The pigment tax
by Tom Sullivan
Reading Charles Blow’s New York Times column this morning, one phrase stopped me cold: a pigment tax. That, essentially, is what the Justice Department’s report charges the Ferguson Police Department was extracting from African American citizens:
The view that emerges from the Justice Department report is that citizens were not only paying a poverty tax, but a pigment tax as the local authorities sought to balance their budgets and pad their coffers on the backs of poor black people.
Perhaps most disturbing — and damning — is actual correspondence in the report where the authorities don’t even attempt to disguise their intent.
Take this passage from the report:
“In March 2010, for instance, the City Finance Director wrote to Chief [Thomas] Jackson that ‘unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year. . . . Given that we are looking at a substantial sales tax shortfall, it’s not an insignificant issue.’ Similarly, in March 2013, the Finance Director wrote to the City Manager: ‘Court fees are anticipated to rise about 7.5%. I did ask the Chief if he thought the PD could deliver 10% increase. He indicated they could try.’”
The report, writes Blow, reads like an account of “a shakedown gang.”
There were many insane accounts from Ferguson, MO of police oppression — what else can you call it? — but this one (via CNN) made my blood boil:
1. Unlawful arrest has long-term consequences
Summer of 2012. A 32-year-old African-American was cooling off in his car after a basketball game in a public park.
What comes next is a series of civil rights violations described in the Justice Department report that resulted in the man losing his job as a federal contractor.
A Ferguson police officer demands the man’s Social Security number and identification before accusing him of being a pedophile and ordering the man out of his car.
When the officer asked to search the man’s car, the 32-year-old refused, invoking his constitutional right.
The response? The officer arrested the man at gunpoint, slapped him with eight charges, including for not wearing a seat belt, despite the fact that he was sitting in a parked car. The officer also cited him for “making a false declaration” because he gave his name as ‘Mike’ instead of ‘Michael.’
“The man told us that, because of these charges, he lost his job as a contractor with the federal government that he had held for years,” the report says.
The Washington Post sums it up as a racket (emphasis mine):
This, as the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out in a tweet, is “plunder made legal. … Municipal employees in Ferguson report sound more like shareholders. Gangsters.” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. called it a system “primed for maximizing revenue” — one that now basically serves as a “collection agency” instead of “a law enforcement entity focused primarily on maintaining public safety.”
“The new Department of Justice report depicts a system in Ferguson that is much closer to a racket aimed at squeezing revenue out of its population than a properly working democracy,” wrote George Washington University political scientist Henry Farrell in the Monkey Cage blog, which runs in The Washington Post. Ferguson city employees, from the police chief to the finance director, collaborated to generate revenue through tickets and fees, according to the Justice Department. As described in the report, Farrell and others pointed out, Ferguson is reminiscent of medieval Europe, when gangster governments collected “tribute” and bamboozled the subject population at every turn.
This is a department that might properly be prosecuted under RICO and likely won’t be. And for the same reason Dick Cheney, the torture master, is still fly fishing instead of swatting flies in a jail cell; for the same reason banksters walk free after defrauding courts, plundering people’s homes and throwing families into the street; for the same reason HSBC pays a fine for laundering drug money, and those too poor to pay parking fines face debtor’s prison.
Justice, which was never equal in this country, has utterly broken down along class lines, rigged like the economy. The scales of justice aren’t just out of balance. They’ve been thrown out. Medieval is right.