feature: more and more blacks are being entrapped in a “cycle of unpaid tickets and arrest warrants”

In Ferguson, St Louis, there have been longstanding tensions between police and the city’s predominately black community; now following the killing of Mike Brown by a white police officer on August 9th, these issues have been brought to the forefront. Now as activists continue to protest police treatment in the small city, the New York Times reports that the Ferguson City Council is proposing changes to its court system, a system which has been heavily criticized for its treatment of low-income blacks through municipal court fines. The New York Times reports that “Ferguson, a city of just 21,135 people, issued 24,532 warrants for 12,000 cases last year [..] That amounts to three warrants per Ferguson household” and that “Young black men in Ferguson and surrounding cities routinely find themselves passed from jail to jail as they are picked up on warrants for unpaid fines, one of the many simmering issues here that helped set off almost two weeks of civil unrest after the teenager, Michael Brown, 18, was killed.” 

By Alexander Aplerku, AFROPUNK Contributor

More and more blacks are being entrapped by this “cycle of unpaid tickets and arrest warrants”. The Arch City Defenders, a nonprofit legal group, and law professors at the St. Louis University School of Law, recently wrote a letter to the mayor, James Knowles III, asking him to waive all pending fines and warrants for nonviolent offenses. The letter said that the warrants served as barriers to employment and housing and that waiving them would be an important conciliatory gesture to the community.”

An official statement from Ferguson’s council read, “We are hopeful that the Council’s clear statement will encourage the municipal judge and prosecutor to explore and utilize alternative methods of sentencing, such as community service, to punish violators and deter similar unlawful conduct.” One council member, Mark Byrne, added “The overall goal of these changes is to improve trust within the community and increase transparency, particularly within Ferguson’s courts and police department,” and that “We want to demonstrate to residents that we take their concerns extremely seriously.”

We hope that this transparency continues and that the police and governing body in Ferguson are fully aware that the world is watching their every action.