The Justice Dept. Wants to Punish Abusive Ferguson Police with Massive Raises

City that preyed on citizens to fund itself told to cough up even more money.

Credit: Loavesofbread

Tonight while everybody is focused on the New Hampshire primaries, the City Council of Ferguson, Missouri, will be voting whether to accept an agreement with the Department of Justice designed to eliminate the abusive and predatory practices of the town's police and court system.

Readers may recall that while the officer who shot and killed Michael Brown was cleared by both a grand jury and a Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation, the DOJ nevertheless took a deep look at the city's operations and found serious civil rights abuses. The town of 21,000 in northern St. Louis County clearly wasn't getting enough tax revenue to support its operations, so it resorted to preying on its citizenry with fees and fines, dragging its poor residents into an arcane court system designed to wring them dry.

The DOJ is demanding Ferguson change its ways or face a federal civil rights lawsuit. City leaders have agreed—in theory—but today is the day they decide whether they will actually accept the DOJ's plan.

And what a plan it is. The DOJ's demands of the City of Ferguson fill up 127 pages of a consent decree. The agreement touches on nearly every aspect of law enforcement and court operations in the city, calling for bias-free training, making sure officers don't engage in unconstitutional stops and searches, making sure officers respect the First Amendment rights of citizens to observe and record police behavior without threatening to arrest them, updating use of force policies, implementing body cameras, and repealing ordinances that have been used to harass (and even imprison) citizens over minor infractions.

And it is not a cheap plan, which is a bit awkward for Ferguson. Ferguson not only suffered quite a bit of damage from unrest there that needed to be repaired (giving it another hit in tax revenue); Missouri also implemented legislation capping how much of a city's budget can be drawn from traffic citations. As such, the city is already operating at a deficit ($2.8 million, according to the Associated Press). Ferguson officials have calculated that implementing this massive plan could cost up to $3.7 million the first year and up to $3 million in the second and third years.

What could account for such a huge expense? It's not just the training and the price of the DOJ monitor to make sure the plan is being implemented. Buried in the consent agreement, down on page 65, are a bunch of demands of the city's recruitment plan. The very first item requires "that the City will offer salaries that will place [Ferguson Police Department] among the most competitive similarly sized agencies in St. Louis county."

Yes, that's right: The DOJ is demanding control over pay levels for police officers. Mayor James Knowles III says he is interpreting that demand to mean that police salaries be among the top 25 percent among similar cities. That would mean an average pay and benefits increase of $14,600 annually for its 50 or so police officers. That's approaching $750,000 a year, and obviously it would have to be a permanent change. And that's not all: There are parts of this deal with the Department of Justice that read like something that would be part of police contract negotiations, like demanding that officers have access to fitness facilities operated by the city free of charge and access to special identity fraud protection services (though it does not demand this benefit be free).

The result, Knowles warns, is that the city may have to cut non-police jobs in order to pay for this increase, given the city's $14.5 million annual budget.

Incidentally, this approach to public safety funding is what bankrupted San Bernardino. Its city charter required it to pay its police and fire employees based on an average wage paid to employees in nearby communities of similar sizes. The problem was that San Bernardino is the poorest of these cities and ultimately couldn't sustain these costs. When the city couldn't convince citizens to vote to change the city's charter, it was left having to dump its fire department entirely to contract with the county.

So just to make it clear, the city stands accused of having an abusive law enforcement agency that violates the rights of its citizenry in order to fund itself and its court employees, and the correction being imposed by the Department of Justice is to force the city to have to find sources of even more money to fork over to the very officers that have been abusing residents.

You can't say I didn't warn you. The Department of Justice has its own ways of contributing to a terrible police and prosecutorial culture. And as we can see, they have ways of making it even more expensive.

Comments

[PapayaSF]

Hey, we fix bad teaching with raises, so why not fix bad policing with raises? I believe this principle works with all unionized employees, correct?

/sarcasm

[Fist of Etiquette]

Make them so wealthy that they don't need to take copious fees, fines and taxes from the citizens!

[Almanian's Rusty Woodchipper]

Genius

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

"Look, do you wanna stay on this city council or not? You gotta throw something our way if you want our support. All the DOJ probes in the world won't change a thing about the reality of Ferguson politics-- you'll be gone, but police will still be here. You wanna still be here too?"

[The Grinch]

They figure they'll be able to recruit better people rather than the dregs. It'd be interesting to see some sort of analysis of citizen complaints vs. mean police salary. Unfortunately, all I really see happening with this is they'll be able to recruit smarter sociopaths who managed to maintain a better GPA. If the whole system's rotten, raises aren't going to help.

[Brochettaward]

Not so sure about this. I think what's more likely is that the national unions are somehow tied into the DOJ and pushing this stuff so they got something out of the reform push. Would be interesting to dig into the motivation behind it.

[Robert]

analysis of citizen complaints vs. mean police salary

So the commenters invite alternative parsing too.

[Hans Bader]

It's actually even worse than Reason suggests.

When the Justice Department imposes costly oversight on local police departments, it actually increases their homicide rate. On average, it makes things SLIGHTLY WORSE than before, at a cost of many millions of dollars to each police department. So finds the Washington Post:

"In five of the 10 police departments for which sufficient data was provided, use of force by officers increased during and after the agreements. In five others, it stayed the same or declined."

See http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....d-results/

Maybe it has to do with the fact that the "reforms" often include nonsense and politically-correct psychobabble, and the fact that the Justice Department lawyers usually come from left-wing advocacy groups, rather than ever having worked in a police department. (Police abuse is not usually the result of racism ? Ferguson was much less racist than people think, which did not prevent abuses -- but rather the fact that power corrupts; the fact that some bullies are attracted to police work; and due to perverse incentives for bad policing).

The Justice Department's claims of systematic racism in Ferguson city government were largely based on statistical ignorance and junk science, and ignored Supreme Court rulings about race and crime:

http://cnsnews.com/commentary/.....able-gauge

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

"In five of the 10 police departments for which sufficient data was provided, use of force by officers increased during and after the agreements. In five others, it stayed the same or declined."

Once you provide them with clear guidelines on what they can and can't do, they merely bear down harder on the things they can do once they figure they're within guidelines.

[buybuydandavis]

That's the way government always works: do a bad job and get more money.

[creech]

Anyone have a creative explanation for why this can be blamed on us libertarians?

[Mongo]

My Democrat/socialist friends get really pissed off when I remind them that libertarians were the first to point out cop shenanigans and the first to raise holy hell on Ferguson specifically.

[Rich]

The agreement touches on nearly every aspect of law enforcement and court operations in the city, calling for bias-free training

I stopped reading right there.

[colorblindkid]

What bothered me about the DOJ report is that pretty much all towns and cities do this to people of all colors. Once again, by focusing only on race and on specific incidents that turn out to be based on falsehoods, they miss the big picture.

[Robert]

Its city charter required it to pay its police and fire employees based on....

Look, if you're just going to out-&-out invite incorrect parsing....

[lukashik]

The technology is so developed that we can watch videos, live streaming, TV serials and any of our missed programs within our mobiles and PCs. Showbox
All we need is a mobile or PC with a very good internet connection. There are many applications by which we can enjoy videos, our missed programs, live streaming etc.