Ferguson, Missouri, is still in a state of crisis a year and a half after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson.
Last January, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil rights suit against the Ferguson Police Department after the city council contested portions of a deal to reform the broken police and court system in the city.
Now the city of Ferguson is stuck between two choices that continue to punish its citizens.
The Department of Justice presented the Ferguson city council with a plan that would keep the city out of court and help to remedy their racial issues. The plan costs almost $4 million in its first year.
Considering the city has a $2.5 million deficit after the civil unrest following Brown’s death, the added cost in police overtime and legal fees means the implementation of the Justice Department’s plan will put the city into bankruptcy.
The alternative to adopting and implementing the reforms laid out by the DOJ is to go to trial, which is estimated to cost the city another eight million dollars.
Although the obvious choice for the city council may be to bite the bullet and agree to the deal, the extra money has to come from somewhere. As usual, this could mean increasing property and sales taxes on Ferguson citizens
There is some question as to whether the city council is inflating these cost estimates in order to keep vestiges of the current justice system, but that has yet to be proven.
If the citizens of Ferguson could trust the current city council to use the money to reform their justice system, they might be willing to agree to raise taxes.
But the citizens of Ferguson do not want to pay for court fees for crimes they did not commit. Nor should the citizens of Ferguson have to pay for the overhaul of the justice system.
In the end, the perpetrators are not the people being punished or the ones forced to pay for their crimes against the citizens of Ferguson.
The DOJ needs to come up with a solution that punishes the criminals and overhauls the city’s broken justice system.
Either direction taken by the current plan puts further burden on the citizens of Ferguson. It doesn’t do enough against the leaders who setup an unconstitutional justice system in the city.
rcm2@indiana.edu
@RachelCMiller1
