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How Many Ways Can The City Of Ferguson Slap You With Court Fees? We Counted.

by LanCulpepper Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over 100 people showed up on Tuesday night at the first Ferguson City Council meeting since Michael Brown’s killing, and unreasonable court fees were a major complaint. Ferguson officials proposed scaling back the myriad ways small-time offenders can end up paying big bucks—or worse. Community activists are optimistic about the proposed changes, but as it turns out, imposing punitive court fines on poor residents is a major source of income for a number of St. Louis County municipalities.

How bad is the current system? Say you’re a low-income Ferguson resident who’s been hit with a municipal fine for rolling through a stop sign, driving without insurance, or neglecting to subscribe to the city’s trash collection service. A look at the municipal codes in Ferguson and nearby towns reveals how these fines and fees can quickly stack up.

To start, you might show up on time for your court date, only to find that your hearing is already over. How is that possible? According to a Ferguson court employee who spoke with St. Louis-based legal aid watchdog ArchCity Defenders, the bench routinely starts hearing cases 30 minutes before the appointed time and even locks the doors as early as five minutes after the official hour, hitting defendants who arrive just slightly late with an additional charge of $120-130.

Or you may arrive to find yourself faced with an impossible choice: Skip your court date or leave your children unattended in the parking lot. Non-defendants, such as children, are permitted by law to accompany defendants in the courtroom, but a survey by the presiding judge of the St. Louis County Circuit Court found that 37 percent of local courts don’t allow it.

Coming to court has its own pitfalls, but not the ones many people fear. It’s a common misconception among Ferguson residents—especially those without attorneys—that if you show up without money to pay your fine, you’ll go to jail. In fact, you can’t be put behind bars for inability to pay a fine, but you can be sent to jail for failure to appear in court (and accrue a $125 fee). If you missed your court date, the court will likely issue a warrant for your arrest, which comes with a fee of its own:

At this point, you owe your initial fine, plus fines for failure to appear in court and the arrest warrant. Thomas Harvey, executive director of ArchCity Defenders, explains that if you’re arrested, your bail will likely equal the sum of these fines. Ferguson Municipal Court is only in session three days a month, so if you can’t meet bail, you might sit in jail for days until the next court session—which, you guessed it, will cost you.

Once you finally appear in court and receive your verdict, your IOU is likely to go up again.

Can’t pay all at once? No problem! Opt for a payment plan, and come to court once a month with an installment. But if you miss a date, expect another $125 “failure to appear” fine, plus another warrant for your arrest.

Court fines for minor infractions tend to snowball. For example, drivers accumulate points for speeding, rolling through stop signs, or driving without insurance. You can pay to wipe your record, which is pricey. If you can’t afford to, and rack up enough points, your license will be suspended and your insurance costs will probably jump. Need to get to work? If you’re caught driving with a suspended license, your court fines increase, you gain more points, and your suspension is lengthened. That’s how rolling through a stop sign could end up costing you your job, messing up your degree plans, and more.

In a county like St. Louis, which consists of 81 different municipal court systems, it’s easy to end up with fines and outstanding warrants in multiple towns. Harvey has seen his clients bounce from jail to jail, and says there’s even a local name for this: the “muni-shuffle.”

“Every handful of months, there’s some awful thing that happens as a result of someone being arrested on multiple warrants,” says Harvey. Last year, a 24-year-old man in Jennings, another city in St. Louis County, hung himself after he couldn’t get out of jail for outstanding traffic warrants. “They can’t get out, and they know they’re not going to get out,” says Harvey. In Ferguson, he explains, residents are caught in cycles of debt that stem from three main infractions: driving without insurance, driving with a suspended license, and driving without registration.

So what happens to all that cash? In Ferguson, as in thousands of municipalities across the country, it goes toward paying city officials, funding city services, and otherwise keeping the wheels of local government turning. In fact, fines and court fees are the city’s second-largest revenue source. Last year, Ferguson issued 3 warrants for every household—25,000 warrants in a city of 21,000 people.

“Ferguson isn’t an outlier,” says Alexes Harris, sociology professor at University of Washington and author of the upcoming book Pound of Flesh: Monetary Sanctions as Permanent Punishment for Poor Peopleâ&#128;&#139;. Similar measures play out in jurisdictions across the country. “All you have to do is show up in court and watch what happens.”

The good news is that this week, under pressure from local activists, the Ferguson City Council announced plans to eliminate some of the most punitive fees, including the $125 failure to appear fee and the $50 fee to cancel a warrant. Of course, nothing is set to change elsewhere in St. Louis County. But eliminating some of the most egregious fees in one town, says Harvey, is “huge progress.”

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How Many Ways Can The City Of Ferguson Slap You With Court Fees? We Counted.

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Here’s the Data That Shows Cops Kill Black People at a Higher Rate Than White People

by DewayneEdmonson Posted on September 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Since a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, one month ago, reporters and researchers have scrambled to find detailed data on how often cops wound or kill civilians. What they’ve uncovered has been frustratingly incomplete: Perhaps not surprisingly, law enforcement agencies don’t keep very good stats on incidents that turn deadly. In short, it’s a mystery exactly how many Americans are shot by the police every year.

However, as I and others have reported, there is some national data out there. It’s not complete, but it provides a general idea of how many people die at the hands of the police—and the significant racial disparity among them:

• The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting program records that 410 people were killed in justifiable homicides by police in 2012. While the FBI collects information on the victims’ race, it does not publish the overall racial breakdown.

• The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that between 2003 and 2009 there were more than 2,900 arrest-related deaths involving law enforcement. Averaged over seven years, that’s about 420 deaths a year. While BJS does not provide the annual number of arrest-related deaths by race or ethnicity, a rough calculation based on its data shows that black people were about four times as likely to die in custody or while being arrested than whites.

Note: Most arrest-related deaths by homicide are by law enforcement, not private citizens. Rate calculated by dividing deaths by the average Census population for each race in 2003-09. “Other” includes American Indians, Alaska Natives, Asians, Native Hawaiians, other Pacific Islander, and persons of two or more races.

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics System offers another view into officers’ use of deadly force. In 2011, the CDC counted 460 people who died by “legal intervention” involving a firearm discharge. In theory, this includes any death caused by a law enforcement or state agent (it does not include legal executions).

The CDC’s cause-of-death data, based on death certificates collected at the state level, also reveals a profound racial disparity among the victims of police shootings. Between 1968 and 2011, black people were between two to eight times more likely to die at the hands of law enforcement than whites. Annually, over those 40 years, a black person was on average 4.2 times as likely to get shot and killed by a cop than a white person. The disparity dropped to 2 to 1 between 2003 and 2009, lower than the 4-to-1 disparity shown in the BJS data over those same years. The CDC’s database of emergency room records also shows similar racial disparities among those injured by police.

However, these numbers provide an extremely limited view of the lethal use of force by law enforcement. For reasons that have been outlined by USA Today, Vox, FiveThirtyEight, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and others, the FBI data is pretty unreliable and represents a conservative estimate. Some 18,000 agencies contribute to the FBI’s broader crime reporting program, but only about 750 reported their justifiable homicide figures in 2012. New York state, for example, does not report justifiable homicides to the FBI, according to bureau spokesperson Stephen G. Fischer, Jr.

It’s also not clear that Brown’s death—the circumstances of which remain in dispute—would show up in the FBI’s data in the first place. (Ferguson reported two homicides to the 2012 Uniform Crime Report, but neither were justifiable homicides, according to Fischer.) The FBI’s justifiable homicide data only counts “felons,” but its definition of a felon differs from the common legal understanding of a felon as someone who has been convicted of a felony. “A felon in this case is someone who is committing a felony criminal offense at the time of the justifiable homicide,” according to a statement provided by Uniform Crime Reporting staff. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook describes the following scenario to illustrate what constitutes the justifiable killing of a criminal caught in the act:

A police officer answered a bank alarm and surprised the robber coming out of the bank. The robber saw the responding officer and fired at him. The officer returned fire, killing the robber. The officer was charged in a court of record as a matter of routine in such cases.

And since the classification of felonies—usually serious criminal offenses such as murder and assault—may vary by jurisdiction, UCR staff states, there is no standard definition of the word.

This leaves much room for interpretation. Was Michael Brown committing a felony at the time Officer Darren Wilson shot him? Local authorities in Ferguson have claimed that Brown was a robbery suspect and that he assaulted Wilson prior to the shooting. Whether Brown’s case might be classified as a justifiable homicide hinges on the details of what happened in the moments before his death and whether local investigations determine that Wilson was justified to shoot. The FBI’s records ultimately rely on police departments’ word and the assumption that the victim was a criminal.

BJS, meanwhile, collects its data from state-level coordinators that identify arrest-related deaths in part by surveying law enforcement agencies. But the majority of these coordinators do not contact each law enforcement agency in their states, so BJS has no way of telling how many deaths have gone unidentified, according to spokesperson Kara McCarthy. BJS collects some details about each reported death, such as how the victims died, whether they were armed, whether they were intoxicated or displayed signs of mental illness, and whether charges had been filed against them at the time of death. It does not collect information about whether the victims had any prior convictions.

Some of the gaps in the FBI and BJS data can be filled in by the CDC data, but there are limitations here, too. The CDC data does not evaluate whether these killings were justified or not. The agency categorizes fatalities by International Classification of Diseases codes, which are used by coroners and medical examiners to record the medical cause, not the legal justification, of death. And death certificates aren’t immune to reporting problems, explains Robert Anderson, chief of the CDC’s Mortality Statistics Branch. This data is still “at the mercy of the medical examiner and coroner,” who often write death certificates and may not include details about officer involvement. Anderson says those details are necessary in order for the CDC to categorize a death as a legal intervention.

Better data, and the will to collect it, is necessary to get the full picture of how many criminals and law-abiding citizens are killed by police every year. Until then Michael Brown—and others like him—may never even become a statistic.

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Here’s the Data That Shows Cops Kill Black People at a Higher Rate Than White People

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Pentagon and Other Agencies Slammed for Police Militarization at Senate Hearing

by CharlinFreycine Posted on September 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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In a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing Tuesday, Democratic and Republican lawmakers slammed officials from the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice for their handling of federal programs that help provide military grade vehicles, equipment, and weapons to local police departments across the country. The hearing was called in response to the events that took place in Ferguson, Missouri, after an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was shot and killed by a white police officer, and peaceful protests were met by a heavily militarized police force. “Aggressive police actions were being used under the umbrella of ‘crowd control,'” noted Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).

The panel grilled Alan Estevez, a Department of Defense agent dealing with logistics and acquisition of military equipment; Brian Kamoie, a federal grant regulator at the Department of Homeland Security; and Karol Mason, an attorney from the Department of Justice.

Senators questioned why certain military equipment was on the Pentagon’s list of acceptable items for local police departments. Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) declared that police militarization gives him “real heartburn” and wondered “how did we get to the point where we think states needs MRAPS”—that is, mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles, which have been acquired by a large number of small police departments across the country. In Texas, McCaskill noted, police departments have more than 70 MRAPS, while the state National Guard has just six.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) questioned what police departments could possibly do with the 1,200 bayonets that have been issued in recent years. The Pentagon’s Alan Estevez replied that he was unsure. Throughout the hearing, members of the panel underscored the point that police officers are often not adequately trained in how (and when) to use the military-grade equipment their departments acquire. The Pentagon doesn’t require police departments to undergo any training before supplying them MRAPS and other military equipment.

Estevez testified that the Pentagon would reevaluate its list of acceptable equipment for police departments. But Brian Kamoie, the Homeland Security official, and the Justice Department’s Karol Mason, both acknowledged that their agencies don’t do much to regulate how police departments use the grant money they dole out to local law enforcement.

McCaskill condemned the Department of Defense and the other agencies for their lack of oversight over the use of military equipment by local police. “None of them know how it’s being utilized,” McCaskill said. She pointed out that a police department in Lake Angelus, Michigan, which employs only one police officer, has received 13 military grade assault weapons since 2011. “I think we need to get to the bottom of that,” McCaskill said.

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Pentagon and Other Agencies Slammed for Police Militarization at Senate Hearing

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What Do We Know So Far From Mike Brown’s Autopsies?

by DamienVxmvkqoot Posted on August 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Normally, it takes weeks to get the results of an autopsy. But today, St. Louis County medical examiner Mary Case announced that Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager who was killed by a policeman last weekend in Ferguson, Missouri, was shot in the head and chest multiple times. Here’s the information we know about Michael Brown’s death, and a little background on why autopsies usually take so much longer.

What have the autopsies found so far?

Three separate autopsies are in various stages of completion. The St. Louis County medical examiner’s office announced on Monday that Brown was killed by multiple bullets to the chest and head. The office has not yet released information about the number or location of the bullets or their toxicology report. According to a confidential source reporting to the Washington Post, Brown’s toxicology test found that he tested positive for marijuana.

The preliminary results of an independent autopsy arranged by the Brown family and performed on Sunday by former New York City medical examiner Michael Baden found that Brown was shot six times: four times in his right arm, and twice in the head. One of the bullets entered the top of Brown’s skull, indicating that his head was tilted forward when the bullet struck him and caused a fatal injury. According to Benjamin Crump, the attorney representing the Browns, the family wanted “an autopsy done by somebody who is objective and who does not have a relationship with the Ferguson police.”

Attorney General announced on Sunday that the Justice Department would conduct a third autopsy, because of “the extraordinary circumstances involved in this case and at the request of the Brown family.” A department representative said the autopsy would take place “as soon as possible.”

Why does it usually take so long to get autopsy results?

An autopsy itself usually doesn’t take too long, but often, medical examiners will wait to release the results until toxicology tests, which analyze the presence of drugs, are also complete. Toxicology tests usually take several weeks, in part due to the chemistry involved and in part because there’s often a backlog of tests. Coupling the release of the toxicology and autopsy results is standard practice because it gives a more complete picture of what may have happened during the shooting, says Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist and the author of Working Stiff: The Making of a Medical Examiner. Determining whether or not a person was under the influence of drugs “may help interpret a person’s behavior and reaction time,” she says.

What do toxicology tests entail?

A basic screening often involves using immunoassays to test blood and urine (from inside the body) for drugs, including alcohol, marijuana, and opiates. If a test comes back positive, then a lab will run more complex tests, like mass spectrometry, to determine the exact concentration of the drug. Melinek says that “negative results come back faster,” and “the more drugs found in a person’s system, the longer it takes because each has to be verified and quantitated.” If Brown only tested positive for marijuana, the tests would only take a few days.

Was Brown’s case slowed down by an autopsy backlog?

Autopsy backlogs do exist—last year in Massachusetts, for example, there were nearly 1,000 unfinished death certificates due to lack of qualified pathologists and state funding for toxicology testing. According to Suzanne Picayune, a representative of the St. Louis County medical examiner’s office, Brown’s case was expedited through the system, as often happens for cases involving officers.

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What Do We Know So Far From Mike Brown’s Autopsies?

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Who Should Run Against Hillary?

by CedricBoyland Posted on August 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Andy Sabl surveys the Democratic field today and concludes that, sure enough, Hillary Clinton is the prohibitive frontrunner. Who could challenge her?

Any Democratic candidate jumping in at this point will have to have already demonstrated party loyalty, actual or likely executive skills, and the ability to win a majority of votes in both a party primary and a general election. Moreover, it would help if that candidate had a record of early and loud opposition to doing “stupid stuff” in the Middle East…It would help if the candidate had vast personal wealth….as well as strong and deep connections to Silicon Valley, the only serious rival to Wall Street (Clinton’s base) as a source of campaign cash.

So who could this be? Sabl is obviously describing Al Gore, and admits there’s zero evidence that Gore has any intention of running. “But if he did, and if he ran as the anti-war and populist—yet impeccably mainstream—candidate that Hillary clearly is not and has no desire to be, things would suddenly get interesting.”

I guess so. But that raises a question: Who would you like to see challenge Hillary? I’m not asking who you think is likely to run, just which plausible candidate you’d most like to see in the race.

I suppose my choice would be Sherrod Brown. He’s a serious guy who’s been in Washington for a long time. He opposed the Iraq War; he’s got good populist anti-Wall Street credentials; and he’s a solid labor supporter. He’s a pretty good talker, and never comes across as threateningly radical. As far as I know, he doesn’t have any skeletons in his closet serious enough to disqualify him. (Aside from the fact that he says he has no interest in running, of course.)

Who’s your choice? Plausible candidates only. Not Noam Chomsky or Dennis Kucinich. It’s surprisingly hard, isn’t it? The Democratic bench is actually pretty thin these days.

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Who Should Run Against Hillary?

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"Hands Up, Don’t Shoot:" Peaceful Protests Across the Country Last Night

by Dolores7899 Posted on August 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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After four nights of heavy-handed police response, a missing-in-action governor and the general appearance of a war zone, things were much calmer in Ferguson, MO, Thursday night. Missouri Highway Patrol Capt. Ronald Johnson was put in charge, and he pledged to strike a more respectful tone with protesters. It showed in the images that poured out of the small town north of St. Louis and other rallies around the country, many using the #NMOS14 hash tag to honor victims of police brutality.

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"Hands Up, Don’t Shoot:" Peaceful Protests Across the Country Last Night

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The Ferguson Shooting and the Science of Race and Guns

by AliciaRibush Posted on August 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Saturday, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri gunned down unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. Eyewitnesses say Brown was killed while trying to run away or surrender, but Ferguson police claim that Brown reached for the officer’s gun. It will be a long time before all the facts are sorted out, but research suggests that such claims may be rooted in something deeper than the need to explain actions after the fact: Race may literally make people see things that are not there, whether it’s a gun or a reach for a gun.

In a 2001 study, participants were shown a picture of a white face or a black face followed immediately by a picture of a weapon or a tool. They were asked to identify the object as quickly as possible. Study participants more often identified weapons correctly after they saw a black face, and more accurately identified tools after seeing an image of a white face. What’s more, “they falsely claimed to see a gun more often when the face was black than when it was white,” the report’s author wrote. He goes on:

Race stereotypes can lead people to claim to see a weapon where there is none. Split-second decisions magnify the bias by limiting people’s ability to control responses. Such a bias could have important consequences for decision making by police officers and other authorities interacting with racial minorities. The bias requires no intentional racial animus, occurring even for those who are actively trying to avoid it.

This study has been repeated by several different groups of scientists with the same results. (When participants are primed with female as opposed to male African-American faces, however, they are less likely to assume the object is a gun.)

A 2005 study by University of Colorado neuroscientists bolsters these findings. The scientists measured threat perception and response in the brains of 40 students to targets in a video game, some of whom were carrying pistols while others carried wallets or cellphones. The study authors predicted that because there is a cultural perception that African-Americans are “more threatening,” participants’ “shoot response” would come more naturally. Indeed that’s how it panned out. The study found that the students shot black targets with guns more quickly than white targets with guns, and took longer to decide not to shoot unarmed blacks than unarmed whites.

We may never know what was going on in the head of the officer who shot Brown—or, for that matter, in the heads of George Zimmerman or Michael Dunn, or many other killers of unarmed African-Americans in disputed situations. But studies like the above suggest that the underlying problems run deep.

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The Ferguson Shooting and the Science of Race and Guns

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Toppik Economy Dark Brown Hair Building Fibers, 0.97 Ounce

by Myrna Posted on August 4, 2014

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Watch Drought Take Over the Entire State of California in One GIF

by VioletPHLsk Posted on August 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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California, the producer of half of the nation’s fruits, veggies, and nuts, is experiencing its third-worst drought on record. The dry spell is expected to cost the state billions of dollars and thousands of jobs, and farmers are digging into groundwater supplies to keep their crops alive. We’ve been keeping an eye on the drought with the US Drought Monitor, a USDA-sponsored program that uses data from soil moisture and stream flow, satellite imagery, and other indicators to produce weekly drought maps. Here’s a GIF showing the spread of the drought, from last December 31—shortly before Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency—until July 29.

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Watch Drought Take Over the Entire State of California in One GIF

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Pura d’or Hair Loss Prevention Premium Organic Shampoo, Brown and Blue, 16 Fluid Ounce

by Myrna Posted on August 1, 2014

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