The protests that followed the police shooting of unarmed African-American teenager Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last August laid bare bitter and longstanding tensions between residents of the overwhelmingly black township and its majority-white police force.
So the news this week that a state commission would study the social and economic conditions that fueled the protests is a positive, if overdue, development. Announcing the creation of the Ferguson Commission, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon was short on details, saying only that it will be "empowered to call on experts to address topics ranging from governance, poverty, education, and law enforcement" and would issue recommendations to make Ferguson a "fairer place for everyone to live."
But if it is to be seen by the local community as credible and legitimate, the commission also needs to look specifically at the law enforcement response to the August protests. As Human Rights Watch documented at the time, that response was marked by violations of the rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression, incidents of excessive use of force, and a troubling lack of transparency and accountability by the police Other organizations have also recently reported on abuses in the police response, including the obstruction of news gathering. That’s why, in a letter to Nixon this week, we have asked that the commission be empowered to investigate all law enforcement agencies involved in the protest response, or that the governor create a separate expert body to do so.
Another area the commission should consider part of its brief – since it speaks so strongly to the distrust between community members and local institutions – is the operation of the much-criticized municipal court systems in Ferguson and surrounding municipalities. Recent reports have described how these courts fund themselves through fees and fines for local ordinance violations that primarily affect low-income residents. Failure to pay fines, combined with many residents’ inability to post bond, routinely lands them in jail.
Such criminal justice practices that heavily burden the poor are not unique to Ferguson, of course – Human Rights Watch has documented how poor defendants unable to make bail in New York have languished in pretrial detention; and how abuses related to the privatization of misdemeanor probation services, operating under an “offender-funded” model in several US states, fall heaviest on those least able to pay – but it's clear they are a justifiable source of grievance among Ferguson residents, particularly low-income African Americans.
If the commission announced by Governor Nixon is to make any meaningful progress in addressing the mistrust between the community and law enforcement, it needs to interpret its mandate broadly to include the full array of issues—from law enforcement’s crackdown on protesters to the proliferation of municipal court fees—that feed that mistrust every day.
