Shaking Down

"Highlights" of the DOJ Ferguson report—

The Justice Department report found that African-American Ferguson residents may have felt like they were being used as the city's personal ATM, by the way the police department hit them with traffic fines.

One woman has paid $550 on what was original a $151 fine for two parking tickets -- and, more than seven years later, she still owes $541.

The police also let dogs loose on residents, sometimes without warning.

One 14-year-old African-American boy said he was waiting for his friends at a house, unarmed, when police released a dog that bit his ankle, thigh and arm.

Harassment was also a common occurrence.

An African-American man was cooling off in his car after playing basketball in a public park in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2012 when a police officer approached him and accused him of being a pedophile.

Eric Holder: "It's not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg."

He pointed to the use of excessive force overwhelmingly against African-American residents, noting that only African-Americans were bit by police dogs, and said "no alternative explanation" except racial bias exists to explain it.

The racist e-mails revealed in the report certainly show police, court and city officials who felt no inhibition at expressing how they felt about black citizens.

Holder also said Ferguson's police department violated residents' First Amendment rights to record the activities of officers, regularly conducted illegal searches and unlawfully detained citizens and competed with each other to "see who can issue the largest number of citations in a single stop."

He said the city's municipal courts and local government "relies on the police force to serve essentially as a collection agency."

Racism fuels the system and targets victims, of harassment or worse. According to Darren Wilson, the late Michael Brown was a "demon."

According to Ferguson officials whose e-mails the DOJ cited, black women should get crime prevention bonuses for having abortions. (As Charles Pierce notes, not a particularly new or original "witticism.")

Beyond the obvious and casual bigotry shown in the DOJ report, Ferguson is a model of governance in the absence of taxation. It's municipal financing by shaking down those least able to pay. The practice parallels the way asset forfeiture in drug cases became too lucrative for agencies to resist applying it to more charges, while using it disproportionately against minorities.

Ferguson is far from the only place to turn police and courts into collection agencies.

Because it's a model that starts by targeting the most disenfranchised poor and working-class groups, it's been mostly people of color harassed—or killed—by authorities who feel justified in their contempt for the victims.

But as police statistics padding and municipal financing rackets continue to expand without oversight, anyone from middling circumstances can be caught. Clever Sister happened to spot this instance.