Chuck goes on to say, “No country on earth is policed as we are. We have too many law enforcement agencies and individuals. They are too heavily armed. They are too militarized. They are too quick to violence. They are rarely held accountable. The false narrative that exists regarding the dangers of police work creates an inordinate sense of fear. Mix that with guns and too much authority and you have a problem. We — all of us — have this problem.
“The hyper-violent policing that is practiced in this country is a disgrace. Yes, African Americans face it at higher rates, but that is all it is...a higher rate of the larger problem.”
Source: Quote from a letter received by Leonard Pitts, Jr. of the Miami Herald that was featured in an article titled "Police brutality not just a ‘black’ problem" - Miami Herald - 7/28/15
In the United States, private police officers currently outnumber their publicly funded counterparts by a ratio of roughly three to one. Whereas in past decades the distinction was often clear — the rent-a-cop vs. the real cop — today the boundary between the two has become ‘‘messy and complex,’’ according to a study last year by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
As municipal budgets have stagnated or plummeted, state and local governments have taken to outsourcing police work to the private sector, resulting in changes that have gone largely unnoticed by the public they’re tasked with protecting.
Such tensions echoed those expressed last year by Ray Lewis, a retired captain of the Philadelphia Police Department. Lewis joined the protests in Ferguson, Mo., following the shooting death of Michael Brown to bring attention to what he believed was a dangerous precedent being set nationwide by the rise in public-private policing — one that was transforming law-enforcement protection into a privilege of the few rather than a basic right of all. ‘‘Corporate America is using police forces as their mercenaries,’’ Lewis declared.
Source: "Who Runs the Streets of New Orleans?" By DAVID AMSDEN - NY Times - JULY 30, 2015
[…] one begins to see that lurking beneath this violence is a fiscal menace: police departments forced to assist city officials in raising revenue, in many cases funding their own salaries—redirecting the very concept of keeping the peace into underwriting the budget.
We saw a glimpse of this when the Justice Department released its report on Ferguson in March. In his statement, then-Attorney General Eric Holder referenced a lady in town whose life sounded Walter Scott-like. She had received two parking tickets totaling $151. Her efforts to pay those fines fell so behind that she eventually paid out more than $500. At one point, she was jailed for nonpayment and—eight years later—still owes $541 in accrued fees.
In 2010, this collaboration between the Ferguson police and the courts generated $1.4 million in income for the city. This year, they will more than double that amount—$3.1 million—providing nearly a quarter of the city's $13 million budget, almost all of it extracted from its poorest African American citizens.
"Essentially, these small towns in urban areas have municipal infrastructure that can't be supported by the tax base, and so they ticket everything in sight to keep the town functioning," said William Maurer, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice who has been studying the sudden rise in "nontraffic-related fines."
Maurer explains that in 2010, Missouri passed a law that capped the amount of city revenue that any agency could generate from traffic stops. The intent was to limit small-town speed traps, but the unintentional consequences are now clear: Pagedale saw a 495 percent increase in nontraffic-related arrests. "In Frontenac, the increase was 364 percent," Maurer says. "In Lakeshire, it was 209 percent."
Source: "Police Shootings Won't Stop Unless We Also Stop Shaking Down Black People" By Jack Hitt - Mother Jones = September/October 2015 issue (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/police-shootings-traffic-stops-excessive-fines)
What have we done?
Source: