3

RACIAL STATES AND LOCAL GOVERNANCE

My son was in the hospital and I got a ticket for a “water closet.” No one at the court knew what that was and I’m still paying on it. I was locked up for a day and a half for a water closet and my eight-year-old son was in the hospital. Also, the police maced my dog when they came on my property. They said they had the right to do that.

—Black woman, resident of Normandy, Missouri

They are crazy about writing tickets out here—just giving tickets to people for nothing. My eighty-five-year-old grandmother got one like that. It’s to fill up the courthouse and fill out the books.

—Black woman, resident of Velda City, Missouri

The production of racialized disparities in and through space is not unique to St. Louis. In fact, to some extent and as detailed in chapter 1, the sorting of people and space is something all metropolitan areas have in common. North St. Louis County is, however, especially revealing with regard to how municipal governments are critical instruments in the remaking of the modern racial state and processes of subject-making in twenty-first-century US cities. As discussed in chapter 1, cities have assumed the role of administrating urban austerity policies and increasingly act as the gatekeepers of citizens’ rights. Using formal and informal policies and real and perceived forms of discipline and surveillance to construct hierarchies of power that appear rational and routine, tiny municipalities in North St. Louis County use similar narratives of propriety, risk, and property to police residents, extract revenue, and create new forms of statecraft under the banners of maintaining order and preserving municipal autonomy.

Although shockingly racialized policing and governing practices in North St. Louis County were exposed by protesters in the city of Ferguson, cities across this area have been carrying out and perfecting similar practices for decades. Ferguson, in fact, does not represent many of the nuanced issues at work in most of the tiny majority-Black cities across this geography. In addition to having one of the few majority-white leaderships, Ferguson, unlike its neighbors, enjoys relatively stable commercial areas, including a revitalized shopping district that brings in a steady stream of the much-coveted sales tax upon which Missouri cities rely.1 After a contested annexation between 1956 and 1964, it became home to the Fortune 500 company Emerson Electric, which employs over 1,300 workers and provides the municipality with another stable, albeit limited, source of tax revenue.2 Furthermore, as a chartered city founded in 1855, Ferguson has a greater degree of political autonomy and taxing authority relative to the tiny third- and fourth-class cities and villages in North County, most of which incorporated after World War II and have limited power but seemingly unlimited economic liability.

This chapter argues that municipalities with majority-Black populations are often both victims and administrators of highly racialized practices that differentiate, oppress, and exploit nonwhite communities. This argument is based on data showing that municipalities with higher percentages of Black residents are more likely to have their resources poached by adjacent cities with majority-white populations. The data also show that the residents of these cities experience more extreme forms of political, economic, and physical violence at the hands of local administrators and police, and that the forms of predatory policing in these areas are often obscured or deemed economically rational. As this chapter illustrates, formal and informal manifestations of the law in North St. Louis County use imaginations of suburban space, or a white spatial imaginary, as a basis for the policing of behavior and property in order to generate essential funds that keep tiny cities solvent.3 This policing for revenue also relies on age-old tropes of Black deviance and the illegibility of Black suffering. In this way, the function of policing is not “applying the law, but . . . obtaining a normal behavior; conformity,” which local leaders exploit in the hope of maintaining hard-won yet politically and economically tenuous Black municipal autonomy.4 What follows are detailed accounts of the racialized means and extreme measures cities in North St. Louis County use to extract money and resources from Black citizens. These practices have been developed over many years in response to wholesale disinvestment and the poaching of resources out of Black communities. Also considered are the ethical arguments and discourses concerning municipal dissolution of majority-Black cities, with particular emphasis on the relationship between municipal poaching, predatory policing, and suburban race-making.

Evelyn and Patrice

Evelyn is a sixty-eight-year-old Black woman who has lived in North County for twenty-six years. She inherited the house she was living in from her long-time boyfriend, who died fifteen years earlier, struck by a car while walking near his home on a street with no sidewalks. I got to know Evelyn over a period of three years when she participated in the “services for seniors” project that my students organized as a way to engage with residents and learn about the community. In addition to the time I spent chatting with her while sitting between her two toy poodles on a worn red couch, my students would often come to class and relay how Evelyn had stuffed them with donuts and shared stories that put their own lives in stark perspective. Two of my male graduate students from China became particularly attached to Evelyn, and one continued to ride the bus to visit her long after the semester ended. Every time I saw her, she effusively thanked me for sending “those nice Chinese boys” to help her around the house.

By the time I got to know her, Evelyn had received multiple municipal citations for property-related infractions. My students were helping her address a long list of violations she could not afford to take care of on her own. Evelyn believed she was being harassed with citations because her son, who lived in another house in the same municipality, had vocally supported the candidate who had attempted to unseat the current municipal alderperson in the previous election. She believed this because she had never received a citation until her son had become politically active. After that she had received eight notices of violations of local codes and several letters from the municipality threatening more fines and the possibility of losing her house if she did not comply. Most of the citations were cosmetic, not safety related. They included demands that she paint her front and back door, paint the foundation of her house, and rewire the exterior lighting on her house. Evelyn also relayed a story about a time when she was in her yard trimming a rosebush and the alderperson drove by her house. According to Evelyn, the alderperson stopped upon seeing her in the yard and told her she should worry about her weeds and not her rose bush and she had better paint her front door right away or receive another citation. Evelyn found the exchange very unsettling and moved between visible anger and tearful anxiety as she recounted the experience. When I asked the alderperson who had stopped in front of Evelyn’s house about the incident, they stated that all residents of the city were treated equally and the city had the right to protect safety and property values by issuing citations to “people that don’t know how or don’t want to take care of their property.”

Property violations were not the only experience Evelyn’s family had with predatory policing. Evelyn’s youngest child, Patrice, had accumulated eight traffic violation citations in the course of two years, four of which were for the same violation—a faulty muffler—received in four different municipalities over a few weeks. After moving in with her mother, Patrice was working two part-time jobs as well as getting her children to three different schools outside the district because she wanted them to finish the school year where they had started. She shared, “I couldn’t take off work or not get those kids to school to go get my muffler fixed. But that’s how it is. It’s like flies on shit. You got one problem with your car and they will be on your ass in an instant because they want to get at everything you got, which is really nothing.” Because she worked evenings, Patrice could not attend three of the court dates, which were all held one evening each month. On the one evening she could attend, she had to make a decision regarding which ticket to take care of, since two court dates were on that same night. She also could not make arrangements to take care of tickets other than physically showing up at court since the cities did not provide online payment methods, nor did they provide another means to pay. Consequently, Patrice had three warrants issued for her arrest even after she emptied her bank account of eight hundred dollars to pay fines and fees. “If all that hadn’t happened,” she said, “I could have fixed my car. Maybe even moved out of my mother’s house.”

Patrice unfortunately had firsthand experience with warrants and understood why she did not want to find herself again in a cycle of municipal jailing. Three years before I met Patrice, she had gone through a similar experience. As she explained,

When my tail light was busted out, the same thing happened which is also why I don’t want to show up at courts because, who knows, they may ship me over to Jennings and throw me in jail when I try to pay a fifty-dollar ticket in Velda City. Or they’ll take my driver’s license away until I can pay and if I lose my car, I lose both my jobs and then I lose my kids. That’s how it works. The last time, I got pulled over for no reason at all. The cop was just driving behind me running my plates. He saw there was a warrant in St. Ann and I ended up in jail there. They told me I had to pay a thousand-dollar bond in cash. I was living on my own then and actually doing okay. My mom took my kids but they couldn’t get to school. I wasn’t allowed to shower for the whole ten days. There was like fifteen of us in there, coming and going, and not enough beds for everyone. People were peeing and heaving and bleeding right in where we were supposed to sleep. I haven’t never seen nothing like that. It was literally like animals in a cage. It took ten days for my mom and brother to get the money together. By that time, I’d lost my job. As soon as St. Ann got their money, they drove me over to Pine Lawn and booked me into jail there. The bail there was set at five hundred dollars and there was no way my mom and brother could get more. I had to call my ex-boyfriend, the father of my youngest two to get me out. I’d been trying to get away from him for years but I don’t have anybody else after my mom and my brother so I ended up going back with him. After that, everything just all fell apart. Maybe I was lucky though because I know people who go through four or five jails and they still owe thousands of dollars. I don’t know what’s going to happen though if I get pulled over again. I have to think real carefully about when and where I drive. Damn, I wish I could leave St. Louis.

Draconian Practices and Debtors’ Prisons

Stories like those of Evelyn and Patrice that detail Black citizens’ experiences with the police, housing inspectors, municipal courts, and jails—and the impact of those institutions on their lives—were told to me time and again through interviews and during informal conversations.5 However, prior to the sustained protest movement following the death of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, few policy makers, journalists, or anyone else was interested in hearing these accounts. Nevertheless, residents consistently described a geography of local legal systems designed to criminalize and entrap people in a web of seemingly endless fines and fees for routine traffic and nontraffic ordinance violations that disproportionately impact poor Black residents. The intergenerational effects on Evelyn’s family went even further, as she recently told me stories of her son’s latest encounters with traffic stops and warrants, as well as her granddaughter’s encounters with the Ferguson police department as a peaceful protester.

Ironically, one of the few acts of collaboration between a patchwork of municipalities that typically refuse to cooperate with one another is a database of municipal warrants, which leads to a leapfrogging jail population across jurisdictions. People described similar inhumane conditions and practices in numerous jails. Common complaints included the lack of personal hygiene implements such as a toothbrushes, towels, or soap; the refusal to accommodate requests to use the bathroom or to shower; the refusal to provide feminine hygiene products to women; vast overcrowding and unsanitary conditions; and taunts, including racial, gendered, and homophobic slurs. Many stories ended with the loss of jobs, housing, and even children. Several stories told by the media ended tragically when individuals hung themselves in municipal jails out of despair.6

It is not uncommon for an individual to rack up hundreds of dollars in fines, as did Patrice, for failure to pay or failure to appear in court for a single infraction that many of us have committed at no cost. For example, a woman from Pasadena Hills waits in line each month at the municipal court to make a twenty-five-dollar payment on a thousand-dollar debt to the city because she let her pit bull urinate in her own front yard without a leash and was unable to pay the initial fine, leading to a warrant for her arrest. Twenty-five dollars represents 12 percent of her monthly grocery budget, and she will need to appear in court on the one designated night every month for more than three years to pay off the fine. If she misses a night, she faces arrest and more fines. Another woman interviewed outside the Pagedale court stood in a long line to pay $30 toward what she said was a $350 cumulative fine for moving into her house after dark without a permit and failing to list her boyfriend, who occasionally spent the night, on her occupancy permit. She has spent an evening every month standing in line for the past eight months. If she does not show up to pay her installment, she will face jail and more fines. “This month I was short,” she said. “I had to borrow from my neighbor who knows what this city does to people. But now I owe her and the city. If I could move, I would.”7 More examples of how Black residents, including many older people, describe their experiences with policing across this geography follow.

Black man from Hazelwood (aged 46–55)

I’ve had horrible experiences with driving in North County. I don’t even get tickets when I get pulled over because they can’t find anything to ticket me for. They just pulled me over and harassed me. People don’t even go to the county solely for that reason.

Black man from Florissant (aged 26–35)

You’ve got be 100 percent cautious around here. It’s not a good feeling driving around like that. You feel that anxiety. In Country Club Hills I missed a court date, so when I came in they held me and locked me up. It was embarrassing. So much pressure here, it’ll make a grown man cry. It’ll break you down like cancer.

Black man from Ferguson (aged 66–75)

I’ve lived here for nine years and I own my home. I’ve had very bad experiences with the police. I’m actually suing the Ferguson police department right now. They came to my house because they wanted to speak with my son. They knocked on the door and said they had a warrant but they didn’t. They threw me down on the floor and handcuffed me. They found my son and tased him. It turns out the Berkeley police wanted to talk to my son, so the Ferguson police just came in like that. I got a lawyer and went to court and they dropped the charges because they never had a warrant.

Black woman from University City (aged 56–65), regarding North County

I was walking with my grandson to his day care at our church in North County one morning. He was wearing his rain boots and after I dropped him off I thought, “What if he wants to play outside and he needs his shoes?” So I turned around (in the church parking lot) to go home and get his shoes. The police stopped me and the officer said I had made a “sudden move.” In the county they are looking for Black people. In the city Black people blend in.

Black man from Normandy (aged 56–65)

My wife drives a 2015 Taurus, I was driving it and I got stopped for driving while Black. The officer said my sticker wasn’t high enough on my license plate. I told him that the sticker was put on by the dealer when we bought the car. I actually called the dealer and he confirmed it but I still got a ticket. So I walked to the police station and spoke to the chief. I explained how I got the ticket and he tore it up. It’s a good thing I know how to talk to the cops or that could have turned out differently.

Black woman from Ferguson (aged 56–65)

I had a bad experience with Calverton Park. My son was stopped there on his way to work, and I was called. He was cited for “improper lane usage” after the cop put his lights on to pull him over! He hadn’t actually done anything wrong until he was pulling over. It was just a “random” stop.

Black woman from Vinita Terrace (aged 56–65)

My boyfriend used to come over and he would get tickets constantly for parking too often in the community. We went to court and they told us that he would continue to get tickets and he should stay in a hotel. We’re still paying for those tickets. I wanted to do community service but I couldn’t because I was working a job. . . . There’s only certain hours you can do it.

Black man from Hanley Hills (aged 56–65)

They definitely target you on small issues out here: trash, grass, stickers. It keeps you on pins and needles in order to keep things straight all the time. I got a ticket for paying my trash bill [to an independent company] thirty days late. I actually paid it before getting the ticket so I went to the court and showed them all the paperwork that I had paid it and they dismissed it. Other people were there were paying seventy-five- and one-hundred-dollar fines for not paying their trash bills.

[His female partner added,] They’ve got someone working at the city who calls the trash company to find out who hasn’t paid on time and they send them a ticket. That’s just lazy, unfair, and unjust. People could use that money to pay their trash bill but instead they have to give it to the city for a fine.

Children and the parents of minors are not allowed in most courts, and police are assigned to keep order, which many residents say amounts to constant harassment while waiting.8 Cases of those who can afford an attorney are heard first. When those who cannot afford an attorney finally appear, the most common directive to those unable to pay, according to those interviewed, is to immediately step out to call every friend and family member they can think of to bring money so they won’t have to “be detained.”9 Not coincidentally, payday loan establishments have cropped up next to many municipal courts, in addition to bail bondsmen, to take advantage of family members who do not have the resources to pay the fines and fees of those jailed. One municipal judge in this area points to this practice as particularly effective because the city receives more of what is owed, stating that “if people didn’t break the law they would not have these problems.”10 This is ironic coming from someone who works for a municipality that has not filed the required data for multiple years or adhered to the cap on municipal financing set forth by the Macks Creek Law, with no consequences.11 Another judge handed brochures to residents for his brother’s traffic school as a means to settle tickets.12

The threat of jail time and the inability to move because of economic constraints ensure that municipal court payments are a priority for residents, regardless of the limitations of their monthly budgets and the sacrifices required to make these payments, including food for themselves or their families.13 In many cases, the absence of opportunities for formal employment leads residents to turn to informal economies in order to pay fines. This fact exposes another reading of theorizations regarding the uses of the wageless class.14 Because of the “taxation-by-citation” structure of municipal financing in these small cities, informal economies are a primary source of funding for municipal budgets. Selling food subsidies and blood, bartering, receiving compensation for listing nonfamily dependents on tax returns, hustling products of questionable origin, doing hair and nails, taking out payday or car title loans, and borrowing money from equally struggling family members as well as friends and neighbors are all examples of how residents coble together resources to pay fines, fees, and bail for minor infractions.15 As a result, cities remain financially solvent by extracting resources gained through informal economies. While extreme, this phenomenon is not unique to St. Louis County. When Eric Garner resisted arrest for selling individual cigarettes on a Staten Island street corner to stay afloat, saying, “This stops today,” he was referring to the perpetual criminalization of his attempts to make ends meet. Like Michael Brown, who, according to his companion Dorian Johnson was fed up with being harassed by police for “walking while Black” in North St. Louis County, resistance led to death.

Reports and news coverage have also revealed that some city leaders and police chiefs set monthly citation quotas for police officers based on budgetary shortfalls, and many cities routinely plan future budgetary increases based on projected increases in arrest and fine quotas by police chiefs (figure 3.1).16 I personally witnessed one city leader calling the police chief and demanding that police officers come to a certain area and write more tickets. I witnessed the same official calling the mayor to report specific addresses for visits from the housing inspector because the residents “didn’t have the right attitude” during interactions.

FIGURE 3.1 Letter from the mayor of Edmundson, April, 18, 2014.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Over the past ten years, most cities in this geography have averaged more than one citation per every one resident per year. Many average four to five citations for every one resident, with some issuing as many as ten citations per resident on average every year.17 Leaders have adamantly insisted that all policing is carried out and citations issued in the interests of safety and the protection of individuals and property. While the number of citations written in North St. Louis County cities trended upward between 2004 and 2014, a dramatic decrease occurred in all but two cities between 2014 and 2015 (see table 3.1). According to city leaders interviewed for this research, these data suggest that residents in North St. Louis County became more compliant between 2014 and 2015, which coincidentally corresponded with over fifty media articles, as well as state legislation, aimed at exposing and remediating predatory policing practices—brought about by Ferguson protesters following the death of Michael Brown Jr. In 2015, new guidelines were passed by the Missouri legislature stipulating that all revenue generated from court fines and fees over 12.5 percent of the general operating budget of a city was to be given to the local school district. If, as leaders have consistently argued, Black residents “don’t know how to behave in the suburbs” and need to be policed for purposes of public safety and the protection of property, then the same leadership should, in theory, continue to police citizens and turn the excess revenue over to struggling schools. Interestingly, when cities cease to directly profit from policing, policing decreases substantially.

The data from St. Louis County show a distinct trend: the higher the percentage of Black residents in a city, the higher the percentage of the municipal budget is derived from court fines and fees. In the two majority-white cities that are exceptions to this trend, the cities of Bella Villa and Calverton Park, Black motorists make up a significant number of traffic stops relative to the municipal demographics, meaning that Black residents are still policed for revenue in majority-white cities (see table 3.1). Poor white residents of St. Louis County are also concentrated in unincorporated areas, making it more difficult to assess whether or not these residents are impacted by policing for revenue through the county court.

Although table 3.1 reveals that the city of Ferguson is by no means the worst offender in terms of budgetary funding from policing or citations per resident, the Ferguson protests led the US Department of Justice to review municipal practices in the city. It found that “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the city’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs. This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson’s police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the Ferguson community.”18 The report then describes in great detail the extent to which the police harassed the city’s Black population. The police, for example, regularly accosted residents for what might be termed “sitting in a car while Black” and then charged them with bogus crimes such as failing to wear a seat belt in a parked car or “making a false declaration” that, for instance, one’s name was “Mike,” not “Michael.”19 Officers seeking promotion were told to keep in mind that their numbers of “self-initiated activities” (random stops) would have a significant effect on their future success on the force. The report cites several internal documents encouraging lieutenants and sergeants to tell officers wanting promotions that decisions would be based on the number of these stops.20 Meanwhile, residents issued citations often lost their jobs and livelihoods because of court appearances, fines, and jail time. Justice Department investigators also discovered that Ferguson municipal court did not “act as a neutral arbiter of the law or a check on unlawful police conduct.” Instead, it used its judicial authority “as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees that advance the city’s financial interests.”21 If these are the conclusions drawn in one of the least predatory cities in North County, the question arises: How much worse are conditions in cities issuing ten times the number of citations per person each year?

TABLE 3.1 Demographic and policing data for twenty-four cities in North St. Louis County, eight selected cities in larger St. Louis County, and the City of St. Louis

Sources: 2010 US Census Data, https://www.census.gov; US Census Data, American FactFinder, 2013–17 American Community Survey, https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml; Missouri Courts Annual Statistical Reports (Supplement-Municipal Division), https://www.courts.mo.gov/page.jsp?id=296; Better Together Municipal Courts Report, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59790f03a5790abd8c698c9c/t/5c4bb0260ebbe8fdff77c74b/1552424034815/BT-Municipal-Courts-Report-Full-Report1+%281%29.pdf; Missouri Attorney General’s Office, Vehicle Stops Reports, https://www.ago.mo.gov/home/vehicle-stops-report; independent request for court data to selected municipal courts in accordance with the Missouri Sunshine Law (by author).

Note: Shaded rows indicate cities in St. Louis County that are outside the area considered North County.

* In violation of Missouri Sunshine Law.

As discussed above, recent reports and media attention focused on Ferguson often suggest that the death of Michael Brown and the unrest that followed were largely due to a racial mismatch between leadership and the residents of Ferguson. Scholars and journalists have used this imbalance to explain the hyperpolicing and unjust treatment of residents that led to mistrust between residents, leadership, and the police. This dynamic, however, does not explain similar and (as table 3.1 reveals) even larger degrees of predatory practices in predominantly Black cities in North St. Louis County that have all-Black leadership. To highlight a comparison from table 3.1, police officers, building inspectors, and judges in Pine Lawn, a community of 3,275 people which is 96 percent Black and has an all-Black leadership and significantly “more Black” law enforcement, issued more than nineteen thousand traffic tickets and over nine thousand nontraffic ordinance violations (eight violations for every one resident) in 2014.22 In the same year, fines and fees in Pine Lawn composed 48 percent of the city’s budget, well above the 30 percent cap mandated by the Macks Creek Law. In comparison, the city of Ferguson, with a population of 21,200, wrote 11,800 traffic violations and 11,900 nontraffic ordinance violations in 2014 (roughly one violation for every one resident), with fines and fees making up 22 percent of the municipal budget.23

In spite of the fact that it is unconstitutional to jail someone solely because they are unable to pay fines and fees, many courts jail individuals without holding the required hearings on their ability to pay, a clear violation of those individuals’ constitutional rights.24 More often courts threaten to jail individuals, without intending to follow through but hoping fear will entice them to take out payday or car title loans (loan establishments are conveniently located near municipal courts), dip into rent or grocery money, sell government-issued subsidies in the informal market, or borrow from friends and family members whose financial status is also precarious.25 Interviews with North County residents and a review of court procedures reveal some of the varied ways cities pressure desperate residents to find ways to pay fines and fees for nonviolent offenses, even when they lack the financial means. For example, citizens found guilty of a traffic violation in Beverly Hills must pay the fine in full or be jailed until someone shows up to pay the fine.26 Similarly, it is well documented that Pine Lawn and Jennings have routinely jailed people for weeks and even months without a change of clothes or toiletries for failure to pay a speeding ticket.27 Northwoods will demand and hold the driver’s licenses of residents parking within city limits but unable to pay for the required city parking sticker. Residents in Velda City or St. Ann who are pulled over with a warrant for failure to appear in court must pay the fine on the spot or face arrest and being held until the assigned court date weeks later.28

While most residents I interacted with had frequent encounters with the police, the majority have given up on calling authorities when they are victims of, or witnesses to, a crime, stating they do not trust the police to act in their best interest. One woman interviewed for this research recounted a time when she called the police because her neighbors were arguing and she feared for the woman’s safety. By the time the police arrived, the neighbors were quiet, but she ended up in handcuffs because she refused to let police search her house. While she was handcuffed, the police searched her house unlawfully and then cited her for multiple housing infractions. When she complained to city officials, the housing inspector showed up at her house three days later and issued additional property violations, which she interpreted as retaliation and a warning.29 In another more publicized case, a mother called the police because her mentally disturbed son had a knife and was threatening to hurt himself. The police arrived and coaxed him out of the house; he was carrying the knife and a bible. When he refused to drop the knife, he was shot dead.30 Many people I spoke with stated that they would not call the police voluntarily, “no matter what,” because they feared they or someone else would be wrongfully arrested or killed.31 “There is no way in hell I would call the police even if I was dying,” one woman told me.32 Judging from statements by almost every respondent that voluntarily calling the police was entirely out of the question, officers appear to have plenty of time for police-initiated stops.

The fragmented geography and postage-stamp size of many cities in North County often mean that residents experience what Patrice has described—amassing several violations from multiple cities, often on the same day for the same infraction, such as having a broken taillight or faulty muffler. Residents comment on “the fact you can get pulled over in one jurisdiction then just cross over into another and in five seconds get the EXACT same ticket as you just did.”33 Another stated, “In the county you can get ticketed almost every other day. I have tickets from municipalities I didn’t even know existed. Turns out, I was driving through five different towns when I thought it was all one—because they are literally the size of a football field.” Yet another said, “I’ve been stopped three times in one week in three different municipalities on my way home from work because my windows were tinted. It is ridiculous. The only way you know you’re entering a different city is a different police officer stops you.”34 Again, while extreme, these experiences are not unique to North St. Louis County. For example, the 2016 shooting of Philando Castile, who reportedly was stopped for a broken taillight and subsequently shot to death in front of his girlfriend and her daughter in his car in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, revealed how Black residents in suburban Minneapolis also experience hyperpolicing. Castile had been stopped fifty-two times and issued eighty-six violations in fourteen years for minor traffic infractions and had paid thousands of dollars in municipal fines and fees.35 As was the case in several instances involving North St. Louis County residents, witnesses claim that Castile’s taillight was not broken. And as in the case of Michael Brown, whose physical appearance was seemingly blamed for his death, after the Philando Castile shooting the officer claimed that Castile’s “flared nostrils” resembled those of a suspect in a robbery.

Residents throughout North County point to tickets that do not list court dates, or list the wrong court date, as intentional attempts at creating confusion about how to settle tickets or ploys to prevent citizens from appearing for court dates and thus to accumulate more fines or warrants for their arrest.36 Many also explain the difficulties they have encountered when trying to obtain information from part-time courts, which lack full-time staff, hold court only one or two nights each month, and often do not maintain websites. Others describe confusion created by the existence of multiple courts in a small geography, each with a different set of policies and practices. The biggest factor residents name for not appearing in court is fear of jail time for inability to pay, which many, like Patrice, have either experienced themselves or know about from others who have been jailed. Other reasons for not appearing include lack of childcare, since most cities do not allow children in court, and the inability to get to the court for fear of receiving another ticket while driving there.37 As a result, the number of people who live with anxiety over warrants for their arrest or mounting fines for small infractions in multiple cities is staggering. This dramatically affects decisions residents make, such as when and where to drive and whether or not to use public space and amenities, such as parks.38 Public transportation is lacking in this area, which was developed as a series of commuter suburbs for people with cars. Food deserts are common since many grocery stores relocated to more affluent communities, and many people described sending their children to the nearby gas station to buy snacks for meals because they did not want to use their cars to drive several miles for groceries out of fear of being pulled over.39

For those residents who do attempt to take care of violations immediately, stories of frustration, barriers, and jail time are surprisingly normal.40 Many cities in North County issue so many violations that they often have several hundred cases on a docket for one court evening, with some courts averaging five hundred cases per docket.41 On court nights people can be found lined up and down the street of the court building for hours, waiting to take care of a ticket. Many who were interviewed on those evenings worried while they waited that they might end up in jail that night because they did not come with enough money. Others explained that they constantly lived on the edge because of payment plans that took years to pay off. Many residents shared the sentiment of a woman who said, “Money-wise I’ve practically gone broke multiple times. Court fees and paying fines constantly over minor things has really taken a toll on me and him [referring to her son].”42

While the recent focus on North St. Louis and St. Louis County has been directed at traffic violations and warrants, many people are not aware of the many other methods by which municipalities in this area collect fines and fees and even take possession of property. These types of nontraffic and property violations have increased greatly over the past ten years and, like traffic violations, disproportionately affect nonwhite residents.43 When Senate Bill 5 was passed in March of 2015, capping the amount cities can collect from traffic-related fines and fees at 12.5 percent of the total municipal budget, many feared that cities would seek to replace lost revenue by increasing the number and costs of non-traffic violations issued. In light of preliminary data, this is a valid concern, since the number of traffic violations plummeted while nontraffic citations increased significantly over the six-month period after the law went into effect.44 In 2016,the Missouri legislature passed modifications to the bill, which added nontraffic violations to the limits set on revenue generated through the courts.45 These types of nonviolent violations target property and behavior and include infractions in the following areas: manner of walking, wearing sagging pants, playing loud music, leaving toys or wading pools in front yards, playing in the street, having basketball hoops or barbecuing in front yards, drinking alcohol within fifty feet of a grill, installing mismatched curtains, loitering in a park, failure to secure a trash can lid, failure to keep grass at a certain length, allowing individuals not listed on occupancy permits to spend the night, owning a nuisance dog, telling someone’s future, and failure to contract with the private trash collection company. The idea that someone could potentially land in jail for failure to appear in court or for the inability to pay for a citation for mismatched curtains seems implausible, yet residents questioned about this possibility emphatically stated, “Yes, that could happen for sure.”46

Cities also use bizarre interpretations of the International Property Maintenance Code to cite hundreds of homes for specific infractions. According to the data, cities tend to choose a pet infraction each year.47 For instance, in 2010 the city of Normandy cited 110 homes for “failure to paint sign pole,” citing ordinance 505.020, which adopted the international standards for property maintenance requirements. This was in addition to the 303 homes that received citations for “violating minimum housing standards,” with reference to the same ordinance (505.020). But the only wording in the international standards that comes close to the language about failing to paint a sign pole in the Normandy ordinance is a clause stating that all exterior metal must be painted with rust-resistant paint. The following year, no houses received a “failure to paint sign pole” citation in Normandy; however, eighty-one homes were cited for “failure to paint the front of a rear door,” again using ordinance 505.020.48

One could argue that the practices outlined above are not race-based since, as one leader put it, “we’re all poor and we’re all Black.”49 This argument, however, would be shortsighted, since the reasons that these cities give for resorting to policing for revenue and the predatory policing tactics employed by administrators are dependent upon perceptions of race and realities of race-making. While tiny cities in North St. Louis County with more diverse populations claim that the inordinate number of traffic citations written to Black drivers is due to the number of Black nonresidents driving through their boundaries, the same cities disproportionately cite Black residents for housing and nontraffic violations. Of the eight municipalities that complied with a request for data regarding non-traffic ordinance violations, all of them issued a larger percentage of citations to Black residents than the overall percentage of Black residents in their jurisdiction.

For example, Greendale has a population of 651 residents and is 69 percent Black. Between 2012 and 2014, 91 percent of all nontraffic violations were written to Black Greendale residents. The city of Bellerive has a population of 254 people and is 43 percent Black. Between 2012 and 2014, 93 percent of nontraffic violations were written to Black residents of Bellerive. The city of Bel-Nor has a population of 1,500 people, of whom 43 percent are Black. Between 2012 and 2015, 79 percent of nontraffic violations were issued to Black residents of Bel-Nor. In Cool Valley, 85 percent of the 1,196 residents are Black, but Black residents receive 92 percent of nontraffic violations. Normandy, with a population of 5,008 residents, of whom 70 percent are Black, issues 90 percent of nontraffic citations to Black residents. Finally, the city of Pasadena Park has a population of 470 people, of whom 60 percent are Black, and issues 78 percent of nontraffic violations to Black residents.50 The issuing of nontraffic ordinance violations to a disproportionate number of Black residents feeds the cycle of traffic violations, since whenever a police officer stops a Black driver, for any or no reason, the likelihood is high that the driver will have an outstanding warrant for failure to pay a nontraffic violation. It is interesting to note that seventeen municipalities either did not comply with my request for specific data concerning nontraffic citations (in violation of the Missouri Sunshine Law) or demanded more than five hundred dollars to provide data. This response led me to wonder whether or not disparities in noncompliant cities are higher than the disparities among cities complying with my request.

Policing the Suburban Crisis

In 1978, Stuart Hall, along with four coauthors, published Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, which asserts that real and perceived crime rates cannot be viewed independently from the institutions that aim to control and report on crime.51 The book examines the politics of policing—using mugging to look at the relationships between a rhetorical “moral panic” and policing campaigns in the context of colonial and imperial legacies of human differentiation through race-making. The authors argue that agencies such as the police, the courts, and the media do not passively react to a given crime situation but “are actively and continuously part of the whole process.”52 Forty years later, this conceptualization is useful for looking at the case of North St. Louis County, where municipal leaders, police, and the courts not only participate in the process of criminalization but, to a large extent, have created specific ways to criminalize Black behavior for economic purposes. Utilizing tropes of deviance, residents are moved from rights-bearing citizens to rightless criminals through the active policing of a rhetorical “suburban crisis,” which works in tandem with equally powerful imaginations of suburban space and norms.

The crisis in the suburbs rhetorically promoted by municipal leaders stems from the very real economic crisis brought about by plummeting property values, hollowed-out commercial districts, and the evaporation of state and federal funding outlined in chapter 2. Leaders, municipal judges, and city attorneys, however, frame the crisis as a public safety issue and, in response, assert their “fundamental right to protect private property” and “maintain their sovereignty.”53 According to these narratives, the astronomical number of citations handed out—which is ten to twenty times higher than in white suburbs—is strictly due to the inability of Black residents to follow simple rules and the tendency of these residents to engage in behaviors said to threaten safety, devalue property, and discourage private investment. Taking the conflation of property values and public safety even further, one mayor argued that failing to maintain an aesthetically pleasing property was absolutely a public safety issue because it lowered overall property values and put other people in economic danger.54 Consistently invoking the rights of the city itself, leaders, judges, and city attorneys claim that residents would have nothing to complain about if they would just “act right and take care of their property.”55 Blaming residents for the predicament of lost investment and framing aesthetic concerns as public safety issues shifts the focus of responsibility away from public and private actors that have abandoned this area and ignores the blatant poaching of resources practiced by more financially stable cities in the region. It also follows a long history of linking blackness to risk and blaming Black residents in North County neighborhoods when self-fulfilling prophecies of decline occur after investment moves elsewhere.

While much has been written about the criminalization of poverty and the many economies of the prison industrial complex, residents of North St. Louis County are perpetually punished for the loss of economic viability brought about by their sheer presence in space and subsequently suffer exploitation that preys on their own financial hardships.56 In this way, cities must necessarily “catch and release” poor residents in order to maintain a steady stream of revenue through what amounts to legalized extortion. Comparing municipal practices to criminal racketeering, a class action complaint against thirteen cities in North St. Louis County makes the following point:

[Cities] have abused the legal system to bestow a patina of legitimacy on what is, in reality, extortion. If private parties had created and implemented this scheme, enforced it by threatening and imposing indefinite incarceration, and milked poor families of millions of dollars, the law would punish them as extortionists and racketeers, and the community would take steps to prevent them from exploiting the most vulnerable of its members. These predatory practices are no more legitimate—indeed are more outrageous—when state and local government actors perpetuate them under cover of law.57

In contradistinction to the concept of whiteness-as-property—the legally protected rights associated with a white privileged identity—blackness-as-risk erodes, and in some cases suspends, the rights of Black citizens so that perceived risks may be contained, controlled, and limited in the interests of economic and physical security.58 As Cheryl Harris showed more than two decades ago, whiteness holds tangible and enforceable rights.59 In her now-classic essay “Whiteness as Property,” Harris examines the many ways white privilege is constructed and enforced in, and through, legal interpretations that do not explicitly rely on racist doctrine. The ways in which eminent domain is exercised and upheld in spite of legal challenges by communities of color, using legal claims of “public good” and “highest and best use,” exemplify how whiteness-as-property determines what is considered good or best for people and space.

Blackness-as-risk can be understood as the inverse of Harris’s argument. The association of blackness with risk permeates all levels of decision-making, from individual to institutional, in a society where historical constructions of race determined whether one was free or unfree and where one drop of Black blood stripped individuals of the privileges afforded white subjects.60 In a more blatant example of the legal ramifications of blackness-as-risk, less than 1 percent of police officers who shoot and kill unarmed people of color are charged with a crime, and even fewer are convicted of wrongdoing. This statistic alone shows how the risk associated with blackness is understood as sufficient reason for the use of deadly force.61 The risk associated with blackness can be clearly seen in North County, from structural disinvestment and the hollowing out of middle-class suburbs to the legalized killing of unarmed Black residents.

Beyond the essential framework of antiblackness, another useful theorization for understanding the phenomena found in North St. Louis County is Michel Foucault’s concept of a punitive society and the use of fines (defined as the taking of property—real and monetary). The four tactics of state violence identified by Foucault in The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–73,62 which create an everyday penal system within normative society, are on bold display throughout this geography:

1. Exclusion from the right to live somewhere. Residents of North St. Louis County find their right to a place to live compromised through multiple property violations, harassment, loss of income, and in some cases, the confiscation of their homes. Many residents find that the so-called right to the suburbs afforded by the Fair Housing Act of 1968 does not apply to them, and they end up returning to St. Louis city, where they report there is significantly less harassment. As one mayor in North St. Louis County put it, “Having a place to live is a privilege” and not a right.63
2. Compensation from subjects for what is lost by “the state.” As described in this chapter, residents are made to compensate cities for lost revenues brought about by disinvestment linked to the risk associated with their very bodies.
3. Public acknowledgment of a sovereign power and authority and the marking of the subject. Residents are made to understand the power of what many mayors expressed as “sovereign cities” and marked as deviant—publicly harassed and humiliated—through constant police stops and draconian court policies.
4. The literal denial of physical and individual freedoms—confinement. Jail time and the denial of individual freedom are frequent threats and part of the reality experienced by countless people across this geography. Many residents are further confined by the inability to move due to economic constraints.

Foucault goes on to argue, “What has to be brought out first of all in the analysis of a penal system is the nature of the struggles that take place around power in a society.”64 He asks, “What forms of power are actually at work for power to respond to infractions that call its laws, rules, and exercise into question with tactics such as exclusion, marking, redemption, or confinement?”65 The criminalization of normal behavior and extreme policing of minor infractions, as well as everyday practices that oppress the opportunity to live freely, are some of the forms of power at work in this area, which reveal how governance and governmentality operate at the most local and mundane levels of society. In this way, the racial state is a local state of affairs. Moments of extreme violence, such as the death of Michael Brown, are eruptions of quotidian practices that create the conditions of possibility for racialized police brutality.

A Hollow Prize of Black Political Autonomy

The people of North St. Louis County understand the history, policies, and politics described in this chapter, and their experience defies the notion that race is becoming increasingly less important in the United States. Many people I spoke with also believe that the implications of race today are less about skin color and personal prejudices and more about the power to control in ways that keep one group over another, which has always been a fundamental purpose of race-making. This perspective explains why structures of antiblackness are implemented by Black leaders using white spatial logics. In addition to the scathing review by the Department of Justice regarding racist and race-based practices and culture in both the municipal administration and police department of Ferguson, other reports prompted by Ferguson resistance also cite racialized practices. For example, the findings presented in the report from the Ferguson Commission, released in September 2015, squarely focus on race.66 After a year of research and listening to communities, the report began by stating, “We know that talking about race makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But make no mistake: This is about race.”67 Remarkably, the commission was made up of a bipartisan cross-section of community leaders, residents, and law enforcement representatives appointed by the governor of Missouri to report on the underlying causes of, and possible proactive responses to, unrest in Ferguson. Although there are 189 calls to action listed in the report, which was supposed to focus on Ferguson, the authors make clear that the report is intended to read as a narrative about racial inequities found in the history, policies, and practices of the St. Louis region.68

The report is somewhat unusual because it is intended to directly address the causes, as opposed to merely the consequences, of tensions. Governor Jay Nixon’s executive order establishing the Ferguson Commission stated, “The unrest and public discourse set in motion by the events of August 9 in Ferguson, Missouri underscore the need for a thorough, wide-ranging and unflinching study of the social and economic conditions that impede progress, equality and safety in the St. Louis region.”69 The Ferguson Commission, in its own words, specifically embraced the call to be “unflinching.” This meant “listening, often uncomfortably, to the personal stories shared by citizens who came to our open meetings, and by people we interviewed throughout the process of developing this report.... Many of the stories were frustrating, depressing, infuriating, deflating, and heart-wrenching. We are committed to honoring those stories, and facing those truths, throughout our work and in this report.”70

The 203 pages of the report present the same depressing data regarding the interconnecting disparities of race and class in the St. Louis region that my research reveals and similarly attaches the experiences of marginalized residents to specific data and analysis. As a “living document,” commissioned at the highest level of state government, the report is an important resource for understanding the degrees of racialized experience in the St. Louis region, with an emphasis on North St. Louis County. How the report will impact change and whether or not recommendations will be implemented remain to be seen. The fact remains that dehumanized Black bodies continue to be used as revenue-generating reservoirs, just as they have been used historically. The 2018 victory of Wesley Bell in the Democratic primary for St. Louis County prosecutor has provided hope to some that change is occurring. Almost four years to the day after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Bell, a Black candidate who ran on a reform platform, unseated the seven-term white incumbent, Bob McCulloch, who was highly criticized for his handling of the police shooting that killed Brown. Although many people calling for reform in St. Louis County cite this outcome as a major milestone, the fact that Bell worked for many years as a municipal judge and prosecutor in multiple small cities across North St. Louis County and oversaw many of the practices described above is rarely mentioned.

Although cities are fighting to maintain the status quo, it is clear to municipal leaders that their world is changing. Less clear is whether change will come in the form of actually remediating inequitable and unconstitutional practices, finding alternative ways to exploit residents, or dissolving cities. In the three years following Ferguson unrest, municipal leaders attempted to preemptively “reform themselves” in closed-door meetings with judges and attorneys, in the hope of convincing state legislators and the Missouri Supreme Court that court reform can be internally addressed. In spite of the findings of an extensive audit and public meetings held by a working group of the Missouri Supreme Court that found vast problems with municipal courts in St. Louis County, few reforms are slated for implementation other than telling cities to do a better job.71 Several leaders of small villages and third- and fourth-class cities complain their sovereignty has been infringed on by the state.72 This consistent invocation of sovereignty suggests that the culture of fiefdoms in this fragmented area and the Missouri tradition of defying Dillon’s Rule continue to frame leaders’ perceptions (and confusion) regarding sovereignty, hierarchy of power, and structure of law.73 However, the fact that cities have more or less been able to pass laws and conduct business as they wished for so many years certainly supports the conception that local governments can act as fiefdoms. In this way, municipalities continue to operate as racial states of “sovereign subjects” caught in perpetual cycles by which residents fund their own oppression in order for cities to survive.

Black leaders claim that policing is not about race or class in majority-Black cities where the leadership is all Black. However, the same leaders do cite race when challenging recent reform measures. A dozen municipalities, most of which are very small and majority Black, brought a lawsuit against the state, claiming Senate Bill 5 violates their constitutional rights.74 The cities won the lawsuit by arguing the state is taking away an important revenue source without funding the law it has passed.75 The lawsuit reveals how some municipalities will be vastly more affected by the law than others, and, in the end, many will cease to exist. Indeed, small Black cities will be the first to be erased and merged with other cities or dissolved into unincorporated St. Louis County, which shows how race directly impacts issues of autonomy and democracy at the smallest scale.76 It also harkens back to a long history of erased and disempowered indigenous populations and Black communities throughout history and particularly in the St. Louis region.77 This situation, however, is both a classic double bind and a zero-sum game if the question at hand remains: Should small Black cities be allowed to oppress and harass residents because otherwise their questionable right to exist will be violated? Arguing that Black leaders have a right to oppress Black constituents because they themselves are Black is an ironic twist in the logics of racial equality and illustrates the limitations of pursuing a “racial democracy.” Clearly, municipal leaders, Black or white, should not be allowed to construct systems by which cities are funded through violence. However, setting majority-Black cities up for certain failure is equally troubling and reveals the degree to which blackness-as-risk operates within the economic structuring and norms of the United States.

Proponents of municipal consolidation are calling for what they see as the natural end to cities that do not serve the interests of residents. Majority-Black cities, as the worst offenders of predatory policing practices and the least capable of competing in the game of municipal solvency, will be the first to be dissolved under proposed reforms. The arguments used to promote consolidation focus almost entirely on the symptoms of municipal insolvency—specifically, predatory policing—and not on the cause, and certainly not on the question of historical responsibility. Those who have long supported consolidation plans view the unrest that reverberates from Ferguson as a political opportunity to highlight the very real consequences of political fragmentation, such as municipal dysfunction, inefficiency, greedy administrators, and racist practices, as they push for regional consolidation.78 In 2019, proponents of merging cities in St. Louis County, and merging the county with St. Louis City, capitalized on the momentum created by Ferguson unrest and attempted reunification under a single metropolitan governance, something administrators across St. Louis County are vehemently fighting against. It is assumed by many in these discussions (in the media and public forums) that residents will be better off as citizens of unincorporated areas of St. Louis County or larger municipalities, and perhaps that is true. However, consideration is not generally given to how municipal space functions as a racializing force or what new race-making situations may emerge under alternative forms of oversight. The latest effort toward city-county reunification failed after revelations of corruption, back-room deals, and other forms of misconduct emerged.79

It appears that any discussions will remain centered on the consequences rather than the causes of predatory practices, and Black leaders will continue to be used as scapegoats for the vast inequities and suffering residents endure. While it is difficult to find much sympathy for Black leaders who intentionally prey upon their own citizens, what they claim is true. Majority-white cities in St. Louis County will remain unaffected, whether or not the state is eventually able to enforce Senate Bill 5 or similar legislation. Cities in North St. Louis County that have hung on to white populations or bolstered commercial districts and capitalized on corporate investments, such as Emerson Electric and Express Scripts (headquartered in Ferguson and Berkeley), will likely weather current reform measures. The culture of fragmentation will continue to be promoted and defended by those who can afford to claim autonomy in the St. Louis region, and small Black municipalities will dissolve or be annexed into neighboring cities.

Lawsuits arguing that the state has not funded the law created by Senate Bill 5 potentially shift the focus to a different question: What is the obligation of the state or the county to ensure certain levels of funding for cities with no alternative sources of revenue—especially cities with historically oppressed populations?80 This could also shift the focus to how the roots of inequality lie in the myriad ways Black residents have been isolated through legal forms of segregation and the legal gutting of resources from minority-occupied areas. Another shift in this line of questioning made by some reformers is, Should any of these tiny municipalities—Black or white—exist, in light of the costs and benefits to the region and the disparate experiences they create across a relatively small geography? The debates over localism versus regionalism are of course not new; however, the extreme practices, disparities, and violations of individual rights revealed in the case of North St. Louis County support arguments for regionalism by vividly illustrating the devastating consequences of “the favored quarter” or, in this instance, the favored fragments.81 These, however, were not the arguments of the lawsuit brought by municipalities and not the reasons that leaders discursively use. Rather, according to the arguments made in the case and consistently made by municipal leaders, the purpose of the lawsuit was solely to declare Senate Bill 5 unconstitutional and return to business as usual. Simply focusing on municipal autonomy versus regional governance in terms of remediating disparity does not acknowledge the historical and prevailing weight that blackness carries with it.

The work that blackness-as-risk performs is experienced by people like Evelyn and Patrice in their everyday lives and justifies multiple technologies of the modern racial state.82 The case of North St. Louis County challenges academic tendencies to draw distinct boundaries around violence and the state, and illustrates how technologies of policing and control operate within civic society at multiple scales of governance, particularly at the scale of the local.83 These technologies of policing blackness in and through space are reinforced by the fact that individuals and institutions are economically rewarded when they separate themselves from perceived risks associated with nonwhite people and groups. Black city administrators tasked with the responsibility of reducing risk and maximizing economic stability in their jurisdictions are thus incentivized to engage in racialized practices that lead to complex contradictions and dilemmas when cities become majority Black. In North County, the economic risk associated with Black residents creates an additional double bind for leaders of majority-Black cities, because they must either work against the individual interests of their residents or risk losing Black political autonomy by operating outside the prevailing economic models. As a result, actions or inactions that disadvantage already disadvantaged groups are justified through appeals to risk management and fiscal responsibility by civic and corporate administrators, who are subsequently represented as rational actors.

As for Evelyn and Patrice, Evelyn has since moved out of Missouri and lives with her brother in Birmingham, where she grew up. Patrice still lives in her mother’s house, which Evelyn is trying to sell, but “after what’s owed on it in fines,” the city may as well have it, she said when I contacted her by phone. “I swore I’d never go back to the South,” she went on. “But nobody should have to live like that.”