armed robbery

Gee, did Mr. Brown get*****ed off at being confronted by a cop because he had a handful of stolen cigars in his hand or did he do so because on a historical basis walking or driving while black is the reason people get -- at least financially -- attacked in Ferguson on a literal daily basis?

“Despite Ferguson’s relative poverty, fines and court fees comprise the second largest source of revenue for the city, a total of 2,635,400,” according to the ArchCity Defenders report. And in 2013, the Ferguson Municipal Court issued 24,532 arrest warrants and 12,018 cases, “or about 3 warrants and 1.5 cases per household.”

Really?

Oh, it gets better:

A Ferguson court employee reported, for example, that “the bench routinely starts hearing cases 30 minutes before the appointed time and then locks the doors to the building as early as five minutes after the official hour, a practice that could easily lead a defend net arriving even slightly late to receive an additional charge for failure to appear.”

So the court (intentionally) starts hearing cases before your appearance time and if you're not there before the time you were summoned you're at risk of having a second charge added for failure to appear.  Then on top of that if you're as little as five minutes late the door to the building is locked, so you can't even plead your case that they called you before the time on the citation -- quite reasonably so, especially if you took public transit to get there.  Now you wind up with a second charge against you, and no opportunity to contest it since, of course, there's no proof you were there as you can't get in.

Can anyone reasonably claim a rigged system like this generates 3 legitimate arrest warrants per household in a year?

REALLY?

Growing up with that all around you on a daily basis doesn't give you a perfectly-good reason to believe that a cop who stops short and exits his car because you're walking in the street, an "offense" that at worst should generate a jaywalking citation and on a residential street, which this was, it shouldn't generate anything at all except perhaps a rolled down window and a polite inquiry as to the fact that you're running the risk of getting hit by a car, might be an excellent indication of bad faith on the part of the officer?

THREE WARRANTS PER HOUSEHOLD folks and over $2.6 million in fines and fees last year, or to put a number on it about $130 per man, woman and child in the town?  Over $500 per family of four on average?

This is legitimate rather than outright theft and extortion?

Riiiiiiight.

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

Indeed experience hath shewn exactly that.

PS: What do you do when the MO of your city, on the numbers, is "Armed robbery by the police"?