CHAOTIC FERGUSON CITY COUNCIL MEETING

Tuesday’s tumultuous city council meeting was marked by a damnation of the white mayor and white council members

The first Ferguson, Missouri city council meeting since the shooting of Michael Brown turned chaotic from the get-go with demonstrators disrupting the session throughout and demanding that the mayor and council members step down. The meeting had to be held in a church Tuesday to accommodate the angry overflow crowd.

The city council had planned to establish a civilian police review board and to make a major change in the way its police and municipal court targeted low-income blacks for minor traffic violations. Municipal court fines have been Ferguson’s second largest source of revenue.

The problem is that most of those ticketed for traffic violations were poor blacks who failed to pay their fines. That would result in the issuance of ‘failure to appear’ warrants which would add additional fines for the violators. According to data from municipal courts across Missouri, in 2013 the city of Ferguson had the highest number of warrants issued in the state relative to its size.

The New York Times reports that “young black men in Ferguson and surrounding cities routinely find themselves passed from jail to jail as they are picked up on warrants for unpaid fines.”

The council had planned to have the courts stop issuing failure to appear warrants, instead giving traffic violators alternatives to paying fines they could ill afford. In addition, the council planned to cap the amount of revenue the city earned from municipal court fines at 15 percent.

The unruly crowd was especially angry because officer Darren Wilson has not been arrested for the murder of Michael Brown. One of the speakers told the council, "You all might as well bring back the army because there’s going to be chaos in the street again."

The meeting ended after three hours with a long line of speakers still waiting to be heard.

The behavior of the crowd supports my contention that, regardless of whether the shooting of Brown was justified or not, Darren Wilson is burned toast.