“Suburbanization Of Poverty”: Tensions In Ferguson Have Been Simmering Below Surface For Decades
The police shooting of Michael Brown was the spark.
But the tinder fueling the anger and resentment that has exploded in Ferguson, Mo., has been building for decades.
The town has seen many middle-class homeowners who eagerly moved to St. Louis’ northern suburbs after World War II to buy brick ranch homes with nice yards leave, replaced by poorer newcomers. Good blue-collar jobs have grown scarce; the factories that once sprouted here have closed shop. Schools have struggled.
And local governments — slow to evolve – often now look little like the people they represent. For the black community, it creates a sense of lost opportunity in a place much like other aging suburbs in the Rust Belt and across the country.
“For a young black man, there’s not much employment, not a lot of opportunity,” said Todd Swanstrom, a professor of public policy at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. “It’s kind of a tinder box.”
The seething tensions prompted Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon to declare a curfew in Ferguson on Saturday, one week after a white police officer shot and killed Brown, an 18-year-old black man. The declaration followed another night of looting.
Critics say an initial heavy-handed response by police using tear gas and rubber bullets touched off the unrest, with mainly white officers facing off against mainly black crowds.
Since Brown’s death, race and police tactics have dominated the headlines blaring from this town 12 miles northwest of St. Louis’ Gateway Arch. But that’s only part of the story.
From jobs to schools to racial transition, Ferguson and its neighboring towns — where many protesters came from — have undergone sweeping changes in recent years. Some places have become pockets of poverty, comparable to the poorest spots in St. Louis.
Others, like Ferguson, remain more mixed, with middle-class subdivisions alongside run-down streets and big apartment complexes like the one where Brown lived. Either way, Swanstrom said, the area highlights the growing challenge of the “suburbanization” of poverty.
“This was a catalyst for something much deeper, the lack of economic opportunities and representation people have,” said Etefia Umana, an educator and board member of a community group called Better Family Life. “A lot of the issues are boiling up.”
It’s been boiling for decades.
St. Louis’ jumble of suburbs — there are 91 municipalities in a county of about 1 million people ringing the city — has long been sharply segregated. Until the late 1940s, restrictive covenants blocked blacks from buying homes in many of them.
Well into the 1970s, tight zoning restrictions and other rules, especially in places near the city’s mostly black north side, kept many largely white, said Colin Gordon, a University of Iowa professor who’s studied housing in St. Louis.
That began to change by the 1980s, when middle- and working-class white families began leaving north county — as the area around Ferguson is known — for newer, roomier housing further out in the exurbs. In their place came a flood of black families from St. Louis in search of better housing and schools.
“When black flight out of the city began, this was the logical frontier,” Gordon said. “It became what the city had been, a zone of racial transition.”
In Ferguson, the change happened fast. In a generation — from 1990 to today — the population changed from three-fourths white to two-thirds black. Even as the area’s demographics shifted, good blue-collar jobs sustained many of these towns, said Lara Granich, a community organizer.
“Everyone in our parish was a brick layer or a letter carrier or something. I didn’t know anyone who had gone to college, but they all made a decent living,” said Granich, who grew up in nearby Glasgow Village, another neighborhood on the decline. “The people who live there now tend to work at McDonald’s.”
The recession hurt, too. This part of the St. Louis region took the brunt of the foreclosure crisis, with subprime loans turning bad, and investors scooping up cheap houses to rent. Auto plants that had sustained a black middle-class shut down.
Since 2000, the median household income in Ferguson has fallen by 30 percent when adjusted for inflation, to about $36,000. In the Census tract where Brown lived, median income is less than $27,000. Just half of the adults work.
Fr. Steven Lawler, rector of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Ferguson, really saw the change in 2008, when visits to his food pantry spiked. They haven’t gone down since.
“I know there are places where an economic recovery’s happening,” he said. “But in the places where people are most stressed, there hasn’t been a recovery.”
Still, as Lawler and others note, Ferguson has some things going for it. Its pleasant, old downtown has seen a revival in recent years, with a busy Saturday farmers market and a new craft brewery. It still has middle-class neighborhoods of historic homes. The headquarters of a Fortune 500 company — Emerson Electric Co. — sits on a serene campus just up the hill from the gas station looters burned a week ago Sunday night.
Gail Babcock, program director at Ferguson Youth Initiative, was quick to note her town still has a strong sense of community — and every morning last week volunteers have poured in to clean up from protests and looting. The challenge is in connecting its poorer residents – especially younger ones – to it.
“It’s very hard for them to find jobs,” said Babcock, who runs a community service program for youth convicted of minor criminal offenses. “That sets up a situation where they tend to get in trouble, and they probably wouldn’t under other circumstances.”
Then there are the schools, one reason why many families moved to these suburbs in the first place. Two north county districts – including the one where Brown graduated from high school in May — have lost their state accreditation in recent years. The district Ferguson shares with a neighboring town remain accredited but scores low on state tests.
That was a big reason why John Weaver took the morning off work Friday, drove his plumbing truck to Florissant, and asked the visiting Gov. Nixon what he planned to do about the problems that have plagued these neighborhoods for years.
Nixon acknowledged there’s “a lot of work to do.” Weaver was not impressed.
“All these politicians say they’ll fight for our education. I feel cheated,” he said in an interview later. “And if I feel cheated, how should these kids feel?”
These issues are all tied together for Shermale Humphrey, a 21-year-old who joined the protests last week. She plans to enlist in the Air Force, but right now works at a McDonald’s near where Brown was shot. She’s something of a veteran activist – helping to organize strikes by fast-food workers in St. Louis — and sees race and local politics and economics here as closely intertwined.
“It’s a shortage of everything,” she said. “It’s a shortage of jobs. Of African Americans on the police force and in government. Of people not being able to get a good education.”
Adding to the frustration, many protesters say, is that the people still running many of these downs don’t much look like the people who live there now. Just three of Ferguson’s 53 police officers are black. Six of seven City Council members are white. So are six of the seven school board members, who run a district with a student body that’s 78 percent black.
Many of these towns are still run “like little fiefdoms,” said Umana, who moved to Ferguson eight years ago, by remnants of their old white middle class that may not share the concerns of newcomers.
“The numbers flip-flopped, but the power structure remained the same,” he said.
It has been hard to build black political leadership in these fast-changing suburbs, said Mike Jones, a black veteran of St. Louis’ political scene. Indeed, it’s been harder than in St. Louis, which has long been racially mixed.
But a more diverse set of voices at Ferguson City Hall, Jones said, might have avoided the heavy-handed police response that only inflamed protests.
“The question is how — in a city that’s 67 percent African-American — do you have absolutely no African American political representation?” Jones asked. “That’s what leads you to a police force that could become involved in this sort of incident.”
It’s an issue more communities will have to face, Jones predicts, as traditionally “urban” issues of poverty and racial change migrate to suburbs often less-equipped to deal with them. And not just in St. Louis.
A study last month by the Brookings Institution found the number of poor people living in high-poverty suburban neighborhoods nationwide more than doubled in the last decade, growing much faster than in big cities.
Chris Krehmeyer, who runs St. Louis-based community development nonprofit Beyond Housing, says he knows colleagues around the country dealing with a lot of the same issues as he is in north St. Louis County, tackling housing and jobs and schools all at once. The key, he said, is to build trust with residents before the community blows up.
Ferguson is a bellwether, he said. “This story could happen in lots of different places, all over this country.”
By: Tim Logan and Molly Hennessy-Fiske, The Los Angeles Times; The National Memo, August 18, 2014
“It’s Getting A Little Silly”: Perry Finds A Way To Blame Obama For Indictments
After Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) was unexpectedly indicted late Friday, the Republican governor discovered some unexpected allies: observers who generally don’t care for Perry blasted the charges against him.
MSNBC’s Ari Melber, for example, characterized the case against the Texas governor as “weak.” Jon Chait called the charges “ridiculous.” Rick Hasen and David Axelrod reached similar conclusions. Scott Lemieux, summarizing the thoughts of many, added, “I’m as contemptuous of Perry as anyone, but this seems really thin.”
Benjy Sarlin joked, “It’s hard to believe an issue would get liberal commentators rallying on Rick Perry’s side, but this indictment seems to be doing it.”
And while the Republican governor and likely presidential candidate is clearly pleased by his reluctant backers, he doesn’t exactly look above the fray when he blames President Obama for an indictment handed down by a Texas grand jury.
The governor, who appeared on “Fox News Sunday,” also used the occasion to criticize President Obama, saying he was responsible for a national erosion of the “rule of law.” […]
Mr. Perry repeatedly invoked the “rule of law,” suggesting that it had suffered under Mr. Obama, whether in the scandal over the Internal Revenue Service, enforcement of border security or surveillance by the National Security Agency.
Look, if the governor wants to mount a proper defense against the pending felony counts, fine. Apparently, he’ll even enjoy a fair amount of support from the left.
But if Perry wants to position himself as a responsible chief executive, who’s been targeted for petty and partisan reasons, his baseless complaining about the president won’t help his broader public-relations cause.
For one thing, there is no IRS scandal; border security has never been stronger; and it’s Perry’s party that supports expansive NSA surveillance. If this is the best the governor can do to offer proof of Obama eroding the “rule of law,” he’s going to need a new talking point.
For another, let’s not forget that the Obama administration has literally nothing to do with Perry’s indictment. The Texas grand jury was empaneled by Texas prosecutors scrutinizing Texas law.
But taking a step back, it’s hard not to notice the pattern: when Republicans find themselves in a difficult position, they reflexively try to blame the president whether it makes sense or not. Eric Cantor lost a primary? Blame President Obama. John Boehner failed to pass immigration bills? Blame President Obama. Bob McDonnell was indicted on corruption charges? Blame President Obama. Sam Brownback fared much worse than expected in a GOP primary? Blame President Obama. Chris Christie’s plan screwed up New Jersey’s finances? Blame President Obama.
It’s getting a little silly.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, August 18, 2014
“Offender-Funded Justice”: The Economics Of Police Militarism
Two crucial battles broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, this week. The first began with the public airing of sorrow and rage after the death of the eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, who was shot by a police officer, on Canfield Court, in the St. Louis suburb, at 2:15 P.M. last Saturday. Then came the local law enforcement’s rejoinder to the early round of protests. Officers rolled in with a fleet of armored vehicles, sniper rifles, and tear-gas cannisters, reinserting the phrase “the militarization of policing” into the collective conscience. The tactical missteps by the town’s police leadership have been a thing to behold. (They’re also to be expected; anyone doubting as much should pick up Radley Balko’s “The Rise of the Warrior Cop.”)
One moment, we see a young man with a welt from a rubber bullet between his eyes; the next, three officers with big guns are charging at another black man who has his hands up. On Thursday, Jelani Cobb filed a powerful account from the sidewalks and homes of Ferguson. Cobb asks about “the intertwined economic and law-enforcement issues underlying the protests,” including, for instance, the court fees that many people in Ferguson face, which often begin with minor infractions and eventually become “their own, escalating, violations.” “We have people who have warrants because of traffic tickets and are effectively imprisoned in their homes,” Malik Ahmed, the C.E.O. of an organization called Better Family Life, told Cobb. “They can’t go outside because they’ll be arrested. In some cases, people actually have jobs but decide that the threat of arrest makes it not worth trying to commute outside their neighborhood.”
The crisis of criminal-justice debt is just one of the many tributaries feeding the river of deep rage in Ferguson. But it’s an important one—both because it’s so ubiquitous and because it’s easily overlooked in the spectacular shadow of tanks and turrets. Earlier this year, I spent six months reporting on the rise of profiteering in American courts, which happens by way of the proliferation of fees and fines for very minor offenses—part of a growing movement toward what’s known as offender-funded justice. Private companies play an aggressive role in collecting these fees in certain states. (Often, this tactic is aimed at the poor with unpaid traffic tickets.) The reports from Ferguson raise questions about how militarization and economic coercion feed a shared anger.
Missouri was one of the first states to allow private probation companies, in the late nineteen-eighties, and it has since followed the national trend of allowing court fees and fines to mount rapidly. Now, across much of America, what starts as a simple speeding ticket can, if you’re too poor to pay, mushroom into an insurmountable debt, padded by probation fees and, if you don’t appear in court, by warrant fees. (Often, poverty means transience—not everyone who is sent a court summons receives it.) “Across the country, impoverished people are routinely jailed for court costs they’re unable to pay,” Alec Karakatsanis, a cofounder of Equal Justice Under Law, a nonprofit civil-rights organization that has begun challenging this practice in municipal courts, said. These kinds of fines snowball when defendants’ cases are turned over to for-profit probation companies for collection, since the companies charge their own “supervision” fees. What happens when people fall behind on their payments? Often, police show up at their doorsteps and take them to jail.
From there, the snowball rolls. “Going to jail has huge impacts on people at the edge of poverty,” Sara Zampieren, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me. “They lose their job, they lose custody of their kids, they get behind on their home-foreclosure payments,” the sum total of which, she said, is “devastating.” While in prison, “user fees” often accumulate, so that, even after you leave, you’re not quite free. A recent state-by-state survey conducted by NPR showed that in at least forty-three states defendants can be billed for their own public defender, a service to which they have a Constitutional right; in at least forty-one states, inmates can be charged for room and board in jail and prison.
America’s militarized police forces now have some highly visible tools at their disposal, some of which have been in the spotlight this week: machine guns, night-vision equipment, military-style vehicles, and a seemingly endless amount of ammo. But the economic arm of police militarization is often far less visible, and offender-funded justice is part of this sub-arsenal. The fears that Cobb and Ahmed describe—court debts that lead to warrants and people who are afraid to leave their homes as a result—compound the force that can be wielded during raids or protests like those on the streets of Missouri. Debtors’ fears change their daily lives—can they go to the grocery story or drive a child to school without being detained? “It deters people who have legitimate problems from calling the police, and removes the police’s ability to do what they’re supposed to be doing—helping people in the community respond to emergencies,” Karakatsanis said. It erodes the community’s trust in and coöperation with law enforcement.
In Alabama, Equal Justice Under Law has filed a class-action lawsuit against the city of Montgomery on behalf of minor offenders who have been jailed for debt; their challenge is pending and the city refutes the allegations, but, Karakatsanis says, at least thirty-five people were released from jail for their court debts since the suit was filed. (A judge has issued a preliminary injunction that leans in favor of the debtors.) More often than not, though, plaintiffs who face overwhelming municipal-court debts never get a shot at a legal challenge. Instead, their problem often compounds their resentment and their disinvestment in authority.
Several years ago, I embedded with U.S. troops in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and spent time with a unit that was tasked with implementing the directives from a set of trainings known as “Commander’s Guide to Money as a Weapons System.” The trainings instruct troops in how to use economic tools to further military objectives, and there is a warning printed in the opening pages of one such field manual: “Warfighters and their leaders must ensure their actions will stand up to a Congressional inquiry and must not cause embarrassment to the Department of Defense.” Here, “real” militarism has one advantage over its domestic counterpart, at least doctrinally—the principle is genuine investment in communities where the military hopes to earn trust and influence. Unsurprisingly, it has proved complicated to implement (and has often failed wildly), but, at least in theory, it is far more graceful than police officers or the military blasting their way across human terrain. Here at home, SWAT teams continue to tear down the proverbial power lines.
In a sign of hope, the new commander in Ferguson, Captain Ron Johnson, of the Missouri State Highway Patrol (who grew up in Ferguson), immediately seemed to grasp this issue when he assumed leadership on Thursday. “We all want justice. We all want answers,” he told the Associated Press. “It means a lot to me personally that we break this cycle of violence.”
In reckoning with police militarization, the economic side of the phenomenon should be considered. The connection may not be obvious to those who’ve never had the gas or water or electricity in their homes shut off. But these forces operate in tandem—the tear gas and the tickets; the weaponry and the warrants—compromising a wide range of fundamental rights that seem, in Ferguson and beyond, to have gone up in smoke.
By: Sarah Stillman, The New Yorker, August 15, 2014
“Non-Journalistic Instincts”: Joe Scarborough, Mike Allen Form Journalistic Axis of Evil
One of the more fascinating sidelights of the crisis in Ferguson is the way it has revealed the complacent, obedient, and fundamentally non-journalistic instincts of certain leading centrist establishmentarian journalists. The precipitating event was the arrest of Wesley Lowery, a young Washington Post reporter who was illegally ordered to leave a McDonalds near the demonstrations and, correctly, refused, leading to his arrest.
This angered Joe Scarborough. And by “angered,” we should be clear, we mean angered at the presumption of Lowery for refusing. The avuncular host of Morning Joe instructed him, “Next time a police officer tells you that you’ve got to move along because you’ve got riots outside, well, you probably should move along.” (Because nothing says “journalism” like following orders from authorities, however questionable, self-interested, or illegal they may be.) Scarborough attributed Lowery’s refusal not to any commitment to continue doing his job but to his desire to “get on TV and have people talk about me the next day,” because the desire to get on television in any way possible is the only motivation that makes sense to Joe Scarborough.
Lowery replied sharply. Riding to Scarborough’s side today, forming a kind of journalistic Axis of Evil, is Mike Allen. In Allen’s world, which is defined by overlapping and possibly coterminous circles of sources, friends, and paid advertisers, the sort of effrontery displayed by Lowery first toward the police and then toward an esteemed television commentator was thoroughly intolerable. Sniffs Allen, in today’s Playbook:
YA CAN’T MAKE IT UP – Wesley Lowrey, 23-year-old Congress/politics reporter for the WashPost, responding on CNN to suggestions that he should have obeyed police amid a riot: “[L]et me be clear about this: I have LITTLE PATIENCE for talking heads.”
FYI, his name is spelled Lowery, and his age is 24. But if Lowery wants more favorable coverage from Allen, maybe he should think about sponsoring some ads in Playbook.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencier, New York Magazine, August 15, 2014
“Republicans Embrace Their Phoniness”: The Truth Is Catching Up To Them
The Republican Party has finally admitted what has been fairly obvious for much of the past six years: It produces fake news.
This is not an earth-shattering revelation to anybody who has been paying attention, but, still, it’s an important step for the party to embrace the phoniness.
“NRCC Launches Fake News Sites to Attack Democratic Candidates” was a headline in the National Journal on Tuesday.
As Shane Goldmacher reported, “The National Republican Congressional Committee, which came under fire earlier this year for a deceptive series of fake Democratic candidate websites that it later changed after public outcry, has launched a new set of deceptive websites, this time designed to look like local news sources.”
These two dozen sites, with names such as “North County Update” and “Central Valley Update” look like political fact-checking sites; the NRCC’s spokeswoman, Andrea Bozek, called it “a new and effective way to disseminate information.”
An NRCC official told me the sites are legal because, if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll find, “Paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee” in small print. “They’re not fake Web sites,” the official said. “These are real attack Web sites.”
Real attacks, but fake news: This is a fairly accurate summary of what the GOP’s scandalmongers have been purveying during the Obama years.
There was the assertion that the White House was covering up high-level involvement in Operation “Fast and Furious,” a gun program under the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives that went awry. No evidence was found.
There was the accusation that the Obama White House pushed through money for Solyndra to pay the president’s political cronies even though officials knew the solar-energy firm was going bankrupt. Didn’t happen that way.
Accusation: Obamacare would bring about the collapse of the American health-care system and replace it with socialized medicine and death panels. No such thing has occurred.
The IRS scandal, it was alleged, could be traced back to the White House, which targeted Obama’s enemies for political reasons. Nope.
The actual truth of the allegations doesn’t matter. Each one sullied President Obama’s name, and investigators’ failure to deliver the goods did little to remove the taint. That’s why fake news works: Falsehoods can drive a president’s approval rating into the cellar while the truth is still getting out of bed.
And now we have the Benghazi exoneration.
For nearly two years, Republicans have been alleging all manner of scandal involving the 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in the Libyan city. That somebody — Hillary Clinton? — issued a stand-down order to prevent help from getting to American officials under fire; that Clinton rejected pleas for more diplomatic security in Libya; and that the Obama White House pushed false talking points to play down the terrorist attacks before the election.
The accusations have been roundly debunked, most recently in military officers’ testimony released by the GOP-controlled House Armed Services Committee.
Now there’s a bipartisan report, adopted unanimously by the GOP-controlled House Intelligence Committee on July 31, awaiting declassification by the administration. It throws yet another bucket of cold water on the conspiracy theories. In a statement, the top Democrat on the panel, Dutch Ruppersberger (Md.), said the report finds that:
“[T]here was no intelligence failure surrounding the Benghazi attacks.”
“[T]here was no ‘stand down order’ given to American personnel attempting to offer assistance that evening, and no American was left behind.”
“[T]he talking points reflected the conflicting intelligence assessments in the days immediately following the crisis.”
“[T]here was no illegal activity or illegal arms sales occurring at the U.S. facilities in Benghazi.”
“And there was absolutely no evidence, in documents or testimony, that the intelligence community’s assessments were politically motivated in any way.”
The report is not yet public, and Republican sources indicate that there is more disagreement in the report than Ruppersberger’s statement indicates and that the report is not as exculpatory as he implies. But there has been no challenge from the Republican side to the accuracy of the findings Ruppersberger detailed in his statement.
Now that the truth is catching up to them, House Republicans will need to stay one step ahead. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the select committee on Benghazi, told CNN’s Deirdre Walsh last week that, despite what the Intelligence Committee found, “there is more work to be done and more to be investigated.”
Excellent. Maybe he can post his phony accusations on some fake news Web sites.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 13, 2014
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