The closer we look at the situation in Ferguson, the more vile it gets. The courts were stacking minor fines on people — especially black people — and then putting them on a merry-go-round of constantly accumulating fines. And when the poor were unable to pay the fines, they were thrown in jail. One woman had to pay over $500 on a $150 parking fine, and even that didn’t clear the debt.
But if you were a rich white debtor, you got a completely different kind of treatment.
The judge in Ferguson, Missouri, who is accused of fixing traffic tickets for himself and colleagues while inflicting a punishing regime of fines and fees on the city’s residents, also owes more than $170,000 in unpaid taxes.
Ronald J Brockmeyer, whose court allegedly jailed impoverished defendants unable to pay fines of a few hundred dollars, has a string of outstanding debts to the US government dating back to 2007, according to tax filings obtained by the Guardian from authorities in Missouri.
This judge bragged about his ability to gouging money out of his constituents, worked simultaneously as judge, prosecutor, and private attorney, and then didn’t pay personal taxes or employer taxes for his legal business.
I guess Missouri (and other states) are re-enacting a collection of medieval fiefdoms. Except that’s slandering the Middle Ages.
Well, he was involved with a gang of robbers. Of course he’s crook, what do you expect?
I hope Ronald J Brockmeyer finds his name has gone down in history as an example of hypocrisy and corruption.
Of course, this is why it’s so important to defund the IRS, so they can’t go after these fine, upstanding citizens. /s
Calling Robin Hood…
Is Missouri Justice officially an oxymoron? If it wasn’t already, it should be by now, right?
You’ve just described the whole of rural America.
Ferguson didn’t have a police department, it had a mafia family.
“Okay, I give up. Stop showing me!” – Willard Duncan Vandiver
Matt Taibbi did an excellent, if depressing, investigation of this fuck-the-poor situation in America with The Divide. The gulf between crimes and the punishment (if any) is insane. So, for example, commit massive financial fraud, whilst nearly collapsing the economy and putting hundreds if not thousands of employees out of a job–a few fines and a pinky swear to never do it again. But come home late at night from a second job and get caught talking to a friend outside your apartment building–get arrested for (This was one of the more memorable stories in the book, there are way, way more.)
Law enforcement do this because these piddly little bullshit summonses and arrests can add up to a lot of revenue for the government, without the inconvenience and labor of actual, investigative police work, since they are simply responding to the tiniest of offenses that they witness with their own eyes. Unfortunately, it’s for statutes that people rarely even know exist, much less think were ever enforced. Thus they are out of a few hundred dollars, or worse, hours at work, if they dare to try and contest them in a court. On top of this it makes citizens resent the police and their role in the community, even without the Ferguson-level tragedies.
Judge prosecutor and private attorney and a tax dodger. He must be Kent Hovind’s attorney.
Not to defend feudalism — but at least under feudalism the lords-manors had formal obligations to their serfs and freeholders, and should one of the lords decide he didn’t need to pay his fief to the Crown, he could expect a visit from a large contingent of men-at-arms seeking an explanation.
Not to defend debtor’s prisons, but your debt would be absolved through service in them, right?
Even slaveholders felt some self-serving obligation to keep their property in reasonable good health.
Jailing people is counterproductive: they can’t pay then, and it’s all about money.
A dirty secret of my job serving warrants: I take people before the judge knowing he’ll never jail them. His sole intent is to scan them enough to pay immediately, hitting up their relatives if necessary. If they really can’t pay, he always gives them a payment plan. If I arrested them for default on the payment plan, he gives them 30 days to pay. It’s played to seem magnanimous, but prisoners cost, and citations are to raise money not spend it.
Conversely, I’m empowered to collect fines on the spot, or if I show up with a warrant, you can literally pay me to gout away and leave you alone.
If they’re maneuvering people into jail time, they must have such a hate on for someone that they’re willing to lose revenue. They might get away with it if they are making enough money to compensate. But if revenue goes down, I’d expect them to be held accountable. That’s dereliction of their primary duty.
Damn auto correct.
A Masked Avenger @ 14
Not if you’re getting kickbacks from private prisons that are funded by federal or state governments based on headcounts.
Or you don’t actually give a shit about money or justice, just re-election, and a “tough on crime” stance is both easy and vote-winning.
To add to Snoof’s comment:
By the time the bill comes due, you’ve already made your money and you’re on your way to bigger and better things. Leaving other people to clean up the mess. Sure, it’s counterproductive for the clean-up crew, but who cares, right?
I’m naïve enough to be surprised – well, shocked. Not at the existence of corruption, but at the sheer extent of it.
Funny, when sovereign-staters (or whatever they’re called) complain about the “police state” they never mention real examples of it like this. Arresting people on a whim and then locking them into a cycle of fines and debt they can never break out of – while taking not even a feudal responsibility for local conditions, infrastructure etc. – is pretty fucking breathtaking.
Did he also exercise the droit de seigneur?
Many have, cervantes, though we just call it rape now. Not really funny, if you were trying to be.
dear me. I used to believe it was just a “snarky urban myth absurdity”: that “speed/radar traps” are only for revenue and nothing to do with law enforcement nor public safety. That speeding tickets are more severe (and never a Warning), at the end of the month; as LEO’s have to meet a ‘quota’ of $s. Appears my bubble has been burst. “Ferguson Justice” [euphemism] has confirmed that “myth” as true fact [dept. of redundancy dept.].
Prof. Farnsworth’s meme of “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.” is the opposite of my approaching attitude: “I don’t want those people to live on this planet anymore.”
I’m just so frequently disgusted by actions of ‘those people’ that I just want them to leave.
okay I said too much @21, but I’ll add a little more here. About the not-so-mythical $ quota of speeding tickets. So obviously about collecting the fine, instead rehabilitating the perp. that speeding tickets all came with a checkbox on the back to plead “NOLO CONTENDRO” to just mail in the fine to the Clerk of the Court. No need for court time; expensive salaries, you know. I think there was also a difference between pleading “Nolo…” and being found Guilty after pleading “NOT guilty”.
And “Nolo…” was always presented as benefiting the perp. As in “you, the recipient of the ticket, will cost you less to pay NOLO than to spend a day in court to be found NOTGUILTY, while losing a days wages to get out of this little fine.”
Now, it is even more obvious that it was all just subterfuge to maximize their profit, not to reduce my costs.
I’m so glad Ferguson has been too blatant about it to stay hidden from sight, and they’ve been called out about it. Maybe now other PD’s will be less offending, and more concerned with their primary purpose: PROTECT AND SERVE, instead of HARASS AND EXTORT. But I’m just dreaming. I’m sure my cynic is saying that the PD’s will just get more subterfugey to hide their actual ‘raisin dates’.
But don’t you know that his case is TOTALLY DIFFERENT? Because…um…well…anyway, it is. Totally different. You can’t possibly put him in the same category as those deadbeats. Not at all. Totally not the same thing.
@twas brillig (stevem), this is way, way beyond speed traps and rigid ticket-issuing. If you read the report – or even discussions about the report like Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article – this was a criminal mob that used the apparatus of government to extort, imprison and harass black citizens while letting their white friends off scot-free.
@dianne:
The federal government is EEEEEEVILLLE! Owing money to the federal government is noble withholding resources from the devil. Those folk who owe money to their municipality, however, are thugs robbing funds from the salaries of people who are trying to do some good in their own community, ‘natch.
@ opposablethumbs
“Funny, when sovereign-staters (or whatever they’re called) complain about the “police state” they never mention real examples of it like this. Arresting people on a whim and then locking them into a cycle of fines and debt they can never break out of”
Since the typical so-called sovereign citizen is white, not his problem.
Why? Brockmeyer reminds me a lot of a robber knight. Being judge and lawyer at the same time has also not been seen elsewhere since the Enlightenment.
Is he in trouble, or does he get to carry on as usual?
A Masked Avenger @14
Not necessarily. Sending a few to jail is probably intended to put fear into the hearts of everyone else; incarcerating a couple of people every once in a while will pay for itself in increased intimidation (cooperation) of the others. They’ve probably worked out the correct jail/fine proportion necessary for optimum profit.
Actually, heavy monetary pressure can be put on a city like Ferguson if everybody decides to be jailed. For example, read the bottom paragraphs of of this web page about the civil rights movement.It costs some money to jail people. If the costs are greater than the fines collected (zero if pick jail versus the fine), it starts weighing on the community finances.
I think everyone is also forgetting that for quite a lot of the people, none of the time they spent in jail, was counted towards the dismissal or reduction of their fines, as the time spent in jail was never tracked-usually no more than 72 hours, but still. And I also understand the the jail conditions were medieval.
I thought, once a person spent time in jail, this would take the place of whatever fines had been issued against them?
People also got jailed for late payments and partial payments, with no consideration for extenuating circumstances, like homelessness, or illness.
The couple of times, I recieved tickets, in East Cleveland, I knew it was for revenue purposes. Everyone in town knows it. We all know that you’re more likely to get tickets towards the end of the month or last two months of the year. I hated paying them, sometimes as low as 25.00 but usually not over 100.00, and I could avoid going to court alltogether by just paying it off right away, sometimes online (I do understand, that’s a luxury, not everyone has, though.)
I know. It’s just such an amazing coincidence, isn’t it, the way legal infractions overwhelmingly tend to break down along certain lines … and the way a heavily-armed “sovereign citizen” loudly declaring their rejection of authority is not such a threat to police that they just have to shoot them.
RHIP.
What is the point of clawing your way to the top if you can’t sidestep the laws and screw over the little people.
As one senator put it after sexual activity with the staff was condemned: ‘What is the point of being a senator if you can’t diddle the pages’.
The phrasing is variable but the sentiment is pretty common.
In quebec it has recently come out, as part of labor pressure by the police who are facing pension cuts, that the police have explicit quotas set by city councils. The police unions have added the abolishment of quotas to their list of demands in their negotiations (cynically, I suspect, to get public support — but I’m ok with that).
numerbois @ 34
I don’t understand why you think it is cynical.
There’s wide public support for cutting public-servant pensions. “Pension = lazy” has been thoroughly ingrained into people. Worse, the police make a decent middle-class living on a manageable work schedule, which is also equated to being lazy. And they eat donuts, which means they’re lazy. Same as in the US, basically.
The only group who would naturally be (and are) opposed to pension cuts have been facing police crackdowns over the past couple years every time we have a protest, so support for the police in particular is quite tepid. Support for the public service in general is still strong.
In the midst of this, suddenly, the police union is very concerned about the quota system, which they’ve never really said anything about before. Everybody hates quotas — nobody likes getting speeding tickets and jaywalking tickets and unlawful-assembly tickets. So now everyone can get on board with the police.
All that said, I didn’t mean to derail the thread from the far worse happenings in Ferguson. The police here give tickets to raise revenue, but I don’t know of any allegations they run an explicit extortion racket.