WaPo | The structure of policing in these small St. Louis communities, as in many places in the United States, is innately combustible.
Officers
rarely stay in the same police force for a long time, much less for an
entire career. This means police and residents are typically strangers
to one another — and not simply from different social, ethnic or racial
backgrounds.
Ferguson is an example of a police department
staffed predominantly with white officers, many of whom live far away
from, and often fail to establish trust with, the predominantly black
communities they serve. Policing can become a tense, racially charged,
fearful and potentially violent series of interactions. Distrust becomes
institutionalized, as much a part of the local infrastructure as the
sewers and power lines.
A newly released report by a nonprofit
group of lawyers identifies Ferguson as a city that gets much of its
revenue from fines generated by police in mundane citations against
residents — what the group calls a poor-people’s tax.
The
civil unrest that followed the shooting of Michael Brown suggests a
deeper problem with the city’s police department, said Geoffrey Alpert, a
University of South Carolina professor of criminology who has studied
police shootings for decades.
“In order for a police department
to weather a storm like that, it has to have social capital. And this
police department didn’t have social capital in that community,” he
said.
