Thomas Harvey talking:
in Ferguson and the surrounding municipalities, there is a substantial amount of income that’s derived from these low-level ordinance violations. These are the least significant, lowest-level contact with the justice system. They are typically traffic tickets, moving violations. And as a system, as a structural problem, these—revenue from these municipal courts can represent either the second- or third-highest source of income for the municipality. Ferguson is $2.7 million a year. In neighboring Florissant, the adjacent municipality, it’s $3 million a year. It’s a line item on a budget, and enforcement of the laws and ticketing and fine amounts are in keeping with the expectation that that income is going to come in to fund the city.
And our clients believe that they are targeted initially because they’re black, and then they are harassed, and they are exploited because they are poor. And it has led to a level of distrust between the community and law enforcement, that you saw manifested in some of the protests in the last two weeks. I’m not trying to say that traffic tickets are the reason people are on the streets of Ferguson, but it’s certainly a contributing factor when you’ve got the tragedy with Michael Brown and the very same people that my clients believe are targeting them because they’re members of community of color and then exploiting them because they’re poor, are now asking them for patience and trust and promising to get to the right answer involving the shooting. And our clients are skeptical. And as the audio clip you just played reveals, it doesn’t take much for someone in this community to move to tell you that in St. Louis County this is a real problem.
Nicole is a very good example of a kind of culmination of all these problems, because these are poor people. These are not criminals. These are people who can’t afford to pay the fines that middle-class folks could pay that would lead to an amendment of their nonmoving violation. And not to get too far in the weeds, but if you have means, and you and I have the same driving record, you can commit the same violations and pay to get a moving violation turned into a nonmoving violation, and then you don’t suffer the consequence of your actions.
So, Nicole has a driving while suspended because she couldn’t pay to get her tickets amended. So her license got suspended as a result. She has no proof of insurance, because she couldn’t get paid to get her tickets amendments, so her insurance costs went up, and it was prohibitively expensive. She’s charged with—typically charged with what our clients are charged with, the big three poverty crimes—and they’re not really crimes—but it’s driving while suspended, no proof of insurance, and failure to register vehicle. These are not people who are refusing to comply with the law; they’re people who cannot comply with the law.
And Nicole’s case is particularly illustrative because she was incarcerated—she was incarcerated for two weeks on a warrant for her arrest because she was unable to pay the fines. Then when she was brought before the court, she—as she’s entitled to, she asked for a hearing. We represented her. We asked for a hearing to determine her ability to pay the fines. And the court refused our hearing. That’s an unlawful act. The court refused our hearing on that matter and told us that we needed to schedule it a week later. Nicole was returned to jail and was threatened with another week of incarceration, while her children were with her mother and her sister, and she possibly was going to lose her job. And so her mother and her sister borrowed money. Her mom borrowed money against her life insurance policy. Her sister loaned Nicole her biweekly paycheck. That was to come up with $700. So, Nicole didn’t have $700. Her mother and her sister came up with 700 bucks to get her out of jail.
And that’s not what the system should be about. We have to divorce the administration of justice from the generation of revenue. And that’s a systemic problem in our region. And they’re incarcerating people and creating problems that, in the most charitable interpretation, I don’t think they’re aware of the consequences they’re having on people’s lives and the havoc they’re wreaking in this region.
we are talking about debtors’ prison. It’s part of a problem that you see in the criminalization of poverty all over the country. Southern Poverty Law Center has brought a lawsuit. Southern Center for Human Rights has been involved in some litigation there. It’s something where you see people held in jail as a result of their inability to pay fines. Up to the moment where they are brought before the court because they failed to appear, I don’t believe there’s anything unlawful that’s happened. At the moment where a person has been brought to court on a warrant for failure to appear, and they’ve said, “I cannot afford to pay the fines you’ve assessed,” the court must allow them to leave or make a finding that they are willfully refusing to comply with the court’s order. In the absence of such a finding, it’s unlawful to continue to incarcerate them.
my clients have told me since the first day I’ve ever represented anybody is, this is not about public safety, it’s about the money. And whether or not that building was built on the backs of poor people in Ferguson and the rest of the region, I really don’t know the answer. But I know my clients believe it. I know the optics are bad. And I realize that that dynamic is what’s contributing to some of the tensions between law enforcement and the community. And if we don’t take advantage of this opportunity to have some real structural reform and revise this system, that is racist—that has a systemic racism built into it, we’re going to—it’s going to be a huge missed opportunity.
— source democracynow.org
Thomas Harvey, executive director of ArchCity Defenders.