Municipal moral turpitude

From Predatory Fining and Mass Surveillance by Alex Tabarrok.

In Ferguson and the Modern Debtor’s Prison I noted that Ferguson raises an unusually high rate of revenues from fines.

You don’t get $321 in fines and fees and 3 warrants per household from an about-average crime rate. You get numbers like this from bullshit arrests for jaywalking and constant “low level harassment involving traffic stops, court appearances, high fines, and the threat of jail for failure to pay.”

It doesn’t inspire confidence, therefore, when we learn that Ferguson plans to increase its reliance on police fines as a source of revenue.

Ferguson, Missouri, which is recovering from riots following the August shooting death of an unarmed black teenager by a white policeman, plans to close a budget gap by boosting revenue from public-safety fines and tapping reserves.

Missouri’s attorney general, however, wants to enforce limits on predatory fining:

Missouri’s attorney general announced lawsuits against 13 of this city’s suburbs on Thursday, accusing them of ignoring a law that sets limits on revenue derived from traffic fines. The move comes after widespread allegations of harassment and profiteering by small municipal governments against the poor and minorities.
…demonstrators have frequently complained about a perceived hypervigilance to minor traffic violations in St. Louis County’s patchwork of 90 municipalities. Many of those cities have their own courts and police departments, but some are only a few square blocks in size and have populations smaller than some high schools.
“When traffic ticketing is used to promote public safety, that’s appropriate,” Mr. Koster said. “When traffic tickets are used to promote revenue, that’s inappropriate.” Such practices, he said, are “predatory.”

For all that the national press has tried to make an issue of the tragic deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, neither has resonated with the public, principally, I believe, because in both cases the individuals had criminal records, were involved in criminal activity and, most critically, because both were resisting arrest. Neither should have died but in both cases, their death has been seen as primarily a consequence of their own behaviors rather than due to police brutality.

The Ferguson flames have been fanned because it serves political purposes but I am afraid that the politicians have distracted from what appears to me to be a critical underlying issue - the relationship between the armed governors and the governed. I think the loss of trust in the Ferguson case is not driven so much by police behavior as by the perceived predatory behavior of the local government as manifested in the fines discussed above.

An overpopulation of criminal statutes, an overcriminalization of infractions and a potentially capricious enforcement of those statues are surefire means of driving a wedge between government and governed. More than that, it is contrary to all the precepts of American culture. Everyone agrees that people should be punished proportionately for their clear crimes. What people object to is the capriciousness, the deviousness, and the foolishness.

Punishment is intended as a mechanism for modifying behavior. It is an affront to one's sensibilities to see government use the criminal process to both raise money and criminalize otherwise law-abiding citizens. Use of fines as a means of funding municipal services and operations is a cruelly regressive form of taxation as well as a means for politicians to avoid making hard decisions. It is, in my view, one of the worst forms of class discrimination. If you want a municipal service, pay for it through your taxes, don't shift the burden to someone else. Especially don't shift that burden to the future taxpayers or to the current residents least able to pay. All this is the most shocking thing out of Ferguson and yet it is the aspect which attracts the least attention and that is the thing that is perhaps most tragic of all.

Ferguson is not about race, or police brutality, or changing demographics, or even poverty. It is about consent of the governed and the moral turpitude of some forms of government.

With all that said, read the comments to Tabarrok's post as well. The commenters raise many related issues and highlight that there are many common goods to this topic which involve hard trade-off decisions.