re: #151 Belafon

Citation please.

From the article in question:

Much has been made of the disparity between Ferguson’s black population and the lack of black faces in its city government. That’s true, and it is a problem that exists in other towns as well. But Gordon points out that Ferguson is an old Missouri River town in the north of the county that predates the subdivision municipalities in the mid-county area. Blacks didn’t begin moving to Ferguson in significant numbers until the 1980s, and weren’t a majority until around 2000. The black populations of these towns are new, transient, and have no local history of political or institutional power.

In the towns along the interstate and east-west highways, where blacks have been a majority for a longer period of time, they have much more representation in city government. But these are the same parts of the county where, thanks to the area’s history, there are just too many towns, too many municipal governments, too many municipal employees, and not enough revenue to support them. It doesn’t seem to matter whether those employees are black or white, they’re a legacy of segregation and structural racism, so they’re still reliant on extracting fines and fees from their residents in order to function. If anything, they’re more reliant on those fees, since there isn’t enough wealth to generate sufficient revenue from property and sales taxes.

The town of Berkeley, for example, has unusually high black political participation. For about a century, there was a historically black enclave in northwest St. Louis County called Kinloch. In the 1980s, most of Kinloch was erased due to an expansion of the St. Louis airport. Much of Kinloch’s population wound up in nearby Berkeley, infusing the town with black residents who had been in the area for generations, and had well-established traditions of political participation and self government. Currently, Berkeley has an all-black city council, a black mayor, a black city manager, and majority-black police force.

If any town could overcome the legacy of structural racism that drew the map of St. Louis County, then, it would be Berkeley. And yet this town of 9,000 people still issued 10,452 traffic citations last year, and another 1,271 non-traffic ordinance violations. The town’s municipal court raised over $1 million in fines and fees, or about $111 per resident. The town issued 5,504 arrest warrants last year, and has another 13,436 arrest warrants outstanding. Those are modest numbers for St. Louis County, but they’re high for just about anywhere else.

“We’ve tried to rely on revenue from our municipal court as little as possible,” says Berkeley Mayor Theodore Hoskins. “We emphasize that traffic laws and ordinances are about public safety, not about revenue.” But there’s a cost to that. The town ran a $1.3 million deficit last year, and recently considered dissolving its police department to save money.

There are lots of good reasons why local governments should reflect the demographics of the towns they’re governing. But more racially representative governments in St. Louis County’s majority black towns haven’t diminished the misery that must be inflicted on the residents in order for those governments to exist. Black people in St. Louis County are no longer held back by legalized discrimination, but the turbulent history that drew the area’s map still plagues them, even in towns that are now run by black people