slate | This week the Department of Justice released a highly critical report
about Ferguson, Missouri’s criminal justice system, accusing police and
officials of perpetrating a racially biased regime that, among other
issues, imposes abusive, excessive punishments and fines for trifling
violations like jaywalking. The DOJ report was foreshadowed in September
2014 by Washington Post writer Radley Balko’s shocking investigation
of the St. Louis County municipal court system, which seems to be a
shakedown racket aimed at enriching everyone involved at the expense of
regular citizens. Balko highlighted an individual named Ronald
Brockmeyer who has made a lucrative living in the traffic-ticket game:
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.
(As I wrote at the time,
Brockmeyer’s compensation as a prosecutor works out to about $1,500 an
hour, which is what you’d make if you worked 40 hours a week at a salary
of $3 million per year.)
As it happens, Brockmeyer is now back in the news thanks to the DOJ
report, which criticized his work in Ferguson—and thanks to the Guardian, which reveals that Brockmeyer, who, again, makes his living by harshly enforcing the most trivial civic rules, owes the United States government some $170,000 in unpaid taxes.
