The Black and the Blue

by Matthew Horace

  Those imperatives come from government officials, civic and business leaders, and influential community groups, and they’re pushed down to police departments with orders to carry them out. Police chiefs, supervisors, and commissioners relay those expectations to their deputy chiefs and commanders, who communicate them to captains, who explain them to lieutenants, who pass them along to the sergeants, who then tell patrol officers to hit the streets and make it happen.

  I’ve attended roll calls when the sergeant made it clear that certain neighborhoods needed “closer attention,” certain businesses had lodged complaints and needed to be attended to, certain neighborhoods had reported “undesirables” who needed to be removed. As patrol officers, armed with our orders and measured by the number of arrests we make and the number of traffic citations we issue, we hit the streets to uphold the law. As we do, we are mindful that job performance can lead to job advancement.

  Along with our orders, we also take with us our personal biases, prejudices, and community norms, all of which inform our actions. Consequently, as we carry out our mission, some neighborhoods and people take precedence over others. Some people are seen almost immediately as suspects, instead of as law-abiding citizens. Some residents are treated with respect and some aren’t. Property may take priority over people, like shooting someone in the back over a stolen vehicle.

  Police procedures that are deemed offensive and inappropriate in some neighborhoods are okay in others. In a middle-class white neighborhood, it would be considered unacceptable for white 12-year-old boys walking home from playing basketball to be forced into a spread-eagle posture facedown on a concrete sidewalk, with three police officers’ guns pointing at them—all due to a call about a man with a gun. But it happened to a group of black youth in Grand Rapids, Michigan. One of them lay on the ground, frightened and crying, “I don’t want to get shot.”

  Ferguson, Missouri, and the death of Michael Brown are object lessons in how government policies and community consent can translate into police procedures that are oppressive, unconstitutional, and can have disastrous results. City officials may not envision negative law enforcement consequences as a result of their policies, but they occur. Ferguson officials wanted more money for downtown redevelopment and other city projects. So, to generate more revenue, police were ordered to ramp up enforcement of policies put in place by the city manager, the finance manager, the municipal court judge, the city prosecutor, and the municipal court clerk, and condoned by the mayor and the city council. Police officers were encouraged to make up phony and excessive charges, to use arrests as a form of tax collection, and to violate the public’s constitutional rights to fill the city’s coffers with money from traffic tickets and arrest warrants.

  Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, a former cop at a nearby police department so bad that it was disbanded, fired the shot that ended Michael Brown’s life. It was city leaders and their policies, however, that set in motion the tragic events that took place when Wilson encountered Brown.

  5.

  THE CONSPIRACY

  Millions of people pass by or through Ferguson annually, though most would probably never notice it. They zoom by on Interstate-270, which borders Ferguson firmly to the north, or on Interstate-70, which slants diagonally near its southern border. When traveling along city streets, it is hard to know when you’re inside the Ferguson city limits, or in nearby Berkeley or Kinloch or Dellwood. The towns are clustered together in St. Louis County and rub against each other like one big suburb of the city of St. Louis. Local residents, however, have a very clear understanding of the dividing lines. They understand how an interaction with police in one city could result in a warning or a ticket while in another city, the same violation could lead to jail.

  Ferguson was founded in 1855 and named after William B. Ferguson, who, in exchange for naming rights, deeded 10 acres of land to the Wabash Railroad. The town’s first schoolhouse was built in 1878 and 16 years later, Ferguson became incorporated as a city. By 1960, Ferguson had reached its current population of approximately 21,000 and hasn’t grown much since then. The town’s racial demographics remained virtually unchanged through 1990, when 74 percent of Ferguson’s population was white, and 25 percent was black. Ten years later, however, African-Americans, mostly former residents of nearby North St. Louis, became the new majority, making up 52 percent of the city’s population. By 2010, African-Americans had grown to two-thirds of the town’s population.

  From the outside, Ferguson is a sedate community of tree-filled neighborhoods, spread across six square miles. A quaint downtown is anchored by a True Value hardware store, a smattering of restaurants, including the Ferguson Brewing Company, the fire department, and the police station. The housing is primarily moderate-sized, single-family brick homes, a departure from the row houses that dominate much of neighboring St. Louis. There are some troubling areas, like Park Ridge, a low-income apartment complex where nearly half the city’s annual homicides occur, and Canfield Apartments and the surrounding apartment units, where Michael Brown was shot and, until recently, a location for much of the city’s low-level drug sales. Those communities are tucked away, off the main traffic corridors and obscured by tranquil thoroughfares, where you’ll find the local Walmart and other chain stores.

  The municipality is largely a town of haves and have-nots. There are some poor white neighborhoods, but African-Americans make up the largest share of the have-nots. Ferguson’s median household income is $42,000; that’s $8,000 below the state’s median household income of $50,000. Four out of every 10 households earn less than $35,000, which is hard to get by on in the St. Louis area, or almost anywhere. White residents are mostly homeowners. Black residents are mostly renters, about 80 percent by some local estimates.

  The dirty secret in Ferguson and the small municipalities surrounding it in northern St. Louis County was that for decades city officials used their police and court systems as a means of taxing residents to subsidize their governments. Local police pestered residents by aggressively handing out traffic tickets or housing code violations—missing trash can lids, unpainted fences, unkempt lawns, etc.—to rake in millions of extra dollars. If residents didn’t have the money to pay the fines, off to jail they went, until a friend or family member could scrape together the money to bail them out and pay the charges and additional fines. Traffic tickets turned into arrest warrants, and people were carted off to jail. Some people lost jobs and careers were dashed as local municipalities used their jails as debtors’ prisons. At its height, the police fed enough traffic tickets and municipal violations through the courts for the 89 municipalities in the county to pull in $52 million a year.

  In 2014, St. Louis County, fueled by the excessive ticketing in cities like Ferguson, Jennings, Berkeley, Bellefontaine Neighbors, Pine Lawn, and Normandy, was handing out 34 percent of the state’s traffic tickets and municipal fines, though it housed only 17 percent of the state’s population. Those figures drove up the state’s rate of traffic citations per person. Consequently, Missouri, with 36 citations for every 100 people, had the second-highest rate of traffic citations in the nation in 2014 after New Jersey. New Jersey’s citations, however, unlike Missouri’s, were largely parking tickets.

  To keep their municipalities afloat, 55 city governments in St. Louis County ticketed their residents at an astounding rate. Thirty-seven of the cities issued 75 tickets for every 100 residents. Twenty-four handed out one ticket for every person in the city, and 17 municipalities, including Ferguson, gave out one and a half tickets for every man, woman, and child in the city, whether or not they could drive. All those tickets had to be handed out by somebody, and that somebody was police officers, under orders from their superiors.

  Edmundson, a small municipality near St. Louis’s major airport, sits along a stretch of Interstate-70 that is a known speed trap. Its mayor, John Gwaltney, sent a letter to his police officers in 2015, suggesting that they start writing more tickets to help pay for
their salaries. In nearby Bellefontaine Neighbors, a police officer went to court to file a lawsuit against the city after he and other officers were demoted or fired because they didn’t write enough tickets.

  None of this is news to Stacey Owens, a man I met in Ferguson in 2017. Owens grew up in nearby Berkeley, Missouri, but he is intimately familiar with the Ferguson Police Department and its ticketing routine. “Man, they’ve been stopping me since I was a teenager,” he said, “and now I’m damn near 50.” Owens and I were pushing food around our plates at Ferguson Brewing Company, a popular restaurant that also crafts its own beer. The restaurant is housed in repurposed two-story brick buildings on the main drag in downtown Ferguson, and gets a big lunch crowd of city employees and professionals. Cops also frequent it. Owens had eaten there on rare occasions, maybe three times, he said. On this day, he, a friend of his, and I were the only three black faces in the room in a city that is mostly black. I could tell that Owens wasn’t very comfortable. I didn’t know how uncomfortable until I excused myself and went to the bathroom. As I did, I took a shortcut past the open end of a large, U-shaped bar that separated two halves of the room. I passed next to the cash register. I did the same thing on the way back. When I sat down, Owens and his friend looked at me in amazement.

  “Man, I thought you were going to be arrested,” Owens said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I thought the police were going to stop you because you went through that area behind the bar next to the cash register.”

  His friend, Tony Rice, turned and looked at him in astonishment.

  “Man, I thought the same thing,” Rice said. “I was holding my breath. We both thought the same thing and we hadn’t even talked about it. I guess that’s our mentality because we grew up here.”

  Owens is one of those rare people who latched onto a job and had the grit to remain there most of his adult life. At 19, he started at the local utility company, Ameren U.E., and has remained there for 30 years. He is responsible for moving the company’s heavy equipment—transformers, big cable rolls—on a 22-wheel truck. When he first started out with Ameren, he went out and bought a 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass. “It was gold with a burgundy vinyl top,” he said proudly. “For a young dude with no kids, I had nothing to spend my money on but cars. That car used to get me stopped all the time. At least once or twice a week, I’d get stopped. Never got a ticket. It was so regular, that I would pull my license and registration out before I started the car to save time, because I knew I was going to get stopped. Sometimes they’d stop me, and it would make me run late for work. I would call my boss and tell him I’d been stopped again. He knew the deal. I even started leaving for work earlier because I knew I was going to get stopped.

  “I never had problems in St. Ann, and Maryland Heights didn’t mess with me. Jennings was known for [stopping you], too. I didn’t go too far into Jennings, and Jennings was known for roughing you up. I stayed away from Florissant, too. My family warned me not to go to Florissant. My dad would have had a fit if he found out we were in Florissant.”

  After lunch, I drove six miles to the home of the Reverend Tommie Pierson. Pierson is the pastor of Greater St. Mark’s Family Church in St. Louis County. Pierson’s church was the meeting site and staging area for many of the Ferguson demonstrations in 2014. I had planned to talk with Pierson about the demonstrations, but the conversation turned to the long-standing practice of cities like his using police and courts as tax collectors. We sat in the dining room, which was just to the left after you enter the front door. Pierson sat at the head of the table. Behind him was a large portrait of his wife, Jo Ann. Pierson is a soft-spoken African-American man of 70, who with age has gotten rounder in the middle and balder on the top. His speech is gentle, his demeanor low-key and steady. He’s also a man of action, having completed three terms as a Missouri state representative in 2016. He lives in Bellefontaine Neighbors, another of those towns notorious for stopping and ticketing African-Americans, and he has been fighting the practice since his church was founded there in 1996. Pierson’s stories about stops and cops, however, go back to December 24, 1962, when he was a teenage transplant to St. Louis from Ripley, Tennessee. “I was living with my sister. She stayed in the 4200 block of Ashland. My other sister lived in the 4200 block of Lee. I didn’t have a car, so I would walk every day between their houses. It was a straight shot down the street. And every day, the same police officer would stop me and ask me what was I doing and where was I going. Every day. Same officer. Neighborhood was about 70 percent white. Maybe that’s why.”

  When Pierson landed a job at General Motors, he moved out, got his own apartment, and bought the car of many a young man’s dream at that time, a brand-new 1965 canary-yellow Pontiac GTO, with a black convertible top. “I got stopped every day,” he said. “One time, the cop said to me, ‘When we see a black guy driving a car like this, we figure you stole it.’ They stopped me with that car every time they saw me. One time, I had seven tickets in my pocket.” When he opened his first church in Bellefontaine Neighbors, the practice of ticketing African-Americans was on the rise. “One time a lady came and got me out of the pulpit during service, because [police] had followed people onto the parking lot to give them tickets. I had to go out and run them off.” While serving as a state representative, Pierson learned that his city’s 33 police officers each had a quota of 30 tickets to fill each month.

  While the practice of ticket writing as a revenue-raiser in Ferguson had been long-standing, beginning in 2010, a team began to emerge in Ferguson’s government that would institute policies to dramatically accelerate its use. The key player was John Shaw. Shaw was hired in 2007 as the city manager, the most powerful position in Ferguson’s government. He was 31 and earned $85,000, which would grow to $120,000 upon his departure eight years later. Shaw would hire the finance manager, the police chief, and the prosecuting attorney, and enlist the assistance of the presiding municipal court judge, creating a team that would wreak havoc on the black residents of Ferguson.

  Shaw had absolute power to run Ferguson’s day-to-day operations. Still, he and his team served at the pleasure of the mayor and the city council. Despite some misgivings, they offered him their unwavering support. Key was Mayor James Knowles, a license fee office manager, who became the face of Ferguson following the Michael Brown shooting, though he had little power. A polished public speaker, Knowles was elected to the Ferguson City Council at age 25, just a few years out of college. He was 31 when he won his first mayoral election in 2011, making him the youngest mayor in Ferguson’s history, as well as one of the youngest mayors in the state. Knowles, who graduated with degrees in government from two local colleges, was also politically pliable. At one time, he was chairman of the Missouri Young Republicans. Later, he was a staff member of Democrat Ted House when House served as a Missouri state senator. Knowles became the face of Ferguson city government, but Shaw wielded the power.

  When Shaw began looking to traffic violations and jail as revenue-enhancement strategies in 2010, traffic fines and collections accounted for $1.38 million, or 12 percent of the city’s $11.07 million budget. By 2015, when Justice Department officials came in after Michael Brown’s death, that proportion had more than doubled to $3.07 million, and then accounted for 24 percent of the city’s budget.

  For Shaw’s efforts to increase revenue through greater ticketing, he needed a cooperative judge to enforce the fines and tickets. He found one in Judge Ronald Brockmeyer. Brockmeyer became municipal court judge seven years before Shaw was hired. Brockmeyer was part of the confusing judicial musical chairs that characterized the municipal court system in St. Louis County. While Brockmeyer served as a judge in Ferguson, he was also the prosecuting attorney 1½ miles to the east in Dellwood; the judge 7½ miles southwest in Breckenridge Hills; the prosecuting attorney in Florissant 3½ miles to the north; the prosecuting attorney in Vinita Park 14 miles to the south; and as a defense attorney 15 miles northwest in neighboring St. Ch
arles County.

  In Ferguson, Brockmeyer worked with the prosecuting attorney, the police chief, and the city manager to devise more ways to separate residents from their money. Brockmeyer bragged about creating new fees to bring in more money, increasing fines for repeat offenders, “especially in regard to housing violations, [which] have increased substantially and will continue to be increased upon subsequent violations,” he wrote in an email to city officials. Fines would be doubled or tripled at his discretion. He routinely added charges and additional fines when a defendant challenged a citation.

  Assisting Brockmeyer was his court clerk, Mary Anne Twitty. Twitty had nearly the same power as the judge. She worked closely with him to increase the amount of fines, to collect them, and to order more defendants to jail when they couldn’t pay. She even made some judicial decisions on her own. At one point, Twitty complained to the judge and the police chief that prosecutor Stephanie Karr’s fines were too low. “We need to keep up our revenue,” Twitty wrote. Karr, who also served as the Ferguson city attorney, raised her fine recommendations in response. Additionally, Karr said, “I have denied defendants’ needless requests for continuance from the payment docket in an effort to aid in the court’s efficient collection of its fines.”

  Twitty was fired after Ferguson’s unrest when it was revealed that she had sent numerous racist emails to ranking Ferguson police officers and other government officials. One was a photo of dancing, bare-chested African women with the caption, “Michelle Obama’s High School Reunion.” Another said a black woman should be given an award for crime prevention for having an abortion. A third depicted President Barack Obama as a chimpanzee. Sergeant William Mudd, the police official who responded to Darren Wilson as his supervisor on the crime scene after Wilson killed Michael Brown, was part of Twitty’s email chain. Mudd also testified in support of Wilson before the grand jury. He was fired for sending his own racist emails. Twitty and Brockmeyer kept the courtroom money train on track and the year Michael Brown was killed, 2014, it was running at full steam. That year, Brockmeyer issued 32,907 arrest warrants in Ferguson, a town of only 21,000 residents. The vast majority were for failure to pay traffic fines. It was by far the most warrants for any of the 90 municipalities in St. Louis County. By comparison, Florissant, with a population more than double Ferguson’s, issued only 10,059 arrest warrants that year.