#100 year rainfall record in st louis during boeing strikes

[fatehbaz]

The perfect storm had been building for some time. Ferguson is at the bottom of the income spectrum and has acted as a sort of vanguard for the outward march of suburban poverty. [...] [T]he dwindling population, fleeing industry, and plummeting property values had created a budgetary crisis, forcing many of the area’s small municipalities to rely less on their shrinking tax base and more on extra-tax fees and fines, enforced by the police and facilitated by the city’s arcane court system.

The result was that Ferguson and similar suburbs existed in what the Huffington Post called “a totalizing police regime beyond any of Kafka’s ghastliest nightmares.” Out of a population of roughly 21,000, over 16,000 Ferguson residents had arrest warrants issued. And this number only counts individuals with warrants, not the total number of warrants. In 2013 this figure was a staggering 35,975, roughly 1.5 warrants per person in the city.

These warrants were part of a complex racket designed to impose unrelenting fines on the poor population in order to fund the city government, which itself had largely been redesigned to facilitate this predatory practice.

In 2013 fines, court fees, and other such extortions accounted for some 20 percent of the city’s budget. These fines were disproportionately applied to the city’s black residents, with black drivers twice as likely to be stopped, searched, and arrested as their white counterparts. [...]

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These funding systems are not unique to St Louis, but instead became a national trend as more and more municipalities found themselves in dire conditions after the last crisis. The suburbanization of poverty and skyrocketing incarceration rates have thus been paired with growth in these massive, extra-tax extortions applied to the poor -- and particularly the suburban and rural poor, who are more likely to live in small, cash-strapped municipalities (or counties) with a dwindling tax base and less access to federal aid. In most places, this takes the form of an expanding net of legal search, supervision, and harassment that essentially extends the walls of the prison out into the new suburban ghetto.

Increasingly expensive incarceration is gradually replaced by a predatory probation system composed of extra-carceral monitoring, fines, and seizure of property, all amplified by the fusion of public budgets and for-profit probation companies. 

Many of these are relatively recent trends, with Ferguson’s dependence on probation funding skyrocketing after 2010. But rather than an unfortunate exception, Ferguson is a window into the future. As low growth, deepening crisis, and general austerity continue [...] [t]hese cities will be forced to find new sources of funding, and the easiest way to do this is for better-off residents to utilize existing legal resources in order to prey on the poor.

As the economic situation becomes increasingly dire, similar patterns emerge at greater scales: the county, the state, and the federal government will all turn to such predatory practices, facilitated by growing armies of police and preexisting legal mechanisms for debt collection, surveillance, and incarceration.

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These patterns are piloted in the poorest areas, applied first to the most disadvantaged social groups. In Anaheim, California, the poorer, predominantly Latino neighborhoods in the city have seen a series of gang injunctions, allowing plainclothes police to arrest and open fire on residents for things as simple as their clothing color or gathering in a crowd. In 2012 a sequence of police shootings in the city led to nights of rioting just outside D!sneyl@nd. In the poorer parts of New York, stop and frisk policies and the enforcement of laws against minor offences (such as selling loose cigarettes) have allowed for similar practices, resulting in local riots around the killing of Kimani Gray in Flatbush in 2013 and national riots around the killing of Eric Garner in 2014. Similar practices have long been applied to the rural poor, including the black residents of regions such as the Mississippi River Delta, Native residents of reservations such as Pine Ridge, Latino farmworkers across the country, and the white poor in places like the coal-mining towns of Appalachia.

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Text by: Phil Neel. Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict. 2018. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]