Small town USA. Does not depict Ferguson itself.
BTW, I do not intend to demean small towns. I've had plenty of family who have lived in them, and all are lovely people. The government of Ferguson though seems to have a problem. A report by Arch City Defenders in a drop box publication accessible here explains their basic thesis of the miserable small towns in the St Louis area that use the Small Town Shakedown (my name for what is happening). And Ferguson is one of three small cities on their list of aggressive users of the system.
Summary: Not having a large tax base, Ferguson chose instead to target their working class citizenry for regular nit picking fines in a big way. And yes, you want to pick on the lowest earners as more affluent people will hire lawyers even at twice or three times the cost from a sense of pride and to protect their futures from harmful legal decisions on their records.
So basically cops were profiling as well as passing out massive amounts of citations to promote their agenda and to earn enough money for their better than average salaries including overtime and medical protection (and for nice salaries for the mayor and council).
All it takes is a little illegal policing spread out to grab money from a lot of people who don't have the means to fight back.
This ain't Mayberry RFD. This is graft city in a small town setting.
It truly needs the feds to come in and straighten things out.
Instead it seems that people are busy hiding the ashes of good governance deep in the soil of the nearest green space.
Nothing to see here, just racism, and graft. Move along.
Now about those drugs.
It's telling that Darren Wilson did not stop shooting Mike Brown until
Over-reaction? That sounds like some kind of upper, either Meth or even caffeine pills can cause loss of control (Meth I'm assuming. I've never taken it) I did use caffeine pills in college a couple of times and found they could push me to snap in unwarranted circumstances. Luckily I chose to retreat to my room and never had a gun to use.
But one way to cut down on expenses in a police force may be to have your available pool work extra long hours. Sure it's overtime, but it's the same retirement and health package so that cost is reduced and it probably works out to less than maintaining a larger force.
And Wilson kept shooting a young man who was already falling to the ground, until his bullets ran out.
I hope they did toxicology tests on Wilson.
Another report says that Wilson was working for a private security firm in addition to his city police work. That might be another reason he'd be using stimulants:
Several in the crowd had connections to law enforcement, including one who said he knew Wilson from working in private security — and got a call from him on the night of Aug. 9. He said Wilson called to say he couldn’t make it to work because of the shooting.At: Washington Post
Vox was my first source of information on the particular form of corruption I'm calling The Small Town Shakedown.
I tweeted out a link late last night from it and from an LA Times report.
Here's two more from Vox with explanations that are shorter than the original Arch City report:
The cold, hard cash at the heart of Ferguson's out-of-control justice system
How for-profit policing led to racial disparities in Ferguson
Shortened link for this post: http://goo.gl/okx35j
Picture above used via Creative Commons License (CC by 2.0) Thanks to Flickr user ellnm1 who has no connection to this blog or blogger.
