A study suggests that black Americans are unfairly fined by police

Economist 

WHEN a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri shot an unarmed black teenager dead three years ago, the killing set off outrage across America over violence committed by police. (Barack Obama’s Department of Justice concluded that the officer acted in self-defence.) But with greater public scrutiny of racial disparities in the use of force, better-disguised forms of inequality soon came to light as well. In March 2015 the department published a report on law enforcement in the city, which found that Ferguson’s criminal-justice system seemed to focus more on generating income for the government than on ensuring public safety. Nearly a quarter of the city’s general revenues came from criminal fines, fees and court costs. Moreover, black residents paid a far greater portion of these expenses than either their share of the population or their share of total crimes committed in Ferguson would indicate. The investigators concluded that the police had displayed “unlawful bias” against blacks.

react-text: 10186 The city appears to have heeded the Department of Justice’s message: fines and fees are down 77% from their peak in 2013. However, Ferguson was unlikely to be a unique outlier, and other cities engaging in similar practices might well have continued outside of the national spotlight. A new /react-text paper react-text: 10188 by Michael Sances of the University of Memphis and Hye Young You of Vanderbilt University published this month in the /react-text Journal of Politics react-text: 10190 found that Ferguson was indeed more of a rule than an exception. After examining data on 9,000 American cities, they found that those with more black residents consistently collected unusually high amounts of fines and fees—even after controlling for differences in income, education and crime levels. Cities with the largest shares (98%) of black residents collected an average of $12-$19 more per person than those with the smallest (0%) did. [MORE]