NYTimes | POLITICS,
wrote the political scientist Harold Lasswell in 1936, is about “who
gets what, when, and how.” If you want to understand the racial power
disparities we’ve seen in Ferguson, Mo., understand that it’s not only
about black and white. It’s about green.
Back
in 1876, the city of St. Louis made a fateful decision. Tired of
providing services to the outlying areas, the city cordoned itself off,
separating from St. Louis County. It’s a decision the city came to
regret. Most Rust Belt cities have bled population since the 1960s, but
few have been as badly damaged as St. Louis City, which since 1970 has
lost almost as much of its population as Detroit.
This
exodus has left a ring of mostly middle-class suburbs around an urban
core plagued by entrenched poverty. White flight from the city mostly
ended in the 1980s; since then, blacks have left the inner city for
suburbs such as Ferguson in the area of St. Louis County known as North
County.
Ferguson’s
demographics have shifted rapidly: in 1990, it was 74 percent white and
25 percent black; in 2000, 52 percent black and 45 percent white; by
2010, 67 percent black and 29 percent white.
The
region’s fragmentation isn’t limited to the odd case of a city shedding
its county. St. Louis County contains 90 municipalities, most with
their own city hall and police force. Many rely on revenue generated
from traffic tickets and related fines. According to a study by the St.
Louis nonprofit Better Together, Ferguson receives nearly one-quarter of its revenue from court fees; for some surrounding towns it approaches 50 percent.
Municipal
reliance on revenue generated from traffic stops adds pressure to make
more of them. One town, Sycamore Hills, has stationed a
radar-gun-wielding police officer on its 250-foot northbound stretch of
Interstate.
With
primarily white police forces that rely disproportionately on traffic
citation revenue, blacks are pulled over, cited and arrested in numbers
far exceeding their population share, according to a recent report from Missouri’s attorney general.
In Ferguson last year, 86 percent of stops, 92 percent of searches and
93 percent of arrests were of black people — despite the fact that
police officers were far less likely to find contraband on black drivers
(22 percent versus 34 percent of whites). This worsens inequality, as
struggling blacks do more to fund local government than relatively
affluent whites.
