The Justice Department exposes Ferguson's courts

After the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown and the protests that followed, the U.S. Department of Justice investigated the Ferguson, Missouri police department. Its March 2015 report found a system built less for public safety than for revenue: police were pressed to write tickets and make arrests to feed municipal coffers, and the courts piled on fines and fees that trapped poor residents in spiraling debt and jail. The burden fell overwhelmingly on Black residents, who made up 67% of the population but the large majority of stops, citations, and arrests. The report made national what scholars had long argued — that policing and the courts function, in part, as a system of economic extraction from Black communities, a direct echo of the convict-leasing era. It connects this theme to who-benefited and greed.