Why we need to fix St. Louis County

"When I went to St. Louis County, Mo., last month to report on the municipal courts system there, I left pretty overwhelmed by what I saw. (You can read my report here.) I’ve done a lot of reporting on the criminal justice system over the last 10 years or so, and the beat itself can sometimes be pretty bleak. But I don’t ever recall encountering the kind of fatalism, frustration, and despair that I saw on display in those courtrooms."

 "Occupancy permits are just one of the myriad ways in which these municipalities can sap funds from poor people. Basically, if you live in St. Louis County, you’re required to get one for your residents. It doesn’t matter if you rent or own. The police can then periodically make compliance checks (although generally they conduct these checks after they’ve been called to a residence for another reason, like a noise complaint or domestic dispute). If there are more people in your place than your permit allows, they can fine you and each person in your home. Attorneys I spoke to say the regulation can end up being a way to enforce antiquated local laws against unmarried cohabitation, and judging by comments you sometimes hear in courtrooms or from local officials, a way for police and prosecutors to essentially fine people for having premarital sex. You can probably guess which communities are most likely to be subjected to these occupancy inspections."

 "When a local government’s very existence depends on its citizens breaking the law — when fines from ordinance violations are written into city budgets for the upcoming year as a primary or even the main expected source of revenue — the relationship between the government and the governed is not one of public officials serving their constituents, but of preying off of them. When the primary mission of a police department isn’t to protect citizens but to extract money from them, and when the cops themselves don’t look like, live near or have much in common with the people from whom they’re extracting that money, you get cops who start to see the people they’re supposed to be serving not as citizens with rights, but as potential sources of revenue, as lawbreakers to be caught. The residents of these towns then see cops not as public servants drawn from their own community to enforce the laws and keep the peace, but as outsiders brought in to harass them, whose salaries are drawn from that harassment. The same goes for the judges and prosecutors, who also rarely live in the towns that employ them."

How would you like it if the police and courts were doing this shit in YOUR city???????????????