The suit — a contentious next-step in what has been a months-long negotiation process over potential reforms between federal and city officials — says these “ongoing and pervasive” violations come from the city’s use of law enforcement to generate revenue, echoing the findings of the Justice Department’s investigation into the city in 2014.
The best part of the whole thing is that it's a self-created problem. In St. Louis County (which is where Ferguson is), the St. Louis County Police Dept. will contract with your city to provide police service at a much cheaper rate than your municipal PD could do it. The town where I grew up, Arnold (which is across the Meramec River in Jefferson County) has the same option form Jefferson County, but they have the tax revenue to keep their own PD running. Counter to Arnold, the city of Ferguson has the same amount of people, but the median income is far lower. Arnold's is $55,500 and Ferguson's $36,645. So when they go to get a Police Department they start out with a lot less money to do it with.
But for prestige and political power they want to run their own PD, and FD, and everything else a city gets to run. And so they have this massive financial burden that they saddle their citizens with leading to persecutory police practices and revenue generation. This whole thing would be a lot better if the city dissolved its PD and contracted out to the County to provide the services.
And there's another layer. The white towns in St. Louis County run their own PDs as well. Why? So they can keep certain types in their part of town. I got in a wreck in Brentwood, MO which is a white part of town. I got a ticket for that and when I went to court to fight it (I won thank you very much) the other people in the court were 90% black. And of that, the charges they were facing were almost always driving without insurance, or without/with a suspended license. You can't get pulled over for that, it's something the police wouldn't know until they had already pulled you over. So what's going on there?
Kirkwood is the same way. There's a black part of town (and I think Kirkwood is very unhappy about this), and if you look to see who's getting pulled over you wouldn't be surprised.
Webster Groves has a black part, and there's a strange thing going on now where as a black person moves out, a white person is buying up the house basically re-white the area. I don't know for sure how they're managing that, but I would bet the realtor is in on it. And wouldn't this be a little better if there was a single black person on the Webster Groves city council to voice these concerns? Maybe, but we wouldn't know because there's not.
I live in Crestwood, MO which is within 5 miles of all these other places (Yes, there are that many municipalities in St. Louis). I drove around with expired plates on a Jeep for a year because I didn't notice they were expired. Didn't get pulled over the whole time. Weird, right? There's nothing to that, right?