The Justice Department report on Ferguson, Missouri is bleak reading. It found the grand jury was probably right in failing to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown. The facts of the altercation were sufficiently ambiguous, the likelihood of Brown having resisted and the slack usually cut police who put their lives on the line all suggested a conviction would have been hard to come by.

However, the report also found ample evidence to suggest Brown or any black resident of Ferguson might have had reason to regard any encounter with local police as perilous. The department appears to have been rife with racism that was enabled by the fact that the municipality was running what could be regarded as a criminal enterprise. The power of the police and the courts was used not to protect citizens but to exploit minority residents. Trumped up or exaggerated charges for minor infractions led to fines. The inability of poor people to pay led to larger fines.

This would be a disgrace if Ferguson were an isolated case, but there’s plenty of reason to believe municipal funding by means of abuse of the police power is routine across America. Often black people are the victims, but in other jurisdictions Hispanics are surely targeted and everywhere the poorer, less educated citizens provide easy prey for cops who have a quota and for municipalities who need a fast buck.

One thinks of the great Levon Helm singing:
“I’ve just spent 60 days in the jail house
For the crime of having no dough.
Now here I am back out on the street
For the crime of having nowhere to go.”

And that ain’t the half of it. Treating the poor as unsightly refuse is one thing, but this sort of organized exploitation goes way beyond that. It’s as if the school bully taking your lunch money had turned into the funding mechanism for entire communities. The second-class citizens get rousted, and the first-class citizens get a lower tax bill.

The cons can be as petty as the speed trap where you not only have to pay a fine but hire a local attorney to plead down to a minor infraction in order to get fewer points on your license. Everybody’s happy – cops, judges, attorneys, locals who get a tax break and know where the speed trap is. Only the poor sap passing through gets the shaft.
But on a grander scale, civil forfeiture laws allow police to seize cash, valuables, even automobiles and real property from people “suspected” of crime without recourse to the courts. You are guilty until proven innocent. No lawyers, no trial and very little way to respond unless you are prosperous enough to foot the bill for a prolonged fight to try to recover your goods. To its credit the Obama administration is trying to crack down on this unjust practice.

At the minimum, such abuse of the police and judicial power smacks of Judge Roy Bean, a law unto himself. At worst, this is the sort of oppression we are usually quick to denounce in totalitarian regimes. You’d think bleeding-heart liberals and government-hating libertarians could make common cause on an issue that combines government over-reach and civil rights abuses. It strikes at the heart of civil society.

Democratic civilization is only possible through the consent of the governed. But in theory they are only consenting to regulation and the imposition of order on the understanding that laws intended to provide equal justice to all will be administered in a fair and impartial manner. When, by contrast, the public knows the police are corrupt, the courts are in cahoots and the government can’t be trusted to fix it because it profits by the scam, lawlessness is inevitable.

People are taught that, if they are in trouble, they should call the cops. If they feel they have been wronged, they will get their day in court. But when the cops are the trouble, who do you call? When the courts are complicit, where do you go for justice? People who don’t live in Ferguson, who have never suffered civil forfeiture, who aren’t members of a minority, who have money in the bank may feel they are safe from such depredations. But once the civil authorities are allowed to abuse somebody, it isn’t long before they can abuse anybody.