[ In the absence of the tax dollars city governments rely on,
American are now funding themselves by fining the poor instead of
taxing the rich. ]
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ORGANIZED PLUNDER  
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Elias Rodriques and Clint Williamson
July 27, 2022
The New Inquiry
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_ In the absence of the tax dollars city governments rely on,
American are now funding themselves by fining the poor instead of
taxing the rich. _

, Background painting: Edward Hopper, Gas, 1940

 

At the turn of the twentieth century, Brookside, Alabama was a mining
town in the orbit of the industrial center of the New South, a region
transitioning away from an agrarian economy and into an industrial
one. From 1887 until its closing, the Brookside coal mine run by the
Sloss Iron and Steel Company produced the coke that fueled blast
furnaces in Birmingham. During this period, miners were both native
born and immigrant white, the latter being especially constituted by
Eastern European workers. They were also Black, a number of whom, we
can presume, had been enslaved a mere twenty-three years prior. And
some of them were convicts leased out for labor. But all populations
took part in the wave of interracial union organizing in the Alabama
coal fields led by the United Mine Workers. Despite the ongoing wedge
being driven between Black and white workers to end the heydey of
populism and to bring about Jim Crow, this group of miners still saw
fit to reach across the color line and to organize together in a
moment when the region--and the country–-depended on the fruits of
their labor.

Though their interracial union fought against the overlapping and
combined horrors of racism and labor exploitaiton, the moment should
be neither romanticized nor condemned. As historian Daniel Letwin
reminds us in _The Challenge of Interracial Unionism_, many of the
same white miners who expressed white supremacist attitudes also took
part in a union that provided a space where racial divisions were less
stark than almost anywhere in their lives. In so doing, the Alabamians
of the United Mine Workers developed a class solidarity that undercut
the mine owners’ attempts to sow workplace divisions along the color
line. Though they succeeded for a time, their efforts did eventually
come to an end. When a strike shut down the Brookside mine in 1920,
Sloss never reopened it. When the mines left and all that remained was
the Russian Orthodox church of the Eastern European miners, Brookside
seemed to be consigned to the past. No major industry took their
place. According to the U.S. census, its population in 1920 was 666;
today the town’s population is 1253, which means that the population
barely doubled in the period when the U.S. population tripled. One
could be forgiven for never having heard of Brookside.

The town’s loss of industry a century ago paved the way for
Brookside’s recent return to news headlines. Without mining, the
town’s people and government struggled to fill their purses. With
civilians left to their own devices, forced to find wages on their
own, the government recently adopted a new approach: overticketing and
civil forfeiture (the police’s taking of any property that they
allege is involved in a crime). In a recent bombshell exposé for
Al.com
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John Archibald found that “between 2018 and 2020, Brookside revenues
from fines and forfeitures soared more than 640 percent, and now make
up half the city’s total income.” Unsurprisingly, many of the
tickets have been contested in court, and the police department has
been accused of both racist practices and of fabricating charges
altogether. Without industry, and hence without much ability to tax
industrial profits, the local government has turned to ticketing and
forfeiture as their primary means of filling their budget. Rather than
mine for raw materials, the government mined its people’s wallets
without helping them earn a living.

In some ways, this is not only the byproduct of lost industry; it’s
also the byproduct of years of Alabama governance. In the same state
where Dixiecrats distributed federal relief during the Depression in
ways that excluded Black sharecroppers, state officials after Civil
Rights equated big government intervention with integration,
convincing their constituents to want smaller government and therefore
lower taxes. This position was taken up by Republicans, who continued
to decrease taxes, such that the state ranked 44th in amount of taxes
collected per capita in 2014. For Brookside—a town of only six miles
of roads, a one-and-a-half mile jurisdiction of interstate, and a
Dollar General—this meant that there was no state support for
filling the governmental budget. Without much tax revenue, Brookside
took the path that one imagines many municipalities will begin to
take. No longer will property or income or inheritance be the primary
tax base, and no longer will there be a pretense that industry-fueled
prosperity will trickle down into governmental budgets; instead,
civilians will now be taxed indirectly by the police.

In this, Brookside took after another notorious town of the South:
Ferguson, Missouri. Among the least expected aftermaths of the 2014
killing of Michael Brown and the rebellion in Ferguson was the
Department of Justice investigation. The federal government had long
pretended that police killings were justified or had refused to
comment altogether. Strange as it was that the government would
intervene, the results of their inquiry, published in March of 2015,
were even stranger. It was predictable that the report would document
a great deal of racist physical violence; in every noted instance of a
police dog biting a civilian or of a person being detained for
“resisting arrest,” the person was Black. But the report also
brought to light another state assault that the federal government had
long ignored: overticketing.

For the Ferguson police department in the 2000s and 2010s, ticketing
functioned as a form of organized plunder. As the Department of
Justice reported, one woman received a $151 fine for parking her car
illegally in 2007. Over the next seven years, when she missed payments
or court dates resulting from those missed payments, she received
seven failures to appear, each of which produced new arrest warrants
and more fines and fees. On two occasions, she tried to put money down
on her debt, but the court refused anything other than full payment.
By December of 2014, she had been arrested twice, held in jail for six
days, and still owed $541, even though she had already paid more than
four times the sum of the initial ticket. This was unjustifiable, in
the eyes of the Department of Justice. This was a police department
that willingly and regularly brandished not only the billy club but
also the pen.

And when the Ferguson police did wield its physical weapons, it often
did so in the way a stickup kid holds the gun but grabs the jewels,
using the threat of violence to coerce civilians into paying up.
“[A]rrest warrants,” the report concludes, “are used almost
exclusively for the purpose of compelling payment through the threat
of incarceration.” Elsewhere, the DOJ writes, “Ferguson’s law
enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue.”
This was a department of organized, armed robbers, but with one key
difference: the badge. With this shield, they expected and often
received impunity. This made the Ferguson PD more terrifying than a
civilian robber. At least that person only has the arms they carry;
the Ferguson PD had an arsenal and backup, to say nothing of the
weapon that is the prison. And the Ferguson police reigned without
fear of repercussion and without any means for accountability.
Unsurprisingly, they turned tyrannical, transforming people into
walking ATMs for the city’s budget. Those whom they robbed, it goes
without saying, were most often Black.

On the political left, the DOJ’s extensive reporting on the
department’s financial plunder met with outcry. But it also signaled
a moment of realization. Jackie Wang, writing in _Carceral
Capitalism_, describes the epiphany best:

After reading the report and researching this topic, I began to pay
closer attention to news stories related to municipal and state
finance. I realized that across the country, municipalities and states
were increasingly dependent on the use of coercive extractive
mechanisms that squeezed the people on the bottom for cash. What the
fuck was going on?

The report revealed a disturbing development: Fines, overticketing,
and more had become institutionalized and structural. Rather than tax
the rich, local governments across the country preyed on the poor to
fill budgets.

This pattern emerged from a long history of dispossession. As Walter
Johnson chronicles in his history of Saint Louis, _The Broken Heart of
America_, Missouri’s politics had long been directed by both the
genocide of Indian removal, in which the state played a key part, and
the violent labor regime of slavery. In the twentieth century, those
compasses led Missouri writ large to extract white wealth from Black
populations. And in the twenty-first century, as Johnson writes, the
“historical amalgam of white privilege, corporate welfare, fiscal
conservatism,” and more encouraged taxation through policing. This
is not a simple metaphor. As the DOJ report found,

The City budgets for sizeable increases in municipal fines and fees
each year, exhorts police and court staff to deliver those revenue
increases, and closely monitors whether those increases are achieved.
City officials routinely urge Chief Jackson to generate more revenue
through enforcement.

The literal collusion between the purse and the billy club may have
been denounced by the federal government and by critics of police
violence, but it also broadcast a new strategy for both racial control
and revenue raising. This technique was especially useful to regions
across the South, which had long lowered taxes on the wealthy and
thereby diminished municipalities’ ability to remain fiscally
solvent. It offered the promise of balancing the budget without
capitulating to increasing taxes or to funding the dreaded welfare
that constituents so hate. Even better, it promised to write paychecks
to the friendly neighborhood cop.

If Ferguson was a harbinger of what was to come, it was also a
tragedy; Brookside was its recurrence as farce. The two are, in some
ways, similar cities; Ferguson and Brookside are both an
eighteen-minute drive from Saint Louis and Birmingham respectively,
and both are peripherally attached to their local city’s economic
corridor. But Brookside escalated Ferguson’s practices to absurd
levels at an extreme pace in a significantly smaller locale. In 2018,
Brookside had one full-time police officer. Earlier this year, it had
thirteen. In absolute numbers, Brookside was a tiny town with a small
police department. But in relative terms, the jump from one officer to
thirteen was huge. Such extreme growth set the stage for the farce
that engulfed the town. But the results were anything but funny.

To spur rapid growth, Brookside police plundered the town’s small
population. The town’s median household income of roughly $38,000
was significantly less than the state’s median income of roughly
$50,000. As a result, the cops targeted the same people over and over.
In 2020, Brookside “made more misdemeanor arrests than it has
residents.” That same year, the police averaged 1.7 tows and 4.4
arrests for every household in town. Rather than search for a large
windfall in the form of taxing extreme wealth (a mainstay of Leftist
policies) and rather than produce large amounts of wealth via prison
construction (as California had), the police levied small charges on
the poor, which was not unlike regressive cigarette or soda taxes.
With enough tickets, they accumulated enough to fund a small branch of
local government in a tiny municipality. Given the town’s relatively
low income, the cops were skimming not off the top but off the bottom.

Directed mostly by profit and engaging with a relatively ordinary
population, police justifications for ticketing quickly became absurd.
Tickets ranged from charges for driving too close to another vehicle
to driving in the left lane and to flickering car lights, all in a six
road town. In one case, the police even charged someone found with a
joint for possession and then tacked on a paraphernalia charge for the
paper it was rolled in. Only in the eyes of money hungry cops could
one object smoked in one sitting become two things, two charges, and
two payments. As Archibald writes, “Brookside officers have been
accused in lawsuits of fabricating charges…and ‘making up laws’
to stack counts on passersby.” This was not simply overticketing; it
was gluttonous.

Brookside’s over-policing effectively privatized public space,
making it a risk simply to leave one’s home. It also ballooned the
city budget. In 2020, the police accumulated $610,000 from fines and
asset forfeitures, which constituted nearly half of the total city
revenue. As a result, the city’s revenue grew from roughly $580,000
to $1.2 million in 2020. What looked like a windfall for the town,
however, was a problem for individuals.

In one case, Anyl Pascal was held in jail after a traffic stop. After
five days, the town officials told Pascal that his bond was either
$7200 or $8200 cash, a fee they claimed was necessary to fix the door
that he had supposedly broken. In court, he pled guilty in the hopes
of later appealing to the Jefferson County Circuit Court, and the
judge ordered Pascal to pay “$7210 in fines and court costs.” When
he and his attorney left, the judge then found Pascal guilty of nine
more charges, which more than doubled his fines. This lacked even the
appearance of a trial; this was a stick-up. Rather than tax to pave
streets and rather than building toll roads, the police transformed
roadways into a casino, wherein drivers are lucky to break even on one
night but, over time, enough people would lose that the house would
always make a profit.

This funding glut spurred rapid growth in the city’s police
department. Over this period, the budgetary allotment for the police
increased from $79,000 to $524,000 (a roughly 560% increase). Beyond
the increase in twelve officers, paid between $12 to $16 an hour (not
counting overtime), the department acquired a “riot control
vehicle” that residents called a tank. (Given the low hourly wages,
one imagines they took a pay cut to joyride in this so-called tank.)
The chief had not only enacted his own jobs creation program but also
formed a slush fund for such supposedly necessary devices for use as
military vehicles. And he did so by draining the bank accounts of
residents or those just passing through a small, impoverished town to
employ a small coterie of bandits. At least in the protection racket
dramatized in mafia flicks, paying off the mob actually did prevent
them from breaking someone’s legs. Paying one ticket in Brookside
offered no such guarantee of immunity.

Unsurprisingly, the local police turned tyrannical. In 2019, the
second-in-command, James Savelle III, got drunk at a Dave and
Buster’s and sexually harassed another customer. Though the police
were called, Savelle pulled out his badge and said, “The police
won’t do anything [b]ecause I am a police officer.” He was so
disruptive that his peers arrested him. His bail? A mere $500, some
sixteen times less than the amount demanded of Pascal. And yet he was
only suspended a month before he returned to the job as
second-in-command. As the police dispatcher at the time of Savelle’s
arrest said, the mayor and the city council “saw dollar signs…They
had blinders on.” He was one of the city’s cash cows. He could do
no wrong. The point here is not simply that the Brookside police wrote
too many tickets—though the point is not _not_ that—so much as
that the Brookside police used their position as violent fundraisers
to act without accountability. The result was that the small
impoverished town found itself the unwilling funders of a city
government that increasingly financed the very police who robbed them.

One might hope that change is on the way. After Archibald’s exposé,
Savelle, the police chief, and five other officers have stepped down
(though it does not seem that the money has been returned from the
city budget). Perhaps things will soon be different in Brookside. But
when we think back to Ferguson, an uneasy suspicion unsettles our
stomachs. Perhaps things did change there, but didn’t that city’s
practices lay the foundations for Brookside? Is it possible that the
Brookside police chief heard of the scandal in that Missouri town and
thought not that it was reprehensible but that it could be reproduced
in Alabama? After all, Brookside is not unique in its position as a
town without an industry struggling to raise a budget after decades of
the state lowering taxes. The same racket could be reproduced in
central Pennsylvania, in north Florida, or in any of a number of
places. Brookside’s transformation of people into assets may have
been uniquely farcical, but the causes and the means of doing so are
easily reproducible. Who knows where the next overticketer will arise?

For decades, Republicans and Democrats alike have made a litany of
promises to return jobs to economically depressed communities across
America that have seen their wages and benefits all but disappear over
the course of deindustrialization. And it appears that a century after
the closure of the Sloss coal mine, mining has once again briefly
returned to Brookside. But rather than the extraction of wealth from
raw resources, the local economy flourishing in Brookside today mines
the people themselves. Every person the cops encountered was a new
seam to open up and bleed dry. Daily life became
financialized—existence was assetized—as a mechanism for revenue
generation wherein every single act of navigating the world could be
made illegal and subject to penalty.

Under conditions of little work and low taxes, public space became an
increasingly lucrative holding for the state. Brookside, after all,
effectively placed a transaction fee on moving through space. Whether
commuting to work or parking at a friend’s house, every time someone
used an automobile in a region where access to a car is a necessity to
movement, an opportunity arose to be waylaid by a highwayman. If
someone was unlucky enough, civil asset forfeiture could come into
play. In this instance, someone did not even need to be charged with a
crime; the police could merely take whatever cash they found or the
entire vehicle and require a demonstration of proof that their newly
acquired plunder was not in fact illegally obtained (a costly and time
consuming procedure in and of itself). In all cases, the police took
money out of the wallets of individuals who could only fill their
wallets with wages. In a country evermore dominated by the experience
of being nickel and dimed, the police have increasingly come to stand
in for the mine operator, exhausting the value until there is nothing
left to take, and the mine has become what money individuals can
cobble together through the increasingly low-wage work available.

Policing has long intertwined punishment and work. As Mark Neocleous
demonstrates in _The Fabrication of Social Order_, the state’s
police power has historically enforced the discipline necessary for
capitalism. In eighteenth-century England, for instance, the police
ensured that people working on farms did not take home any of the
literal fruits of their labor and instead only took home wages. Today,
the ability to penalize monetarily, whether through the levying of the
fine, the setting of bail, or civil asset forfeiture is part and
parcel of the state’s enforcing the necessity of wage labor on a
populace. After all, when the state provides no livelihood itself, one
can only look to work to raise one’s bail.

Yet Brookside and Ferguson’s policing practices signal something
beyond a mere extension of the police’s longer history. This is not
only because there is little work to be found in many places where
cops overticket. In Ferguson and Brookside, the police ticketing to
fund themselves makes them a distinct class, accumulating for
themselves. This is what makes them so dangerous. Think back on James
Savelle III; he retained his job after obviously abusing the badge and
a civilian in part because he did not rely on anyone else to fund his
position. He could fund himself. In this, Savelle typifies the
overticketing cop, focused directly upon their own expansion and
proliferation, which is to say upon their own tyranny.

That the police are so successful at establishing their own power is
due in part to the loss of work for so many others. In Brookside, for
instance, the town may not have looked the other way on overticketing
had the government already filled its budget via taxing a population
that made livable incomes. And in Ferguson, city officials colluded
with the police chief to raise a budget during and after the 2008
recession, when what little wealth could have been taxed in the region
moved to other areas. Perhaps most worrisome, the economic problems
that contribute to this kind of state plunder plague myriad regions in
the United States. For all the right’s fears about defunding the
police, cops are fully capable of funding themselves by robbing the
rest of us. In a country so uninvested in the livelihood of its
residents and so full of overly empowered cops, the growing
financialization of daily life may entail not only the loss of work
for ordinary people but also the police’s mining of more and more
civilian bank accounts to fund the state, as it did in Brookside.
Brookside’s recent history could very well become the future of many
U.S. towns.

But even Brookside’s past is not past. Less than an hour away from
the town’s abandoned mines, and more than a hundred years after the
interracial union went on strike, over 1100 miners organized with the
United Mine Workers of America have been on strike since April 1st,
2021 against Warrior Met Coal. In a Senate Committee on the Budget
hearing organized by Bernie Sanders, “Warrior Met and Wall Street
Greed: What Corporate Raiders are Doing to Workers and Consumers,”
mine employee and UMWA member Braxton Wright testified that private
equity firms taking over the mining operation has worsened
deprivations for laborers. When asked by Senator Sanders how it felt
to see private equity firms make extensive profits while the union
members have been out on strike without a paycheck for almost a year,
Mr. Wright responded: “It’s not fair. They exploit our work.” In
this, Warrior Met is like the bandits of Brookside and the cops of
Ferguson. And they remain vulnerable to those who, recognizing that
they have nothing to lose because they are being robbed, hold the
line.

* Police
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* deindustrialization
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