the Florissant police force. The judge and both prosecutors are white. In nearly all the towns in St. Louis County, the prosecutors and judges in these courts are part-time positions, and are not elected, but appointed by the mayor, town council, or city manager. According to a recent white paper published by the ArchCity Defenders, the chief prosecutor in Florissant Municipal Court makes $56,060 per year. It’s a position that requires him to work 12 court sessions per year, at about three hours per session. The Florissant prosecutor is Ronald Brockmeyer, who also has a criminal defense practice in St. Charles County, and who is also the chief municipal prosecutor for the towns of Vinita Park and Dellwood. He is also the judge – yes, the judge — in both Ferguson and Breckenridge Hills. Brockmeyer isn’t alone: Several other attorneys serve as prosecutor in one town and judge in another. And at least one St. Louis County assistant district attorney is also a municipal court judge.

One of those pending warrants was for “Jack” (he asked that I not use his real name), a black man who looked to be in his 60s whom I met briefly at the Cool Valley courthouse. I noticed Jack as he was chatting through a teller’s window with the court clerk. He was getting increasingly frustrated. I followed him outside and asked why he had been in court. He said he had recently been stopped by a police officer. He hadn’t been issued a citation for the stop, but a search of his name apparently showed a warrant stemming from a 20-year-old speeding ticket. With late fees and added fines, prosecutors said he now owed $615.

But he said he was angry because no one could show him the original ticket. They could only point to the warrant. He believes it was a mistake, and wondered why the warrant wouldn’t have shown up the other times he’s been stopped over the last 20 years. But the court officers had no time to argue with him. They handed him a piece of paper showing what he owes, with instructions for his payment plan. He is to come back to court each month and pay $50 until the full amount is paid off. If he misses a month, they’ll put out another warrant for his arrest.

I showed the form the clerk gave Jack to several local attorneys. Most agreed that a good lawyer could probably get the warrant cleared and the fine dismissed. It’s doubtful, for example, that the officer who issued the ticket is still around, and if he is, that he’d remember the ticket. But Jack (he asked that I not use his real name) didn’t know any of that. One attorney attempted to look up the Jack’s record to find the warrant, but not all the municipalities use the designated legal databases. Cool Valley is apparently one of those that doesn’t.

“I’ve asked prosecutors for a client’s file and they’ve flat turned me down,” said one local attorney. “They’ll say ‘Here’s a list of his warrants, but we can’t show them to you. Just trust us.’ Or they’ll just staple a blank form to a manilla envelope, write my client’s name on it, and call that his ‘file.’ They’re giving me the runaround, and I’m an attorney. So you can imagine what happens when people try to work within the system by themselves.”

 

[benjipwns]

Few more snippets:

About 15 minutes down I-64 from the ACD offices, Mae Quinn runs the Juvenile Law and Justice Clinic at Washington University School of Law. A native of Staten Island who practiced in the Bronx, Quinn is tough, occasionally foul-mouthed, and angry about what the area’s court system has done to her clients. Because she works with juveniles, she can’t discuss most of her clients by name, so she distinguishes them by personality. One case is the “really neat guy,” another is the “the smart kid,” still another a young mom she calls the “hard worker.”

“I’ve practiced in a lot of places, including five states,” Quinn says. “I’ve never seen anything like what goes on here. Never.”

When Quinn started the clinic, she expected all of her cases to be in juvenile court. But most Missouri towns allow defendants to be tried in municipal courts at 17, sometimes even younger. “We kept hearing about all of these problems about kids getting tangled up in the municipal courts. So we started taking them on.” Now about half the cases Quinn and her students take are in municipal court.

Quinn describes one homeless girl who had been written up for violating an occupancy permit restriction. To simply reside in St. Louis County, you have to register your residence with the local government. What that entails varies from town to town. In the town of Berkeley, for example, new tenants must obtain an occupancy permit from the Inspections Department of the City of Berkeley. A permit costs $20, and requires a valid driver’s license or identification card. If your license has been suspended due to an outstanding warrant, you can’t move in. A permit includes the names of the people legally allowed to live at the residence. If you want to add additional names or change a name, it’s an additional $25 and a signed authorization from the landlord. And again, you’ll need an ID.

In theory, occupancy permits are to prevent fire hazards and overcrowding. But they can also be another way for towns to generate revenue. Quinn’s client, for example, was the victim in a domestic abuse incident. But when the police arrived, they checked her occupancy permit, which only allowed for one person to reside at the apartment. The officers then cited the woman and her boyfriend $74 each for violating the permit. When Quinn protested that the law makes no effort to distinguish visitors from unlawful residents, the municipal prosecutor stated that “nothing good happens after 10pm” when single men and women are alone together — a sentiment later echoed by the judge. Other attorneys say that the permits are sometimes even used to enforce anachronistic laws prohibiting cohabitation of unmarried couples.

This is especially true with juveniles. Quinn, for example, recently had a client arrested because a “wanted” had been put on him. Different than a warrant, a wanted is basically a “person of interest.” It means the police don’t have probable cause to obtain a warrant. But it does allow them to snag someone up and hold them for up to 24 hours. Quinn’s client had allegedly been identified as an accomplice in a crime. But Quin and her law student assistant couldn’t figure out where he was being held. He had been arrested in one town for a wanted placed by another. She eventually found him in the interrogation room in the jail of a third town. It turned out that the town in which the wanted was placed wasn’t big enough to have its own jail. He was soon released.

“Many of these ‘wanted’ cases are just an excuse to catch and release juveniles,” Quinn says. “It gives the police a chance to squeeze them for information about other people.”

Khazaeli had a similar experience tracking down a client. His client, who was homeless, had been arrested for being a juvenile out after curfew. When the police discovered that Khazaeli’s client was actually 18, they charged him with interfering with a police officer, and for wearing “saggy pants.” He was arrested by police from the town of Charlack, a town so small that its police department, city hall, and jail are all contained in one modified single-family house. In fact, you can stand on the front lawn of the Charlack City Hall, look across Midland Boulevard, and see the Vinita Park City Hall across the street.

When Khazaeli got to Charlack, he was told his client had been sent to the jail in St. Ann, because the Charlack jail was occupied. “I then had to drive back to Charlack to sign for his release, then drive back to St. Ann to pick him up and take him back to the shelter,” Khazaeli says.

Morgan is no Cookie Thornton. For all he’s been through, he seems remarkably well-adjusted. But he says he has lost count of the the number of times he’s been arrested. He’s certain more than 20. Until the incident in Hazelwood with his kids, he had never been convicted of anything more serious than a traffic violation. H has had a couple more serious incidents with police, though neither resulted in charges.

In 2012, Morgan was working on his truck at his mother’s house when he heard a loud boom. He assumed it was a car or lawn mower backfiring and continued working. A short time later, he was driving his truck with a friend when a police officer pulled them over and emerged with his gun drawn. Soon, more squad cars showed up, 11 in all.

“A whiteshirt then showed up, and said someone fitting my description had been seen committing a burglary,” Morgan says. “They said they saw me kicking down a door, and then my friend driving my truck as we drove away. I had been working on my truck all morning, and my friend had never driven it.”

Morgan and his friend were arrested, though the police claimed they had been detained, not jailed. “I couldn’t leave, so I’m not sure what the difference is,” he says. After about three hours, the police let both men go without an explanation. Morgan’s truck had been towed. He says that when he got it back, the seats and upholstery had been ripped out, as if someone had been searching for guns or drugs. Morgan actually did have a gun. He also had a legal concealed carry permit for it.

“They told me they’d have to ‘run’ the gun to see if it was stolen or had been used in a crime, and that it could take up to 30 days. I told them I hadn’t been accused of any crime. When I tried to get it back later, an officer told me they’d have to keep it longer because of my record.”

Morgan says when he replied that he had only been convicted of traffic violations, the officer noted that he had recently been arrested for burglary — the same burglary for which the police had wrongly arrested him, confiscated the gun, and released him three hours later. Morgan just got his gun back in February, nearly three years after it was confiscated.

 

[Jack Remington]

This is awful.

 

[benjipwns]

This is awful.

Maybe we should use St. Louis County for your experiment.

 

[Orbis Tabula]

Jesus...I don't even know where to start. It's just too much.

 

[reggieandTFE]

Disgusting. I've gotten two speeding tickets on the way to the STL airport from the city to the East. I was really pissed off that they charge double if you're in the 'airport' corridor.

 

[The Technomancer]

Dat local government. Revolting behavior.

 

[See You Next Wednesday]

A lot of those poverty violations are still crimes.

 

[Brakke]

Maybe we should use St. Louis County for your experiment.

Lol. In a way we already are, it's basically a nightmare of tiny fiefdoms and warlords.

 

[kirblar]

Vox had a few pieces on this as well a few weeks back:

How for-profit policing led to racial disparities in Ferguson

The cold, hard cash at the heart of Ferguson's out-of-control justice system

A local public defender on the deeply dysfunctional Ferguson court system

 

[XT Vengeance]

I hate living near St. Louis. Also, I can confirm that the Forristell speed trap is most certainly a thing.

 

[KingGondo]

This NPR series is also worth listening to, and it found similarly disturbing conditions across the country.

http://www.npr.org/about-npr/314011043/npr-news-investigation-guilty-and-charged

Some of the key findings:

Since 2010, 48 states have added and/or increased court-related fees

At least 43 states have billed defendants for the cost of a public defender

41 states can charge inmates for room and board in jail/prison

Offenders can be billed for their own probation and/or parole supervision in at least 44 states. The growing tendency to privatize these services can minimize state oversight and diminish the accountability of for-profit companies.

49 states charge for electronic monitoring bracelets related to home detention.
Some states compound fees with penalties for missed payments, add high interest rates, and incarcerate those who fail to pay.

In Benton County, Wash., 25 percent of the misdemeanor defendants in jail on any given day are there for not paying fines and fees.

 

[PhoenixDark]

I hope the DOJ drops a bomb on the entire department.

 

[Brakke]

I hope the DOJ drops a bomb on the entire department.

A) Yes.
B) The whole point of this article is there isn't *a* department in St Louis, there's a zillion. The shit hit the fan in Fergusson but it could just as easily have been any one of a dozen or more St Louis municipalities, a bunch of them are fucked.

 

[fuzzyset]

Radley Balko has been talking about the militarization of the police force for years. This should be a good read. Thanks.

 

[benjipwns]

After looking at a couple of those other articles posted. This is the death by a thousand paper cuts type of stuff that really gets me.

I'm sorta desensitized to police killing unarmed people (in part thanks to Balko) because it gets reported at least. But usually this kind of run around, endless fuckery that helpless people get thrown into is never looked at. And it's much more common.

Not to say that unarmed people being killed by the police is not shitty since it is, but kinda like everyone (well...) knows that kind of thing is wrong and it gets attention. Nobody ever gives a shit that this one guy's file is a blank sheet of paper stapled to an envelope or the guy who has a fake burglary arrest on his record still. And all the jail shuffling, and the charge switching. And this is constantly happening to actual people but only a few people like the lawyers in Balko's story give any kind of shit.

And asset forfeiture...charging inanimate objects like money and cars with crimes...seizing hotels because people who aren't the owners might have dealt drugs in them...etc. That's so far outside the scope of the duties of the police (in theory) that it's shameful we let it go on.

With no consequences for anybody because you've got the thin blue line and apparently you've got prosecutors who are also judges and a bureaucracy that has gone beyond was I assume originally petty theft into justifying it all with some kind of "us versus them" mentality.

And probably the worst part is, that if these dudes and dudettes were just blatant egregious racists, it'd somehow seem more forgivable because well, at least then they have a shitty excuse for their behavior other than "we like to fuck with people when we can get away with it."

 

[benjipwns]

Maybe it's because if you take the "Wilson" side of the story on face value, it at least somewhat fits into the conception of what police should be doing, and you can stretch it to say it's the kind of incident that should be a big deal because it should rarely happen. And sometimes the police even admit wrongs even if the punishments aren't satisfactory.

But this other stuff, if you ask why the fuck, the only explanation you'll ever get is "it's process" or "it's procedure."

 

[Kickz]

Absolutely insane

 

[Chichikov]

Finally got around reading it, not surprising, but infuriating nontheless.
Great reporting too, Balko is the man (usually).

You should be reading this.

 

[ShutEye]

These are really just sophisticated protection rackets. You'd be better off with an actual mob.

I really don't know how the US begins to mine away from this nonsense either.

 

[YoungHav]

#notallcops

 

[linsivvi]

Wearing saggy pants is a violation.

What is this 500BC?

 

[benjipwns]

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/...cle_92a738a9-1f88-5a82-8acb-362735bab904.html

FLORDELL HILLS • The six-member police force being built here will have an officer for every couple of square blocks.

Flordell Hills has 822 residents living on about a dozen streets in less than a square mile. It will stop relying on its larger neighbor — Country Club Hills — for police services starting at midnight Oct. 1.

The new police chief and former city marshal, Dennis Oglesby Sr., said Wednesday the move will bring improved services at the same or a lower cost.

...

Flordell Hills becomes the 58th municipal police department in the county of 1 million people. That doesn’t include the county police, which covers the third of the population that lives in unincorporated areas or in cities under contract.

...

Rosenfeld said he fears the greater issue may be a desire to maximize revenue from traffic tickets.

The city is a sort of island surrounded by Jennings, from which it once contracted for police protection. A scandal prompted Jennings to dissolve its force and contract with the county in 2011.

Flordell Hills had also considered such a contract, but went to Country Club Hills instead after county police refused to continue to operate its speed cameras, county Police Chief Tim Fitch said at the time. Fitch, since retired, has been a vocal critic of automated traffic enforcement and small police departments.

Oglesby said he has not heard any complaints from residents about forming a police department.

Four officers, all newly hired from surrounding municipalities, are on the streets now, even as Country Club Hills continues to work until its contract expires.

“The residents are already making comments. They’re already happy that our cars are out patrolling,” Oglesby said.

He said residents had complained that they didn’t see Country Club Hills officers on patrol often enough.

“Several residents had made comments saying Country Club officers were sitting in the Schnucks parking lot on West Florissant not really doing anything,” said Oglesby, himself a former officer in Country Club Hills and Jennings.

...

Oglesby acknowledged that crime in Flordell Hills is low.

Both chiefs also agree that small departments may provide better service than big ones.

Ware recalled the time one of his officers was patrolling in Flordell Hills and noticed the front door open on a house where he knew an elderly man lived. Upon checking, the officer discovered the resident having a heart attack.

“My officer saved that guy’s life,” he said. “I think sometimes if you get too big of a department, you lose that personal touch.”

sigh...