Photography by William Powell
Ferguson is slowly fading from the national radar, as most of the media caravan has moved on to the next brush fire, whether it's Isis in Iraq, Ebola in Liberia, the Gaza Strip, Ukraine, or V.A. hospitals.
Among the lessons learned since the killing of Michael Brown on August 9: There are too many police departments in St. Louis County, with many of them not ready to deal with the changing demographics of their jurisdictions; the county’s multiplicity of mini-municipalities inhibits civic connections for low-income citizens who move frequently; and both traditional and social media often don’t have an accurate or complete grasp of what’s going on.
Public Safety: Problems & Solutions
St. Louis County has 90 municipalities, after losing two—St. George and Peerless Park—in the past decade or so. That rate of shrinkage probably won’t change soon. Most county residents like their picket-fence boundaries and predictable taxes.
St. Louis County has more than 60 municipal police departments, and that looks much more likely to change soon. In the past few years, three of Ferguson’s neighbors—Dellwood, Cool Valley, and Jennings—folded their police departments when they were convinced the departments weren’t worth it, cost-wise and otherwise. Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, who shot Brown, was a Jennings policeman before the department closed.
Just last week, the Jennings City Council voted to fold its fire district into Riverview Gardens, a move that will save Jennings $750,000. Cost savings and a better-trained force were the incentives for both Jennings and Dellwood to cede police powers to the county. Cool Valley contracted with Normandy to do its patrolling.
This trend might be accelerated by the tragedy in Ferguson. Long before these recent troubles, former St. Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch was generally critical of other, smaller departments, saying many municipalities “can no longer afford to do this. Most of these officers, their main job is to write tickets for the city, to keep the city functioning. So it’s another local government by traffic ticket.”
These small towns—many smaller than Ferguson’s six square miles and population of 20,000—alienate citizens by writing speeding tickets for drivers who go just several miles over the speed limit. Often, these tickets are not paid, so citizens risk arrest due to outstanding warrants, further aggravating the police-populace relationship.
Two years ago, Missouri’s legislature put pressure on small municipal police departments, requiring that no more than 30 percent of a municipality’s revenues come from traffic tickets. That was the second time in the past 20 years that the legislature had lowered that threshold. The County Council also could offer incentives to have St. Louis County Police assume public-safety duties for those communities who can no longer cope. It would save money and might do a better job keeping the peace.
During the Uplands Parks police department controversy in 2012, Fitch zeroed in on the inefficiency of maintaining so many struggling departments. “I use Natural Bridge as an example,” Fitch said in an interview on KDHX at the time. “There are so many municipalities up and down Natural Bridge from the city limits out into the county. Do you really need a different police department every two-mile stretch, with their own chief, their own administration, their own records room, their own, their own, their own? They can’t do business that way anymore.”
But they do. Fitch said that two years ago.
After five years as chief, he left in January.
So Tell Me About Ferguson
Ferguson turned into "Fergustan" as the killing of Michael Brown led to demonstrations, looting, more demonstrations, a smaller reprise of looting, police in riot gear, and a media stampede. There were so many reporters, they often ended up interviewing each other. People wanted to know about St. Louis. They needed a story line, a background factoid, or a glib way to handle a question when a real attempt to answer it would raise far too many ambiguities.
For some reason, during the first week, a series of phone calls connected me to an Ivy League law-school professor about to record a "Gabfest" on slate.com. He wanted a local to explain why African-Americans didn’t elect hardly anyone African-American in Ferguson.
So, due to time constraints, he called me instead of someone who was African-American, who didn’t vote, and who lived in Ferguson. Of course, undeterred by my lack of qualifications to answer the question, this was my explanation: Many of the county’s 90 municipalities cover less than 1 square mile. When many local African-Americans moved away from the city or other NoCo nooks, the village or town that people moved to was immaterial. If the movers had children, the school district is important—the municipality doesn’t matter nearly as much.
Ferguson has six council members, two each elected from three wards. Some smaller burgs don't even have wards. If you just moved into an apartment, you’re not keenly aware of property taxes or local politics. Having 23 school districts in the county also gives residents reason to move, possibly into a new town to attend a better school.
The Ivy League law professor wasn’t buying much of my spiel about low voter turn-outs being linked to low incomes, but he did not argue against my assertions that low-income people moved more frequently and that their disinterest in local politics was hardened by being new to town and knowing another move might happen soon. With the crazy quilt of the county’s municipalities, almost any move means a new jurisdiction.
Ferguson’s population flipped from 74 percent white in 1990 to 67 percent African-American in 2010. Many among those new settlers probably don’t care who the mayor of Ferguson is and didn’t plan to vote in local elections. That might change.
Virvus Jones, former alderman and comptroller for the city of St. Louis, says the problems in North County “had been festering for a long time.” Canfield Green Apartments, where Brown was shot, “had all sorts of problems,” says Jones, adding that it was not well-suited for a Ferguson police force with only three African-American officers on a 53-officer force.
“All of that contributes to distrust," says Jones. "It’s no excuse for committing crimes, but this is 2014, and we still do not understand how not having a diverse police department is a problem.”
Jones, who was one of the first African-Americans elected to city-wide office in the late ‘80s, says the unrest in Ferguson can lead to positive change, depending on what happens next.
“My father used to tell me that anger is a motivation—it is not a modus operandi," he says. "It isn’t a method for doing stuff. You get angry and then come up with a rational way to do something.”
Shouting Theater in a Crowded Fire
Media has been compared to ants at a picnic, but the man-made disaster in Ferguson was no picnic. Dozens of reporters, photographers, and cameramen descended on North County, along with hundreds of protesters, posers, and perpetrators. It was hard to tell them apart.
The media misinterpretations were slight, significant, and persistent. Tibetan Buddhist Monks visited the burned-out Quik Trip on Sunday, August 17. Having met with the lead monk, Tsewang Thinley, later that night, it was clear that he was in favor of peace, love, and understanding, but he knew little about incidents in Ferguson.
Despite that, a photo of the monks at QT surfaced via Twitter and Facebook, with the blurb “They came all the way from India to #Ferguson,” and an accompanying thread about how great it was that the monks came for the protest. It was true that the monks had come all the way from their monastery-in-exile in India, but the fundraising trip had been planned for months and the timing of it was only coincidental with the protests.
Other misinterpretations were more significant, including a photo of Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson posted on Twitter and Facebook supposedly flashing a “gang sign” of the Bloods. In the photo, Johnson and another African-American male are facing the camera, each making the same hand sign by touching the ends of their right thumbs and right index fingers and extending the other three fingers.
CNN posted the photo on its CNN iReport web page, later taking it down when it became clear to anyone who checked out the photo that the hand signs were from the African-American fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi.
The trouble with social media is that it doesn't live up to its name. It's not benignly "social" in that it is not just a friendly chat among people you know; instead, there are “followers” and “friends” reading what is being typed. It is not “media” in the usual sense of the term; for most tweets and postings, there are no reporters, editors, and photographers trained to ride herd on the enthusiasm and confusion of the moment.
In the more traditional media, the local daily paper of record performed well during the Ferguson fracas. Daily newspapers are built for such rolling catastrophes. An old journalistic maxim on the Gulf Coast is that when a hurricane hits, you “send everybody.” A daily newspaper has dozens of reporters, editors, and more than a few photographers. Reporters are sent out, they gather information, they type it up on a keyboard, editors edit, photos are paired with copy, and it’s published. It’s the journalistic equivalent of why the first Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago liked snowstorms: It gave city government a chance to show what it could do.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch piece on August 24, about the paucity of African-American officers on police forces in the county, was on target. But it could have been done three months ago or three years ago. With its shrunken staff and depleted resources, it’s harder for the Post-Dispatch to do insightful reporting on the day-to-day realities outside and between dramatic disasters like the unrest in Ferguson.
There will be plenty of opportunity to continue the reporting and analysis of the Ferguson dynamics, but it will be harder to attract interest without the noise, conflict, fireworks, and visuals.
