HuffPo | This complete penetration of policing into everyday life establishes a
world of unceasing terror and violence. When everyone is a criminal by
default, police are handed an extraordinary amount of discretionary
power. "Discretion" may sound like an innocuous or even positive policy,
but its effect is to make every single person's freedom dependent on
the mercy of individual officers. There are no more laws, there are only
police. The "rule of law," by which people are supposed to be treated
equally according to a consistent set of principles, becomes the "rule
of personal whim."
And this is precisely what occurs in Ferguson. As others have noted,
the Ferguson courts appear to work as an orchestrated racket to extract
money from the poor. The thousands upon thousands of warrants that are
issued, according to the DOJ, are "not to protect public safety but
rather to facilitate fine collection." Residents are routinely charged
with minor administrative infractions. Most of the arrest warrants stem
from traffic violations, but nearly every conceivable human behavior is
criminalized. An offense can be found anywhere, including citations for
"Manner of Walking in Roadway," "High Grass and Weeds," and 14 kinds of
parking violation. The dystopian absurdity reaches its apotheosis in the
deliciously Orwellian transgression "failure to obey." (Obey what?
Simply to obey.) In fact, even if one does obey to the letter, solutions
can be found. After Henry Davis was brutally beaten by four Ferguson officers, he found himself charged with "destruction of official property" for bleeding on their uniforms.
None
of this is even to mention the blinding levels of racism, which remain
the central fact of police interactions in Ferguson and nationwide. The
overwhelming force of this violent and exploitative policing system is
directed at the African American population. In 2013, 92 percent of Ferguson's arrest warrants were issued against African Americans, and black Fergusonians were 68 percent less likely
than others to have their court cases dismissed. The racism is so
blatant and comprehensive that the DOJ concluded that "Ferguson law
enforcement practices are directly shaped and perpetuated by racial
bias." Considering the qualified and colorless language typically
deployed in government documents, this is an astonishingly forceful
statement.
Ferguson's racism has been central to the media
coverage of the release of the DOJ report. But in a certain way, by
focusing entirely on disparate racial impacts without examining the
sheer scale of the brutal state juggernaut, one misses crucial facts.
MSNBC listed as the DOJ's number one
"most shocking" finding the fact that "at least one municipal employee
thought electing a black president was laughable." But the existence of
racist views in the department is not the most shocking fact, not by a
country mile. Rather, endemic racism in policing comes standard.
However, that racism occurs in the wider context of an ever-enlarging
interlocking system of administrative bureaucracy and police violence.
The
other pitfall in analyzing the Ferguson report is to see it as being
about Ferguson. There are 19,492 municipal governments in America, and
the chances that Ferguson happens to be the worst are extremely slim. In
fact, there is strong evidence that in the world of better funded, more militarized, more technologically advanced
police departments, Ferguson is simply a high-profile case study. While
the Ferguson nightmare may dwarf the problems in cities like Boston,
American policing is so out-of-control that Ferguson-style practices can
occur on at least some level in almost every department.
It's
hard to believe, but the Ferguson police department's massive deliberate
racism only represents one of its problems. The DOJ report shows not
just a racist criminal justice system, but one in which the very act of
being alive has been made a crime, and in which nearly every resident is
wanted by the law at every moment of every day.
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