Poverty Profiteering Part 2 – The Business Model of Exploiting the Poor in St. Louis County

The officer found that Bolden had four arrest warrants in three separate jurisdictions: the towns of Florissant and Hazelwood in St. Louis County and the town of Foristell in St. Charles County. All of the warrants were for failure to appear in court for traffic violations. Bolden hadn’t appeared in court because she didn’t have the money. A couple of those fines were for speeding, one was for failure to wear her seatbelt and most of the rest were for what defense attorneys in the St. Louis area have come to call “poverty violations” — driving with a suspended license, expired plates, expired registration and a failure to provide proof of insurance.

“These aren’t violent criminals,” says Thomas Harvey, another of the three co-founders of ArchCity Defenders. “These are people who make the same mistakes you or I do — speeding, not wearing a seatbelt, forgetting to get your car inspected on time. The difference is that they don’t have the money to pay the fines. Or they have kids, or jobs that don’t allow them to take time off for two or three court appearances. When you can’t pay the fines, you get fined for that, too. And when you can’t get to court, you get an arrest warrant.”

– From Radley Balko’s excellent article in the Washington Post, How Municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., Profit from Poverty

The following article is the second in a series exploring the increasing business of “Poverty Profiteering.” The first one, which stuck a particular chord with several readers can be found here: Poverty Profiteering in 2014 – Introducing Private Probation Companies

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The recent events in Ferguson have shone a much needed spotlight on one of the most pressing issues affecting America today. The presence of a marginalized, preyed upon and ultimately explosive underclass percolating restlessly beneath the surface of these Unites States.

While many thoughtful people have tried to understand the root causes of Ferguson, many of these observations appear to have been superficial in their own right. For example, one notable criticism has been the fact that in many of these smaller cities and towns, such as Ferguson, you have a majority black population and a majority white police force and city government. While this situation is certainly an important issue, and undoubtably exacerbates the underlying problems, it does not appear to be a root cause. Take the example of Pine Lawn. Balko notes that:

Pine Lawn is perhaps the best example of how the problem in St. Louis County extends well beyond the racial disparities in local government. Blacks make up 96 percent of Pine Lawn’s 3,216 residents and have been well represented among the town’s elected officials. But that hasn’t stopped the town from soaking its residents in fines, fees, and warrants. In 2013, Pine Lawn police issued 17,155 traffic citations, or more than five per resident.

Rather, the root issue seems to be the fact that municipalities, and the people that run them, increasingly rely on petty fines or aforementioned “poverty violations” in order to earn revenue. Even worse, people whose job it is to uphold the rule of law simply look upon poor people as cows to be milked to death in order to inflate their own bank accounts. Balko shares the following disturbing tale:

And Voss recalls one incident in which after successfully negotiating with a prosecutor to reduce his clients’ fines, the prosecutor replied, “You’re taking money right out of my pocket, here.”

While these problems exist throughout the country, they appear to be particularly acute in St. Louis county. The reason for this is in part related to the area’s history and crazy zoning which led to “too many municipal governments, too many municipal employees, and not enough revenue to support them.”

This has resulted in the emergence of some horribly neo-feudal practices. Such as turning poor people into a specific target group due to the fact that police know they are unable to pay the fines connected with many minor violations. These people then fail to show up in court, which leads to an arrest warrant, which leads to more expenses. Ultimately, this sprawling underclass gets stuck in an endless cycle of being nickel and dimed to death.

Further exacerbating the problem, as the need for revenue expands, the need to create irrelevant violations to trap poor people becomes increasingly necessary. One example comes from the previously mentioned Pine Lawn, which has imposed a $100 fine on the parents of children caught wearing saggy pants. Additionally, there are now 26 different ways you can lose your license in St. Louis County, whereas there used to be five. However, it gets a lot worse than that. Balko notes that:

“There have been instances where someone will drive to court to clear a warrant for driving with a suspended license. They’ll pay the fine, get the warrant removed, and then get pulled over as they’re leaving the parking lot, because a police officer in the courtroom overheard why they were there,” Harvey says.

Go ahead and read that twice. Yet, that’s just the start of it. Balko notes so many insane practices it’s hard to keep track of them all. For example, it is apparently common in St. Louis country for one person to serve as a prosecutor in one case and a judge in another. One defense attorney notes butting heads with a particular prosecutor only to find out he was serving as a judge in another case in which he was representing a different client.

This all leads to a culture of complete insanity, which has manifested itself in St. Louis country. You end up with many towns where the number of outstanding arrest warrants can exceed the number of residents, sometimes by several multiples. The most egregious example is a town called Country Club Hills, which has 33,000 outstanding arrest warrants, or 26 per resident.

What follows are excerpts from Balko’s lengthy and extraordinary article. I strongly suggest reading the entire thing if you have the time.

On March 20 in the St. Louis County town of Florissant, someone made an illegal U-turn in front of Nicole Bolden. The 32-year-old black single mother hit her brakes but couldn’t avoid a collision. Bolden wasn’t at fault for the accident and wanted to continue on her way. The other motorist insisted on calling the police, as per the law. When the officer showed up, Bolden filled with dread.

“He was really nice and polite at first,” Bolden says. “But once he ran my name, he got real mean with me. He told me I was going to jail. I had my 3-year-old and my one-and-a-half-year-old with me. I asked him about my kids. He said I had better find someone to come and get them, because he was taking me in.” The Florissant officer arrested and cuffed Bolden in front of her children. Her kids remained with another officer until Bolden’s mother and sister could come pick them up.

The officer found that Bolden had four arrest warrants in three separate jurisdictions: the towns of Florissant and Hazelwood in St. Louis County and the town of Foristell in St. Charles County. All of the warrants were for failure to appear in court for traffic violations. Bolden hadn’t appeared in court because she didn’t have the money. A couple of those fines were for speeding, one was for failure to wear her seatbelt and most of the rest were for what defense attorneys in the St. Louis area have come to call “poverty violations” — driving with a suspended license, expired plates, expired registration and a failure to provide proof of insurance.

Bolden posted a couple hundred dollars bond and was released at around midnight. She was next taken to Hazelwood and held at the jail there until she could post a second bond. That was another couple hundred dollars. She wasn’t released from her cell there until around 5 p.m. the next day. Exhausted, stressed, and still worried about what her kids had seen, she was finally taken to the St. Charles County jail for the outstanding warrant in Foristell. Why the county jail? Because the tiny town of 500 isn’t large enough to have its own holding cell, even though it does have a mayor, a board of aldermen, a municipal court and a seven-member police department. It’s probably best known locally for the speed trap its police set along I-70.

By the time Bolden got to St. Charles County, it had been well over 36 hours since the accident. “I hadn’t slept,” she says. “I was still in my same clothes. I was starting to lose my mind.” That’s when she says a police officer told her that if she couldn’t post bond, they’d keep her in jail until May. “I just freaked out,” she says. “I said, ‘What about my babies? Who is going to take care of my babies?’” She says the officer just shrugged.

“She was crying as I explained the situation to her,” Voss says. “So then I started to cry as I explained it her. One of the really frustrating things about what’s happening here is that this system is breaking good people. These are people just trying to get by, just trying to take care of their families.” Voss’s eyes well up as he talks about Bolden. This isn’t just an attorney defending his client. It’s a guy who is concerned about what’s happening to another human being. Bolden is a single black woman with four kids. She has several tattoos. It’s easy to see how cops might target her, or court officials might dismiss her. But Voss points out that she had already earned an associate’s degree in medical assistance. And while dealing with all of the arrests and the harassment, she earned another in paralegal studies.

While in jail, she missed a job interview. She fell behind in her paralegal studies. When she finally got her day in court, she was told to change out of her jail jumpsuit into the same clothes she had worn for three days straight, and that had been sitting in a bag for the previous two weeks. She was brought into the courtroom to face the judge, handcuffed, in dirty clothes that had been marinated in her own filth. “I was funky, I was sad, and I was mad,” she says. “I smelled bad. I was handcuffed. I missed my kids. I didn’t feel like a person anymore.”

Stories like Bolden’s abound across the St. Louis area. And despite the efforts of the ArchCity Defenders and legal aid clinics like those at Saint Louis University and Washington University, the vast majority of the people swept up into the St. Louis County municipal court system don’t have attorneys to inform them of their rights or to negotiate with judges and prosecutors.

Some of the towns in St. Louis County can derive 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from the petty fines and fees collected by their municipal courts. A majority of these fines are for traffic offenses, but they can also include fines for fare-hopping on MetroLink (St. Louis’s light rail system), loud music and other noise ordinance violations, zoning violations for uncut grass or unkempt property, violations of occupancy permit restrictions, trespassing, wearing “saggy pants,” business license violations and vague infractions such as “disturbing the peace” or “affray” that give police officers a great deal of discretion to look for other violations. In a white paper released last month (PDF), the ArchCity Defenders found a large group of people outside the courthouse in Bel-Ridge who had been fined for not subscribing to the town’s only approved garbage collection service. They hadn’t been fined for having trash on their property, only for not paying for the only legal method the town had designated for disposing of trash.

“These aren’t violent criminals,” says Thomas Harvey, another of the three co-founders of ArchCity Defenders. “These are people who make the same mistakes you or I do — speeding, not wearing a seatbelt, forgetting to get your car inspected on time. The difference is that they don’t have the money to pay the fines. Or they have kids, or jobs that don’t allow them to take time off for two or three court appearances. When you can’t pay the fines, you get fined for that, too. And when you can’t get to court, you get an arrest warrant.”

Locals say the cops and court officers often come not only from different zip codes, but from completely different cultures and lifestyles than the people whose fines and court fees fund their paychecks….In Velda City, for example, blacks make up 95 percent of the town, but just 20 percent of the police. In Flordell Hills, it’s 91 percent and 25 percent respectively. In Normandy, 71 and 14. In Bellefontaine Neighbors, 73 and 3. In Riverview, 70 and 0. Residents of these towns feel as if their governments see them as little more than sources of revenue. To many residents, the cops and court officers are just outsiders who are paid to come to their towns and make their lives miserable. There’s also a widely held sentiment that the police spend far more time looking for petty offenses that produce fines than they do keeping these communities safe.

There are many towns in St. Louis County where the number of outstanding arrest warrants can exceed the number of residents, sometimes several times over.

Just inside the courthouse/gymnasium door in Florissant, two police officers and a court clerk check people in. In the middle of the gym, about 200 chairs sit neatly aligned in rows. Court has been in session for over an hour now, but most of the seats are still occupied. About 80 percent of the people in the gym tonight are black, even though blacks make up just 27 percent of the town. According to statistics compiled by Missouri’s attorney general’s office, 71 percent of the people pulled over by Florissant police in 2013 were black. The search and arrest rates for blacks were also twice as high as those rates for whites, even though whites were more likely to be found with contraband, a contradiction that has also been widely reported in Ferguson.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, blacks make up less than eight percent of the Florissant police force. The judge and both prosecutors are white. In nearly all the towns in St. Louis County, the prosecutors and judges in these courts are part-time positions, and are not elected, but appointed by the mayor, town council, or city manager. According to a recent white paper published by the ArchCity Defenders, the chief prosecutor in Florissant Municipal Court makes $56,060 per year. It’s a position that requires him to work 12 court sessions per year, at about three hours per session. The Florissant prosecutor is Ronald Brockmeyer, who also has a criminal defense practice in St. Charles County, and who is also the chief municipal prosecutor for the towns of Vinita Park and Dellwood. He is also the judge – yes, the judge — in both Ferguson and Breckenridge Hills. Brockmeyer isn’t alone: Several other attorneys serve as prosecutor in one town and judge in another. And at least one St. Louis County assistant district attorney is also a municipal court judge.

“I had a felony criminal case in state court a few weeks ago,” says a local defense attorney, who asked not to be quoted by name. “Sometimes criminal cases can get contentious. You have to do everything you can to defend your client, and sometime your interaction with a prosecutor can get combative. A few days later, I was representing a client who had a few warrants in a municipal court where the same prosecutor I was just battling with is now the judge. Is my client is going to get a fair hearing? You hope so. But it sure looks like a conflict to me.”

And Voss recalls one incident in which after successfully negotiating with a prosecutor to reduce his clients’ fines, the prosecutor replied, “You’re taking money right out of my pocket, here.”

“There have been instances where someone will drive to court to clear a warrant for driving with a suspended license. They’ll pay the fine, get the warrant removed, and then get pulled over as they’re leaving the parking lot, because a police officer in the courtroom overheard why they were there,” Harvey says.

“There are now 26 different ways you can lose your license in St. Louis County,” he says. “There used to be five. You can now lose your license for things that have nothing to do with driving. We definitely have a problem with over-criminalization.” One local attorney pointed to a particularly good example of how poorly-written laws can be self-defeating: In Missouri, you can lose your driver’s license for failure to pay child support, a penalty that makes it nearly impossible to get or keep a job. And that of course makes it difficult to resume paying child support. The delinquent parent ends up in jail, and the child is no better off — and is probably quite a bit worse.

Some residents say police pull them over for vague infractions like braking too often or following too closely in order to fish for more infractions like not wearing a seatbelt or failing to have the car inspected. Here too the poor get hit especially hard. Older, shabbier cars get stopped more often because police suspect they’re more likely to be driven by people who can’t afford insurance or registration fees.

 In 2000, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported in a series of articles that motorists passing through the tiny town of Bel-Ridge (also on Natural Bridge Road) were getting pulled over for running a red light at an intersection where the light had previously always flashed yellow. The complaining motorists reported seeing the light suddenly change to red while they were in the middle of the intersection. After several complaints, an engineer with the Missouri Department of transportation went out to observe what was going on.

As it turns out, in 1998 Bel-Ridge police had received permission from the DOT to install switch at the light that allowed an officer to manually convert it to red. The switch was installed so an officer could allow children from a nearby school to safely cross the road. But the engineer witnessed police switching the light to red when there were no children present at the intersection at all, just as groups of cars were passing through. Another officer would then pull one or more cars over and issue them tickets. Bel-Ridge police denied the allegation, and insisted that officers only switched the light to red when children needed to cross. But the engineer found that most of the morning tickets were issued between 9 and 10:30am, when school was already in session. The Post-Dispatch noted that in 1996, two years before the switch was installed, Bel-Ridge derived 29 percent of its annual revenue from traffic fines. In 1999, the first full year after the switch was installed, that figure jumped to 44.8 percent.

Sales taxes are the primary source of revenue in most St. Louis County municipalities. Wealthier areas naturally see more retail sales, so the more affluent towns tend to be less reliant on municipal courts to generate revenue.

Those incentives then get passed on to the judges and prosecutors the towns appoint for their municipal courts, and the police officers they pay to enforce the ordinances. “I was representing a client in a poorer town and was negotiating with a prosecutor who was also the municipal prosecutor in a wealthier town,” Voss says. “He actually told me that if we were in the wealthier town he could cut my client a deal. But he couldn’t do it in the poorer town, because there was more pressure on him to generate revenue.”

Think about that for a moment. How incredibly fucked up is that.

In the towns along the interstate and east-west highways, where blacks have been a majority for a longer period of time, they have much more representation in city government. But these are the same parts of the county where, thanks to the area’s history, there are just too many towns, too many municipal governments, too many municipal employees, and not enough revenue to support them. It doesn’t seem to matter whether those employees are black or white, they’re a legacy of segregation and structural racism, so they’re still reliant on extracting fines and fees from their residents in order to function. If anything, they’re more reliant on those fees, since there isn’t enough wealth to generate sufficient revenue from property and sales taxes.

One of those pending warrants was for “Jack” (he asked that I not use his real name), a black man who looked to be in his 60s whom I met briefly at the Cool Valley courthouse. I noticed Jack as he was chatting through a teller’s window with the court clerk. He was getting increasingly frustrated. I followed him outside and asked why he had been in court. He said he had recently been stopped by a police officer. He hadn’t been issued a citation for the stop, but a search of his name apparently showed a warrant stemming from a 20-year-old speeding ticket. With late fees and added fines, prosecutors said he now owed $615.

But he said he was angry because no one could show him the original ticket. They could only point to the warrant. He believes it was a mistake, and wondered why the warrant wouldn’t have shown up the other times he’s been stopped over the last 20 years. But the court officers had no time to argue with him. They handed him a piece of paper showing what he owes, with instructions for his payment plan. He is to come back to court each month and pay $50 until the full amount is paid off. If he misses a month, they’ll put out another warrant for his arrest.

I showed the form the clerk gave Jack to several local attorneys. Most agreed that a good lawyer could probably get the warrant cleared and the fine dismissed. It’s doubtful, for example, that the officer who issued the ticket is still around, and if he is, that he’d remember the ticket. But Jack (he asked that I not use his real name) didn’t know any of that. One attorney attempted to look up the Jack’s record to find the warrant, but not all the municipalities use the designated legal databases. Cool Valley is apparently one of those that doesn’t.

In most of these courts, the defendants with attorneys get called up first. There’s a practical reason for that. The courts don’t want to waste the attorneys’ time. It also means that attorneys like Wyrsch, Quinn, and the ArchCity Defenders can represent more clients. But it’s also another example of two-tiered justice. Defendants fortunate enough to have an attorney representing them don’t even have to show up in court. The attorney can stand in for them. And of course the vast majority of people who send an attorney in their stead aren’t indigent, but wealthier people who can afford to hire an attorney. That means the indigent defendants have to wait. That means more time away from work, or more money they’ll need to pay a babysitter.

But perhaps the most gaping divide between having and not having an attorney is that many people think that if they can’t pay their fines, they’ll be arrested and jailed the moment they show up in court. So they don’t show up. In truth, you can’t be jailed if you don’t have the money to pay a fine. But you can be jailed for not showing up in court to answer a charge. So under the mistaken belief that showing up in court broke will land them in jail, people chose not to show up . . . which then lands them in jail.

As is usually the case, knowledge is power. The poor in many of these communities are often times completely unaware of the rules of the game, and that’s just how the revenue generating machine of poverty profiteering likes it.

“That’s probably the single biggest misunderstanding out there,” says Vatterott, the former municipal judge. “We have to do a better job of informing people. I think it should say on the notice that even if you have no money, you need to show up, and it should be made clear that you won’t be sent to jail. But when I bring that up, the prosecutors don’t like it. The arrest warrants bring more fines and make the towns more money.”

Pine Lawn is perhaps the best example of how the problem in St. Louis County extends well beyond the racial disparities in local government. Blacks make up 96 percent of Pine Lawn’s 3,216 residents and have been well represented among the town’s elected officials. But that hasn’t stopped the town from soaking its residents in fines, fees, and warrants. In 2013, Pine Lawn police issued 17,155 traffic citations, or more than five per resident. During the protests in Ferguson, several media reports expressed alarm that there were about two arrest warrants pending in the town’s municipal court for every resident. As of June 30 of 2013, there were 23,457 arrest warrants pending in Pine Lawn Municipal Court, or about 7.3 per resident. The court brought in more than $1.8 million for the town, or around $576 per resident. That’s about 4.5 percent of the average Pine Lawn resident’s annual income. (Pine Lawn is far from the worst. The aforementioned town of Country Club Hills has over 33,000 outstanding arrest warrants, or an astonishing 26 per resident.)

Last August, TV station KMOV reported that Pine Lawn’s speed camera was actually installed in a vacant parking lot, that the city provided no warning to motorists, and didn’t include driver photos when sending out tickets. What’s more, the city threatened any motorist who refused to pay for a ticket with an arrest warrant. In the first six months of 2013, the camera generated $150,000 for the city, and sent a thousand extra motorists to its municipal court. In 2007, Pine Lawn passed a “saggy pants” ordinance, imposing a $100 fine on the parents of children caught wearing droopy drawers.

On another occasion, Morgan says he and some friends had gone out to dinner. He returned to his shop later that night to pick some things up. A police officer saw the lights on and demanded to see Morgan’s permit. (You need a separate permit to operate a business after dark.)

“I told him that I wasn’t working, I was just picking a couple things up. He said I was talking back to him, and that if I kept it up, he’d shut down my shop.” The officer ended up having two of Morgan’s vehicles towed. He had to pay $200 to get them back. On another occasion, Morgan says two offices and the Pine Lawn municipal prosecutor came to his shop to ask about a new Camaro they were painting for a woman in Clayton. “They thought we were stripping it for parts,” he says. “They couldn’t believe that a white lady in Clayton would send her car to a black guy’s garage in Pine Lawn.”

For a related article on the underlying causes of Ferguson see:  Putting Ferguson in Context – New Jersey Man Faced 5 Years in Jail Before Dashcam Video Proved Police Abuse.

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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