Cities that have more Black residents tend to depend more on traffic tickets and fines for revenue versus manly white communities.
“According to data from the Census of Governments, the average city generated about $21 per person from fines in 2012, the last year for which there is national data,” The Conversation reported.
In cities with more Black residents the average was a lot higher. And according to a new study, it’s not because they are higher crime areas. The study “found no relationship between crime or budgetary stress and fines. However, we did find that cities with larger Black populations fine residents more on a per capita basis and are more reliant on fines,” The Conversation reported.
The study, “Race, Representation, and Revenue: Reliance on Fines and Forfeitures in City Governments,” revealed “that a 1 percent increase in Black population is associated with a 5 percent increase in per capita revenue from fines and a 1 percent increase in share of total revenue from fines.”
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Also, cities that relied on fines are those with the highest percentages of Black residents being served by law enforcement.
“Take Inglewood: In 2010, it was 43 percent Black and 23 percent white, but its law enforcement agency was flipped, at nearly 40 percent white and 16 percent black. The city generated nearly 5 percent of its revenues from fines, more than double the average city in California,” The Conversation reported.
Depending on tickets and fines not only negatively affects the residents of the cities that do so, but also have a negative affect on the cites themselves, say economists and activists.
Police abuse and shootings have been attributed in part to this.
“This increasing reliance on fines and fees comes despite what we learned following the shooting in 2014 of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo. A federal investigation of the city’s police department subsequently revealed that as much as a quarter of the city’s budget was derived from fines and fees,” Governing.com reported.
When police are under pressure to “produce” revenue from lower-income and African-American residents, this creates a not-so-friendly relationship between the two. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report in 2017 that found that the “targeting” of low-income and minority communities for fines and fees is far from unique to Ferguson.
“Because the burden of these penalties falls disproportionately on people who can’t afford to pay, jurisdictions collect far less than expected and waste resources chasing down payments that won’t materialize. In California, increased fines and fees have resulted not in a treasury flush with cash but in $12.3 billion in uncollected court debt as of 2016,” Governing.com reported.
There are some cities that are trying to reverse this trend. San Francisco, for example, has established the Financial Justice Project dedicated to fines and fees reform. New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington state are also looking into reforms.
