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v.02 Chapter 2

The lives that matter in US cities

Black Lives Matter. That this even needs pointing out is telling about twenty-first century America. The grievances have been accumulating over decades, but it took yet another uprising to put them once again on the public agenda as an appeal to justice, equality and accountability. In a democratic country like the United States, such an appeal does not have to take the destructive form as it did – twice – in Ferguson in 2014. The fact that it did showed whose lives did not matter and whose voices did not count. The fact that it did, however, also showed those lives do matter. Ferguson uprising began on 10 August 2014, the day after a white police officer, Darren Wilson, shot several times and killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown. It lasted about two weeks, and was repressed by police officers equipped with military-grade weapons, the National Guard referring to the protestors as ‘enemy forces’, and the declaration of a state of emergency – an extreme measure that was also taken in April 2015 during the Baltimore uprisings triggered by another black life lost during police custody.1 Another week of uprising followed in November after a grand jury decided not to indict Wilson, and protests of a smaller scale took place on the anniversary of Brown’s killing. Violence visited upon black lives by white police officers has long been a trigger for revolt – Cincinnati in 2001, Los Angeles in 1992, Miami in 1980, and others during the turbulent 1960s.2 It would be a mistake, however, to see these as isolated or random instances of brutality committed by some bad cops. As Ferguson, and others before and after, showed, rage builds up over time through systematic – not occasional – oppression of certain groups and their exclusion from the rights and privileges enjoyed by others. Racist police officers do exist and do horrible things, but as we will see with Ferguson, Los Angeles, Cincinnati and Baltimore, urban uprisings cannot be explained away by a focus on the individual perpetrators of violence. In other words, the sources of urban rage are structural rather than individual. This may be getting a bit too abstract, so perhaps it is time we paid a visit to Ferguson, an inner-suburb of the City of St. Louis, Missouri.

Who loves Ferguson? If you arrived in Ferguson by South Florissant Road, you would probably find it difficult to match it to the image that made Ferguson’s name both nationally and internationally. Ferguson, you would see, has its wine bar, cigar lounge, local brewery and Italian bakery, all conveniently located along this commercial road – not quite the image of a run-down city devastated by riots, more of a quaint suburban community. You might think, as I did, that either they fixed everything up very quickly, or else it was just a big fuss over nothing, all the while wondering where the black citizens of Ferguson were. Walking north on South Florissant, you would start seeing signs of the incidents once you have passed the building that house both Ferguson’s Police Department and its Municipal Court. Signs of damage, however, are not many. There are few boarded up businesses, and one of these is a law firm that specialises in traffic law. Once we have understood the workings of the police department and the municipal court, we will see that this was not a random choice. Across the street from the police department and the municipal court is a curious store called ‘I Love Ferguson’, black letters and a red heart instead of ‘love’. This is where you buy you ‘I Love Ferguson’ memorabilia – hats, t-shirts, coffee mugs and signs that you also see displayed on many of the shop fronts on South Florissant Road. If you are a foreigner, a push-pin marks your country on the world map hanging above the guestbook. As the lady keeping the store explains, the store was set up after the uprisings, and the revenue it generates goes to businesses that suffered damage during the incidents. When asked why people revolted, her smile gives way to a concerned look, and she says, nodding with her chin, ‘well, they put all the Section 8 housing there’. There are, it turns out, two Fergusons, and the other one is further east. This second Ferguson feels more contained and compact, and it is clearly separated from the first one by West Florissant Avenue, a commercial strip that bore the brunt during the uprisings. The houses in this part of Ferguson are of two kinds: single family houses and apartment complexes. The gardens are well kept, houses are maintained; you can see it is not a particularly wealthy neighbourhood, but not a run-down one either. The area with the apartment complexes is where Michael Brown was killed. It is one of the most concentrated areas of poverty in the region, because these apartment complexes

are home to Section 8 renters, recipients of rent aid vouchers who are by definition poor. Northwinds Apartments, where Brown lived, has 438 housing units, and it is one of the largest in the region. It is followed by Park Ridge with 336 units. There is also Canfield Green Apartments, Versailles Apartments and Oakmont Townhomes, all concentrated in this eastern tip of Ferguson, where the population is practically all black. The Section 8 voucher system allows people to chose where they want to live by providing rent subsidies rather than units in designated projects. In theory, this system could reduce segregation and concentration of poverty by increasing the options available to the poor by allowing them to rent in the private housing market. In practice, however, voucher users get concentrated in certain areas because of four reasons. First, the federal government sets an upper limit for rent, which limits the areas for the use of vouchers. Better areas have higher rents, which prevents the use of vouchers in these areas and pushes Section 8 renters to less desirable neighbourhoods where rents are lower. Second, housing provision for vouchers is limited as landlords do not want to deal with poor tenants and the bureaucracy that comes with the voucher system. Third, landlords who are willing to have Section 8 renters offer units in poorer areas, which aggravates the problem of concentrated poverty. And finally, zoning laws that deliberately limit rental housing, as we find in St. Louis and elsewhere, further limit opportunities for these tenants. The majority of Section 8 renters are thus highly concentrated and segregated in low-income neighbourhoods like this eastern tip of Ferguson.3 St. Louis is among the most segregated metropolitan areas in the United States, not least because of its history of racially segregative public policies, ranging from zoning decisions to public housing projects. Although blacks were the majority in its inner city neighbourhoods for decades, the suburban colour line began to shift after 1970. Whites, who had already left the inner city, started fleeing the inner suburbs as well. This process, bluntly referred to as ‘ghetto spillover’ by a local observer in 1981, changed the population dynamics in inner suburbs such as Ferguson. Until the mid- 1960s, Ferguson was a ‘sundown town’: blacks came in during the day to work as housekeepers and nannies, but were banned from the city after dark. The city even barricaded through streets and made sure most of the others dead-ended before reaching Kinloch to the west, a neighbouring all-black suburb, then quite exceptional in St. Louis.4

But the demographics of Ferguson changed in the following decades. While the black population went up from 25% in 1990 to 67% in 2010, the white population went down from 74% to 29% – a change, as we will see, that has not been reflected in the city’s administration and police force. Increasing poverty that hit other metropolitan areas hit St. Louis and its suburbs as well, and Ferguson saw its poor population double from 2000 to 2012. One in four Ferguson residents lived below the poverty line in 2012. This suburbanisation of poverty was not unique to St. Louis. During the 2000s, suburban poverty not only increased, but also concentrated in certain neighbourhoods in almost every major US metropolitan area. This partly had to do with the dismantling of public housing projects and the shift to the voucher system.5 Coupled with a trend in inner-city revival and gentrification, as we will see with Cincinnati below, these shifts pushed inner-city poor out to the suburbs. Ferguson’s economic problems reflect broader transformations that negatively affect American society. One of these transformations, as we have seen in the previous chapter, is rising inequalities. American post-war growth and reductions in equality came to an end in the mid-1970s. Since then inequality in the US rose steadily; wealth concentrated more at the top, while poverty engulfed even greater proportions of the population. From 2000 to 2010, 15 million more people fell below the poverty line, bringing the proportion of Americans living in poverty to over 15%. In 2012, one in six Americans lived below the poverty line, one in four American children were in poverty, and six million people had no cash income, relying exclusively on charity and food stamps.6 The largest number of the poor is still white. But poverty disproportionately affects certain non-white minorities, who were particularly hard hit by the economic transformations of the past four decades. Nearly half of black children who began their lives in middle-class families in the late 1960s, just before the economy started its downward shift, ended up in the bottom fifth as adults. The rate was 16% for white children.7 The increasing income inequality of the past decades also led to increased polarisation and residential isolation. Black-white segregation is still high for historical reasons and the persistence of discrimination in the housing market.8 One particular aspect of this growing poverty is geographical: American poverty is expanding and moving from inner-city to suburbs. In 2000, most of the poor lived in the country’s major cities. By 2008, suburbs had overtaken cities and become ‘home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country’, housing almost one-

third of America’s poor. In other words, suburbs, rather than cities, have absorbed the growing number of poor since 2000. St. Louis was no exception. Between 2000 and 2008, the share of population living below the poverty line went down from 24.6% to 22.9% in the cities of St. Louis metropolitan area, but it went up from 7.9% to 9.6% in its suburbs. In 2000, St. Louis metropolitan area was second (after Atlanta) nation- wide in the share of metropolitan poor living in the suburbs with 69% of its poor in suburbs. In 2008, the ranking remained the same, but St. Louis’s share of metropolitan poor living in suburbs went up from 69 to 75%. In 2008, in other words, three-quarters of its metropolitan poor lived in suburbs.9 Inner-city revival projects displaced the poor, while housing vouchers concentrated poor families in already segregated areas like the apartment complexes in the second Ferguson. This new geography of American poverty is not merely a product of private prejudice or preference, but of public policies, from the local to the federal. Ferguson, then, is not some aberrant case, but a product of policy choices that have been transforming the economy and cities in the past decades.10 This broader context allows us to understand why we have two Fergusons. When he was stopped by a white police officer, Michael Brown was walking back to Northwinds, one of the Section 8 apartment complexes in the area. Northwinds is owned by the Maine-based Eagle Point Companies since 2005. As the president of the company said, there is ‘a lot of turnover’, and that some of their residents cannot pay the rent.11 An investigation of law enforcement practices in Ferguson may explain why they could not afford the rent, or, even if they could, why they would be tempted to leave. No-one, it seems, loves Ferguson in this part of the city, not enough at least to display a sign of affection. There is not a single ‘I love Ferguson’ sign in the second Ferguson, but plenty that reads ‘We must stop killing each other’. Let us see how law was enforced in Ferguson, the self-affirmed ‘community of choice’. Getting blood from a turnip

– Municipal Court gross revenue for calendar year 2012 passed the $2,000,000 mark for the first time in history, reaching $2,066,050 (not including red light photo enforcement). – Awesome! Thanks! Email exchange between Ferguson’s Police Chief and City Manager, 2013

Failure to perform can result in disciplinary action not just a bad evaluation.

Ferguson Captain of the Patrol Division to patrol supervisors, 2012 The Department of Justice (DoJ) report following the investigation of Ferguson police department and municipal court was quite categorical: ‘Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs’.12 This emphasis on revenue generation led to unconstitutional policing and irregular practices at the municipal court, both of which reflected and exacerbated racial stereotypes and discrimination. The investigation found that the police and court disproportionately targeted blacks. The uprising of 2014 was not a reaction to an isolated incident; it was a response to years of institutionalised racism, oppression and exploitation. The City of Ferguson had put in place a ‘business model’ that used the police and the municipal court to generate revenue by preying on blacks, who were also less likely to be able to pay extravagant fines. ‘How can you get blood from a turnip?’, asked one member of the Ferguson police questioned by the DoJ. Another said it would have been better for public safety to allow residents use their limited income to fix equipment violations (such as a broken taillight) rather than force them to pay fines to the city, which will eventually lead to an arrest warrant and still leave the equipment unfixed. But such views were not shared by the majority of police officers, and certainly not by the senior management. A culture of ‘productivity’ prevailed over Ferguson’s police department and municipal court, a culture so internalised that it dissociated law enforcement from public safety, and turned it into the city’s second largest source of revenue. In this context, the number of citations issued by police officers became indicators of their productivity, and played an important role in officer evaluations and promotions. Indeed, every month the municipal court provided the police department with a list of the number of tickets issued by each officer. Officers wrote up to six, eight, and in one instance fourteen, citations during a single encounter. What had been happening in Ferguson for years went beyond occasional abuse by some bad apples. It was a systematic and deliberate exploitation of the poor and black population through the coordinated efforts of the city’s police department and municipal court, pushed by the city management. Here is how it worked.

Municipal fines and fees are the second largest source of income for Ferguson. Over the years, the city has been increasing their part in the budget, pressuring the police and court staff to deliver, whose performance it closely monitored. In the five years leading up to the uprisings, the share of fines and fees in Ferguson’s municipal revenue went up from 8% to over 13%. In the year before the uprisings, the court generated more than $2.5 million through municipal fines and fees.13 Once this pattern was exposed by the uprisings, however, the revenue from this source was cut in half, and its share in the city’s revenue went down to 6%.14 The DoJ investigation found that the city officials routinely urged the police chief to generate more revenue. In March 2000, for example, the city’s finance director contacted the police chief to express his concern about the expected sales tax shortfall and to ask him to offset this through fines. ‘Unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year’, he wrote, ‘it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year’. The police chief responded that the city would see an increase in fines and that he could target the $1.5 million forecast once more officers were hired. He also said he was considering a different shift schedule to have more officers on the street to increase traffic enforcement. Shortly after this exchange, the Ferguson police switched to a 12-hour shift schedule, which is less conducive to community policing, but more effective in generating revenue through enforcement. This was not an isolated incident. In the year leading up to the uprisings, in March 2013, the finance director wrote the following to the City Manager: ‘Court fees are anticipated to rise about 7.5%. I did ask the [police] Chief if he thought the PD [police department] could deliver 10% increase. He indicated they could try’. Data also shows certain municipal charges applied almost exclusively to blacks. The five most common charges brought against blacks were also the ones that gave the widest discretion to police officers: Manner of Walking in Roadway, Failure to Comply, Resisting Arrest, Peace Disturbance, and Failure to Obey. Between 2011 and 2013, blacks accounted for 95% of Manner of Walking in Roadway charges, and 94% of Failure to Comply charges. A similar pattern emerged in speeding charges as well. The DoJ investigation showed that when citations were issued based on the officer’s visual assessment, rather than on radar readings, blacks were disproportionately charged. This racial bias was accompanied by illegal police practices. Ferguson police officers stopped, searched, arrested and used force in ways that went beyond their legal authority. They targeted blacks, and when citizens cited their rights or asked for a

cause, they responded by retaliation, fining or arresting them for talking back. One typical example of this was traffic stops. Ferguson police officers routinely asked for identification from all passengers, and if they refused, they cited and arrested them under the municipal Failure to Comply charge. This is unconstitutional. Passengers are in their right to refuse to provide identification, and this is protected under the Fourth Amendment. Talking back to officers or recording their activities are protected by the First Amendment. Even verbal expressions of disrespect, including the use of foul language, cannot constitutionally be a basis for arrest. Yet, Ferguson police officers regularly used arrest to retaliate against disrespect, usually charged as Failure to Comply, Disorderly Conduct, Interference with Officer or Resisting Arrest. Such constitutional violations were also evident during the protests outside Ferguson police department in February 2015 to mark the sixth month of Michael Brown’s death. Peaceful protesters were menaced by jail, one man recording arrests and another in a wheelchair live-streaming the events from the sidewalk were threatened that they would be arrested for Manner of Walking. The DoJ investigation also revealed a pattern of excessive force use. Ferguson police officers routinely used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment, again disproportionately targeting blacks – about 90% of the cases involved blacks. The DoJ’s conclusion was that use of excessive force by Ferguson police officers was racially biased, punitive and retaliatory rather than necessary (for example to counter a physical threat). Ferguson police regularly used Tasers and dogs against unarmed individuals, people with mental problems, and even juvenile students. In a 2011 incident, a mentally troubled man claiming to be god died after officers Tasered him multiple times. In another, during the year leading up to the uprisings, a 14-year old black student was Tasered and arrested in the classroom after refusing to leave after an argument with a fellow student. Taser use was routine, including on people in handcuffs. Dogs were also used unnecessarily, deployed even to bite unarmed children. And Ferguson police dogs bit only blacks – not a single incident reported a police dog biting a white person. There is also evidence of police harassment in the area with the apartment complexes. For example, a few months before the uprisings, in December 2013, police officers stopped and searched people in this area with no reasonable suspicion. This was not an isolated incident, but, as the DoJ report put it, part of a ‘consistent … pattern of suspicionless, legally unsupportable stops’ that targeted blacks. The following month, in the same area, the police arrested a young black man at the home of his girlfriend’s

grandparents for trespassing, even though the young man was there upon invitation. When he resisted arrest, seven officers repeatedly hit and Tasered him, causing significant injuries. ‘Partly as a consequence of City and FPD [Ferguson Police Department] priorities’, the DoJ report stated, ‘many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African-American neighbourhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue’. There are several examples in the report, but perhaps this one shows best the legally arbitrary, racially targeted and revenue-driven nature of policing in Ferguson. In the summer of 2012, an officer pulled up behind a 32-year old black man’s car. The man had just finished a game of basketball in a public park, and was cooling off in his parked car. The officer asked him for his social security number and identification. Then, pointing at the presence of children in the public park, he accused the man of being a paedophile, and ordered him out for a search. The man cited his constitutional rights, which led to his arrest. The officer then charged him with eight violations of Ferguson’s municipal code, including one for making a false declaration (he said his name was ‘Mike’, whereas it was ‘Michael’ really), one for not wearing a seat belt, one for having an expired driver’s licence, and one for not having one. To put it bluntly, Ferguson police preyed upon blacks to generate revenue for the city until one incident went awry with the killing of Michael Brown. The police, however, was only one part of Ferguson’s revenue generating mechanism. Officers might issue as many citations as they could, but there has to be something else to force people to pay fines and fees. This was the role of Ferguson’s municipal court. The court as cash machine

Each month we are setting new all-time records in fines and forfeitures. Ferguson City Manager, January 2013

Ferguson municipal court did not act as a neutral arbiter of the law, but as a cash machine. It used its judicial authority to collect outstanding fees, and worked in a way that particularly harmed blacks, violating, the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of due process and equal projection. Thus, rather than promoting public safety, it undermined, just like Ferguson’s police did, the legitimacy of law enforcement, creating a deep mistrust among black citizens.

Ferguson municipal court is in the same building as the police station. It operates as part of the police department, and is supervised by the Chief of Police, to whom the court staff directly reports. The judge, court clerk, prosecuting attorney and assistant court clerks were all white at the time of the DoJ investigation. The residents of Ferguson are not involved in the election of court staff. The judge is nominated by the City Manager and appointed by the City Council. It is a two-year position subject to reappointment, and judge Ronald Brockmeyer worked as Ferguson’s municipal judge for eleven years until he had to resign following the DoJ investigation. The Court Clerk, supervised by the Police Chief, has broad authority according to Ferguson’s municipal code. As the DoJ investigation found, she played the most significant role and exercised wide discretion in the everyday workings of the court. One area where she used her authority and discretion was discarding charges brought against friends. She had to resign over racist emails revealed by the investigation, including one with a photo of Ronald Reagan feeding a baby chimpanzee. The caption read ‘Rare photo of Ronald Reagan babysitting Barack Obama in early 1962’. The court, like the police, worked in a legally arbitrary, racially targeted and revenue- driven way. On the one hand, it routinely helped many city officials – including the judge, court clerk and several high-ranking police officers – and their friends by removing their fines and fees. On the other, the court fined blacks more heavily than others. For example, the 53 Failure to Obey charges brought during 2013 not only involved a majority of blacks (44), but also resulted in higher fines for them: an average of $206, whereas others had an average of $147 for the same offense. In order to force people to pay fines and fees, the court issued arrest warrants. These warrants, however, were not issued for public safety concerns, but to secure collection. They were the court’s routine response to pending fine payments and missed court appearances. This city of 21,000 issued warrants for the arrest of 9,000 people for 33,000 offenses in 2013 alone. This would amount to 25 arrest warrants a day if the court worked every single day during the year. The municipal judge, however, only worked a grand total of twelve hours per month. The rate of arrest warrants impressed even Ferguson police officers, who called it ‘staggering’ in internal emails. With so many arrest warrants to go around, police officers regularly made unlawful stops, not because of a reasonable suspicion, but to catch individuals with pending arrest warrants. As noted, the police deliberately and disproportionately targeted blacks: 85% of vehicle stops and practically all pedestrian stops involved blacks. Blacks

also accounted for 90% of citations, 93% of arrests, 92% of cases with arrest warrants, about 90% of cases of use of force, and all police dog bites. Most of the arrest warrants issued by Ferguson municipal court originated from minor violations for which jail time is far too severe a penalty (parking infractions, traffic tickets, or housing code violations). But because Ferguson used its court to generate revenue, minor violations resulted in arrests, jail time, and payments that well exceeded the original fine. The following case of a black woman shows how minor infractions turn into crippling debts and unduly harsh penalties. This woman parked her car illegally in 2007, and received two citations, a $151 fine, plus fees. Because of financial difficulties and periods of homelessness, she missed court dates and fine payments, which led the court to charge her with seven Failure to Appear offenses over the years. The court also issued an arrest warrant, and new fines and fees for each failure to appear offense. Thus, what started in 2007 as a minor parking infraction led over the years to her arrest twice, six days in jail, and a debilitating debt despite the considerable amount she had already paid. As of December 2014, she had already paid the city $550, but still owed $541. Moreover, Ferguson municipal court often did not provide clear and accurate information about the charges and obligations. There is also evidence that Ferguson police officers frequently provided incorrect information about the date and time of court sessions to the people they cited, potentially leading to additional charges and fines under Failure to Appear, as well as an arrest warrant. The court issued arrest warrants when a second court date was missed, but did not confirm that the notice of the second court date had been safely received by those concerned. Indeed, in many cases individuals did not even know if an arrest warrant was issued against them since the court had stopped sending warrant notices in 2012 to save money on the cost of warrant cards and postage. Although Ferguson city officials blamed lack of responsibility for certain groups of the population, the DoJ investigation found strong evidence of racial bias among Ferguson police and court staff. Indeed, even the lack of personal responsibility explanation used by city officials reflected such racial bias and stereotypes, which was also evident in emails between senior police officers and court staff that included overtly racist jokes about blacks associated with laziness, irresponsibility and criminality.

Ferguson police is authorised to issue citations under both the municipal code and state law. Most charges, however, are filed as municipal offenses, because pursuing municipal rather than state charges benefits Ferguson financially. The city has a comprehensive municipal code that leaves few areas of civic life untouched – housing, height and removal of grass and weeds, use of city’s trash service, animal control. walking. Compared to other municipalities in the region, its fines are high, ‘at or near the top of the list’, as the city’s finance director noted approvingly in a 2011 report. For example, a parking fine in Ferguson was $102 whereas it ranged between $5 to $100 in others; Weeds/Tall Grass charge was as low as $5 in one municipality, whereas Ferguson set it between $77 to $102. Ferguson charges $375 for Failing to Provide Proof of Insurance, more than twice the average fine for this offense in the region’s 70 municipalities. This allowed Ferguson to collect $286,000 in fines for this offense in 2013 alone, exceeding all but the Failure to Appear fines. These high fees, coupled with Ferguson police officers’ routine practice of issuing multiple citations in a single encounter, amount to sums that people in poverty cannot pay. In order to resolve a municipal code violation, the offender must have the means to hire an attorney and pay fines. Even for a simple speeding ticket, the defendant must pay $50-$100 to the attorney, and $150-$200 to the municipality in fines and court fees.15 These are not negligible amounts, especially for the poor. The situation is aggravated by the Ferguson municipal court’s tendency to inflate fines and charge, for example, $302 for Manner of Walking, $427 for Peace Disturbance, $531 for High Grass and Weeds, $777 for Resisting Arrest, $792 for Failure to Obey, and $527 for Failure to Comply. These are colossal amounts especially for people living in poverty, and way too high for minor violations. Between July 2010 and June 2014, about 90,000 citations and summonses were issued for Ferguson municipal code violations – 22,500 citations and summonses a year in a city with a population of 21,000. In 2014, during the year leading up to the uprisings, nearly 50% more citations were issued compared to those issued during 2010. This suggests a deliberate attempt to generate more revenue through fines and fees, which is also indicated in email exchanges between city officials (as we have seen, the share of fines and fees revenue in Ferguson’s municipal budget has constantly increased over the years). The DoJ investigation established that this upsurge was not driven by a rise in serious crime; indeed, serious crime (assault, stealing, driving while intoxicated) has remained constant or declined in Ferguson over the last ten years. There was a similar rise in municipal court cases: 16,178 new cases were filed, and 8,727 were resolved

during the fiscal year 2009. During the year leading up to the uprisings, the number of new cases had gone up by 50% to 24,256, and the cases resolved to 10,975. The judge, you may think, must have been working really hard. But municipal court judges are part-time positions, and the judge does not need to be a resident of the municipality. Municipal judges may hold positions in multiple jurisdictions, as Ferguson’s did. The court holds three or four sessions each month, each lasting no more than three hours. It is not uncommon for the court to see as many as 500 people in a single sessions, and given that police officers issue as many citations as they possibly can, usually 1,200 to 1,500 offenses are considered in each three-hour period (which may even, as it has in the past, go over 2,000 offenses in one sitting). The court’s efficiency did not escape the City Manager, who noted in January 2013 that ‘each month we are setting new all-time records in fines and forfeitures’. The handpicked judge was under pressure to generate revenue for the municipality, and he delivered with great zeal, which made him keep his office since his first appointment in 2003. As the city’s finance director reported to the city council in 2011, judge Brockmeyer had been ‘successful in significantly increasing court collections over the years’ – though it turns out he was less successful with his finances and owed over $170,000 to the government in unpaid taxes.16 His productivity was due partly to the creation of additional fees, which were deemed abusive and possibly unlawful by the DoJ. He also managed to see hundreds of cases in a single three-hour session, as we saw above. These dubious practices did not go unnoticed. In 2012, a member of the city council wrote to other city officials to oppose reappointing the judge. The judge was so efficient because he did not listen to the testimony, did not review the reports or the criminal history of the defendants, and also did not let all the relevant witnesses testify. Although a change of judge would probably result in less revenue, the member of the city council argued, it was more important to handle the cases properly and fairly. Proper and fair, however, were not among the priorities of the City Manager, who stated that Ferguson could not afford any decrease in its revenue from the court, and urged for the judge to be reappointed, which he was. The revolting Ferguson residents were well aware that their actions were disrupting the city’s business model based on the exploitation and criminalisation of black people. DeAndre Smith, a black resident of Ferguson, was admittedly present during the

incidents that led to the looting and burning of QuikTrip – a convenience store that later became a gathering point for protestors. Two days into the uprisings, in an interview on television, he said: ‘This is how they eat here. This is how they receive money. The businesses, the taxes, police stopping people, giving them tickets, taking them to court, locking them up […] So, when you stop their flow of income. When you stop their whole … everything … their business’.17 At the site of QuikTrip where Smith was interviewed, there is a writing on the burnt out shell of a gas pump. It lists several uprisings, starting with ‘Spain 36’ and ending with ‘Ferguson 14’. Brixton, Paris and Cairo are on the list, so are ‘Watts 65’, ‘L.A. 92’, and ‘Cincy 01’. We saw that racist, oppressive and abusive law enforcement practices in Ferguson were not occasional incidents, but part of the regular workings of the city. Let us now take a look at urban uprisings in Los Angeles, Cincinnati and Baltimore to see that Ferguson uprisings were not aberrational, but a justified response to urban rage. The sources of resentment that led to Ferguson uprisings were also behind those of Los Angeles, Cincinnati and Baltimore, although Ferguson’s business model remains unique among those. As long as these sources of resentment remain unaddressed, the incidents in these cities suggest, recurrent uprisings will be part of our urban futures. Careful police work

This is not some orgy of violence. This is careful police work. Defence attorney in the 1992 Rodney King beating trial

There’s a black person up our street and we say ‘Hi’ like he’s a normal person.

A resident of Simi Valley, home of Rodney King beating trial, 1992 One warm summer night, on 1 August 1988, officers from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) stormed two buildings in the area known as South Central, searching for drugs. While helicopters hovered over the area, the 88 police officers on the ground were engaged in a demolition job in the apartments: they punched holes in the walls, destroyed furniture and appliances, hammered toilets, poured bleach over cloths, and emptied refrigerators. Some even left their graffiti that read ‘LAPD rules’. The damage to the apartments was so great that the operation left ten adults and 12 minors homeless, who were offered help by the Red Cross. Residents from the two buildings and others from the neighbourhood were rounded up, humiliated, insulted by racist epithets, punched, kicked and choked by police officers, though none was

charged with a crime. The result of this massive raid was the successful seizure of less than six ounces of marijuana and less than an ounce of cocaine, plus $4 million in court fees and damages paid to the residents, property owners, and to those rounded up during the operation.18 South Central was the epicentre of 1992 Los Angeles uprising. In terms of its geographical extent, ethnic diversity, violence and destruction, Los Angeles uprising remains the most devastating in US urban history. Like the Watts uprising of 1965 in the same area, the 1992 uprising took place at a time of economic difficulties and in a context marked by racism, involuntary segregation and police brutality. Watts and other uprisings of the 1960s had all occurred at times of economic recession.19 The 1992 Los Angeles uprising took place during the worst recession southern California had experienced since the 1930s. Income inequality and proportion of the poor increased steadily in Los Angeles between the 1965 and 1992 uprisings. In 1990, one in four young black man in South Central was unemployed. The context was set by policy decisions. The federal government’s economic policies since the early 1980s contributed to increasing unemployment. Dismantling of social safety nets, attacks on anti-discrimination and affirmative action agendas meant more hardship for the poor and racialised minorities. Cutting the funds for community-based organisations had devastating effects in places like South Central since these organisations worked with disadvantaged populations in inner cities. On top of all these, increasing reliance on the criminal justice system doubled the prison population in a decade from 1980 to 1990. The racialised poor were hit by every single one of these policy decisions. Wealth continued to concentrate at the top, while the poor saw their prospects shrink, and became increasingly subject to aggressive policing and incarceration. Mass incarceration further reduced the prospects for the racialised poor. As a 2014 report put it, the United States saw a ‘historically unprecedented and internationally unique’ growth in incarceration rates since the mid-1970s. By 2010 figures, more than half the prison population was black or Hispanic.20 Economic difficulties do not automatically lead to unrest, but when they are compounded by discrimination and police brutality in everyday urban life, eventually something has got to give. As one of the participants in 1965 Watts uprising put it: ‘We’ve been holding out for a long time, a long time; giving the white man a chance’.21 The 1992 Los Angeles uprising showed, however, that this was not just an issue of black and white. Unlike the incidents on 1965, which were confined to the Watts area

of Los Angeles where the majority of the city’s black population was pushed to live, the 1992 uprising covered a much larger area, expanding especially north from South Central to Hollywood. Unlike Watts, the participants in the 1992 uprising were not overwhelmingly black. Latinos, who had been at the receiving end of Los Angeles police’s discriminatory practices, also participated widely. Not everyone had the same purpose; the participants’ motivations ranged from outrage at the Rodney King verdict, which triggered the incidents, to simple opportunism, from resentment built up by discrimination to securing necessities for their families. The Los Angeles uprising started on 29 April 1992 following the announcement of the not-guilty verdict in the trial of four white police officers. They were filmed beating Rodney King, an unarmed black man aged 25, in the early hours of 3 March 1991. The video showed King lying on the ground after a car chase, twenty-three LAPD officers at the scene, and four of them beating him with batons and kicks. After 56 baton blows, six kicks, and two shots of Taser, King is left with injuries ‘of a minor nature’ according to the report of the Sergeant involved in the beating. King’s skull and cheekbone were fractured, lip split, face partly paralysed, one eye socket shattered and one leg broken. Three surgeons had to operate for five hours on his battered body. Broadcast the next day, the video – which President Bush called ‘sickening’ – became a national and international sensation, and led to the trial of the four police officers. The trial should have taken place in Los Angeles County with a jury selected from there, because that is where the incident took place. The defence asked for a change of venue, but this was denied by the trial judge Bernard Kamins. After the California Court of Appeals replaced Judge Kamins with Judge Stanley Weisberg, the new judge changed the trial venue to Simi Valley in Ventura County, arguing that this would avoid unfair treatment of the police officers due to adverse publicity around the incident. Home of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, and Ventura County in general, was known for its conservative politics and strong law and order stance. With its overwhelming white majority – 80% white and only 2% black – Simi Valley was home to a large number of LAPD officers and retirees. Indeed, about one fourth of LAPD officers lived in Simi Valley.22 In the end, there was not a single black person among the twelve members of the jury, which was made up of six white men, four white, one Hispanic and one Asian women. Eight of the jury members had either served in the army, or had spouses who had served in the military. Three had relatives in the police. Five of them were gun owners,

of which two were National Rifle Association members. Where many saw a repeated beating of a black man offering no resistance, the jury saw a black man threatening police officers who only hit him in self-defence. The defence attorneys had broken the video down into stills, and used them for raising questions about restraining suspects. Thus, the repeated beating of King was reduced to disjointed stills to be analysed in isolation by restraint experts. This strategy allowed the defence to argue that what the jury had before their eyes was ‘not some orgy of violence [but] careful police work’. The jury was convinced, and they acquitted the police officers. Following the announcement of the verdict, incidents started in the South Central area in the late afternoon of 29 April. This is also when the barbaric beatings of Reginald Denny, a white truck driver, and Fidel Lopez, a construction worker from Guatemala, occurred. Despite the contentious nature and publicity of the trial, the LAPD had not taken any precautions, and was unable to respond effectively once the unrest started. The incidents only intensified the following day, moving north towards Hollywood. Koreatown was on the way, but police forces were deployed to protect downtown Los Angeles, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. This left Koreatown and South Central without protection, which would prove disastrous for Korean businesses. Less than two weeks after the Rodney King beating, Latasha Harlins, a black teenager, was murdered by a Korean shopkeeper, who shot her in the back of the head while she was walking away from her store after an altercation over a cartoon of orange juice. The shopkeeper was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, but was only sentenced to five years of probation and some community service. The demographic transformation of South Central had already put blacks, Latinos and Koreans in competition over housing and jobs.23 Both the murder and what many felt was an unfairly light sentence further strained the relations between blacks and Koreans, making Korean businesses, not least the one where Harlins was murdered, targets of choice during the incidents. The incidents continued with increasing intensity, which first led to the deployment of the National Guard, then of army troops. California Governor Wilson declared a state of emergency, Mayor Bradley imposed a curfew, and on 2 May, President Bush declared Los Angeles a disaster area. Thus ended one of the most devastating urban uprisings in American history, leaving in its wake 53 people dead and more than 2,000 injured. The number of arrestees went over 10,000, about half of whom were Latino and 38% black. These figures almost doubled those of Watts uprising that had started in the same area in 1965, leaving 34 people dead and about a thousand injured. Let us

now take a closer look to Watts in 1965 to see how it differed or resembled the 1992 uprising. From ‘monkeys in the zoo’ to ‘gorillas in the mist’

One person threw a rock and then, like monkeys in the zoo, others started throwing rocks.

William Parker, LAPD Police Chief, on the Watts uprisings, 1965

…right out of ‘Gorillas in the Mist’. Police officer Powell, shortly before the King beating, 1992

Unlike in 1992, Watts area in 1965 was predominantly black. Nearby industrial jobs and public transit access to downtown had made Watts relatively attractive earlier, but by 1965 both were gone. After the war, many factories closed or moved out, and many black workers were laid off. The construction of the elevated north-south Harbor Freeway (Interstate 110) in the 1950s separated the rundown Watts area to the east and the slightly better-off areas to the west (including South Central).24 Thus, Watts became separated by this physical barrier from the rest of the city, and the disappearance of job and public transit left little chance for upward mobility for its residents. The barriers that confined blacks to Watts were not only physical. In a state-wide referendum held a year before the uprising, two-thirds of California voters supported Proposition 14. Led by the real estate sector, Proposition 14 was a response to the Rumford Fair Housing Act passed in 1963, which prohibited discrimination in the private housing market. Promoted with the slogan ‘A man’s home is his castle’, Proposition 14 nullified the Rumford Fair Housing Act by amending the California Constitution, and turned discrimination into a constitutional right. Property owners had the right to refuse selling or renting property to people not only on the basis of their race but on any basis.25 Watts was already home to more than 80% of the black population of Los Angeles. Proposition 14 meant they were stuck there. Unlike the other uprisings we study in this book, the Watts uprising of 1965 did not follow from dramatic incident. It was triggered by police action, like the majority of urban uprisings, but a trivial one compared to them. There was no beating, as in Los Angeles 1992, or killing, as in Cincinnati 2001, Ferguson 2014 or Baltimore 2015. The

uprising in Watts followed an arrest for drunken driving, and there was no evidence of excessive force use. Blacks in Los Angeles, however, had been victims of police brutality for such a long time that a minor arrest quickly turned into full-scale uprising. Unlike in 1992, the Watts uprising led to an official inquiry by the so-called McCone Commission, led by John A. McCone, a prominent businessman and former director of the CIA. The findings of the commission were widely discredited by social science research at the time. When the archives related to the inquiry became public, further research revealed that the commission had come to conclusions about matters on which no research was done, and had deliberately neglected unsavoury evidence collected during the investigation.26 The McCone Commission report had explained the uprising though the so-called ‘riffraff theory’, an example of the pathological framework we discussed in the introduction. Contrary to the commission’s assertions, however, researchers found that the participants in the Watts uprising were not a marginal group of deviants and criminals – the riffraff. They were representative of, not marginal to, the black population of Los Angeles. Their actions were popular even among blacks who had not participated in the uprising. These findings were supported by the records of the hearings and testimonies in the commission’s archives, but they did not find their way into the official report on the Watts uprising. What was common to both 1965 and 1992 uprisings in Los Angeles (and also to those later in Cincinnati, Ferguson and Baltimore) was where they started. All of these urban uprisings erupted in areas home to poor and racially defined groups who disproportionately found themselves on the receiving end of police brutality and harassment. By the time of the 1992 uprising, the Watts district had equal black and Hispanic populations, as well as a small minority of Asians. Central American were newcomers to the area in 1992 just as blacks were earlier. Jewish ghetto merchants were replaced by Koreans. But the area still remained a poor neighbourhood of racially defined groups, and was subject to racially biased police practices. The racial bias in policing, however, was not a matter of a few rogue police officers. Just like Ferguson, there was a well-documented pattern of racially biased police violence, ranging from patrol officers all the way up to police chiefs. The context leading up to the 1992 uprising shows the discriminatory, systematic and targeted nature of police violence in Los Angeles. Several reports demonstrate Los Angeles police officers regularly using excessive force, in particular against blacks and Latinos. Although complaints were discouraged (as it happened, for example, when

King’s brother tried to file one) or covered by supervisors, the city of Los Angeles still had to pay millions of dollars to settle complaints and lawsuits by the victims of LAPD abuse, a pattern we will also see with Baltimore later on. Blacks and Latinos suffered disproportionately. One particular issue was the use of choke holds by the police, which claimed 18 lives during the 1980s. Sixteen of those victims were black, a disproportionality explained by the LAPD Police Chief Daryl Gates in a most peculiar manner. It was probably because, he argued, their ‘veins and arteries do not open up as fast as on normal people’. Gates was the controversial police chief of Los Angeles from 1978 until he was forced to resign in 1992 following the uprising. The legacy of his paramilitary style of policing included the creation of SWAT teams in the 1960s, and Operation Hammer starting in 1987. The latter turned South Central and East Los Angeles into occupied territories saturated by police forces operating with a war mentality, produced the police raid that opens the previous section, and largely contributed to the growing resentment that ended up erupting in 1992.27 When placed within this context, even the Rodney King beating does not look exceptional; what set it apart was that it was caught on video. King’s beating was part of a broader pattern of police abuse in Los Angeles. Like Ferguson’s police department, LAPD’s practices showed racial bias, and its officers, like Ferguson’s, did not refrain from using excessive force and racial epithets. A commission investigation found, for example, that two of the officers who beat King had sent a computer message shortly before the incident about a domestic dispute of a black couple, referring to it as something ‘right out of “Gorillas in the Mist”’. After the beating, one of them – officer Powell, who alone struck King over 40 times – sent a message stating he hadn’t ‘beaten anyone this bad in a long time’. Powell had a history of violence that was well known in the LAPD. The same officers accompanied King to the hospital, where they openly joked and bragged about the beating, as the nurses reported.28 The commission investigation revealed that the use of excessive force, aggravated by racism, was a deeply entrenched problem within the LAPD. A significant number of LAPD police officers had a well-known pattern of violence, who were not only not disciplined, but rewarded with positive evaluations and promotions. Racist remarks were recurrent in the messages officers sent, which was not monitored and sanctioned by their supervisors. Indeed, the commission found that the supervisors themselves frequently made racist remarks. Racist abuse, however, went beyond messages within the department. There was also evidence of verbal harassment of blacks and Latinos, who were frequently subjected to humiliating practices and unnecessary use of force,

as well as to dog attacks. Just like in Ferguson, dogs were frequently used in minority neighbourhoods, particularly in South Central where the uprising started. Between 1986-1989, 71% of all LAPD dog searches, 70% of all arrests using dogs and 70% of all reported police dog bites took place in South Central. The commission also heard complaints about LAPD officers having dogs attack minority youth already in custody or not calling the dogs off even after the suspect was restrained. Another report by Amnesty International supported these findings.29 There was clear evidence that LAPD officers used excessive force for years, mostly in black and Latino neighbourhoods, leading to serious injuries and death. The use of force by officers reached such levels that Amnesty International claimed it amounted at times to torture. The findings were not all that different then from now: use of force that exceeded guidelines and not justified by circumstances, shooting victims several times even after they had been disabled, use of Tasers, setting dogs on unnamed or surrendered suspects, even on those in custody – practices all concentrated in black and Latino neighbourhoods. Dogs were deployed predominantly in areas with large minority populations, and among dog-bite victims, less than 2% were identified as white, whereas 70% were Latino, and 20% were black. A similar pattern of targeted police violence was also an important factor behind the 2014 Ferguson uprising, as we saw, but also behind those of Cincinnati in 2001 (the largest urban unrest since the 1992 Los Angeles uprising) and the 2015 uprising in Baltimore. Let us now take a look at these two cities to see what else related or differentiated them from Ferguson and Los Angeles. From feast to famine

Plastic baggies in hand, the recipients headed back out into the cold – four blocks, and a world away, from the bright lights of Main.

Michelle Cottle on post-riot Cincinnati, 2001

You go feast to famine in a matter of blocks. David Bramble, developer in Baltimore, 2015

The Main Street with its bright lights is the one in Over-the-Rhine (OTR) neighbourhood, the epicentre of 2001 uprisings in Cincinnati. It runs parallel to Vine, another street with vibrant commercial activity four blocks to the east. The shops here

speak to the extent and nature of the city’s attempt to transform the area, starting from 12th Street. If you walk north on Vine Street from 12th, you find, for example, a fancy pet food store, a ‘movement studio’ (aka ‘gym’), or a company specialised in ‘brainstorming and business coaching’, in addition to your regular cafés, trattorias and restaurants. Once you have passed Kroger supermarket and hit 15th Street, however, the pretty shops and refurbished historical houses give way to boarded up stores and derelict buildings. The contrast reaches its starkest with a food bank located somewhere between Vine and Main streets. You have gone from feast to famine in a matter of blocks. OTR had a mostly white population of about 30,000 in the 1950s, which went down to about 7,500, mainly black, by the turn of the century. OTR first attracted black residents from the adjacent West End, a historically black neighbourhood. After the war, like many other inner city black neighbourhoods at the time, West End became the target of urban renewal projects. The old housing stock was razed and Interstate 75 tore right through it, resulting in the displacement of its residents, some to the neighbouring OTR. The displacement process now at work in OTR is more subtle. Although no bulldozers are involved, the forces of change are strong, and we must first understand the profit potential of this area to get a sense of the stakes. Downtown Cincinnati is bordered by Interstate 71 to the east, Interstate 75 to the west, the Ohio River and Kentucky state border to the south. This leaves only north for downtown Cincinnati to expand, which is where OTR is. So this ‘pocket of poverty’ long forgotten by the city is now among Cincinnati’s most valuable land. The economic potential of OTR was recognised in the 1980s, which led to its designation as a historic district in 1983. The neighbourhood has since been the object of fierce struggles between developers and community activists, notably the Over-the-Rhine People’s Movement. Perhaps the struggle over the area can be illustrated by this 1996 Cincinnati Enquirer headline reporting the murder of Buddy Gray, the influential leader of the People’s Movement: ‘Over-the-Rhine now up for grabs’. At the time of the 2001 uprising, three-quarter of OTR residents were black, most living below the poverty line. About one third of the housing units in the area were vacant. It was, however, a time of economic revival as the city had been investing for a decade in this area. It had refurbished the Main Street entertainment district with jazz clubs and art galleries, and managed to attract wealthier white populations. The patrons of the new facilities had to be protected, so the city also invested in measures

to have more police presence and vigilance in the area. In a city already marked with racism and in an area with sharp inequalities, this increased vigilance quickly translated into police harassment of black youth. What was seen as a revival by the city officials and the new patrons of the area was seen as an assault by the residents.30 Cecil Thomas, a black Cincinnati police officer, observed a pattern of aggressive policing emerge during the 1990s. In his expert report for the 2001 case on racial discrimination in Cincinnati police, Thomas wrote that blacks were disproportionately subject to arbitrary searches, undue detention, improper use of handcuffs, use of force and guns, as well as retaliation if they asked badge numbers and names of police officers. They were also disproportionately subject to discretionary offenses such as jaywalking, just like in Ferguson. Aggressive policing, even when it violated civil rights, was rewarded by the city, rather than supervised and disciplined. The case was settled by a court-supervised collaborative agreement between the citizens, the city of Cincinnati, and the Fraternal Order of Police to reform police practices and improve police-community relations.31 In addition to the more serious allegations of disproportionate use of excessive or deadly force against blacks, Cincinnati police officers were also accused of routine harassment, targeting blacks for multiple traffic citations, like in Ferguson. This was one of the important factors in the eruption of simmering anger when Timothy Thomas, a 19-year old black man, was shot and killed by a white police officer after a chase in an OTR alley, shortly after 2am on Saturday, 7 April 2001. Thomas was unarmed, had no history of violent crime, but had 14 outstanding warrants, 12 of which were for traffic violations. He was the fifteenth black man killed by Cincinnati police in the previous six years, and the fourth in the previous six months, including the high-profile death of Roger Owensby, Jr., an unarmed black man who died of asphyxiation in police custody on 7 November 2000. Already a month before Thomas’s death, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Cincinnati Black United Front had filed the federal lawsuit mentioned above against racial bias in Cincinnati policing. Thus, the tension created by the prospect of displacement and the resentment over the perceived occupation of OTR by a police eager to protect the visitors from the residents reached a critical point. Yet, the incidents did not start immediately. On 9 April, Thomas’s mother, joined by protestors, confronted the mayor in the City Hall and asked for an explanation, but received none. The uprising started then, lasted three days, and ended with the declaration of a curfew on 12 April. Although social

workers in the area who had also been through the urban uprisings of the 1960s thought the 2001 incidents were more like ‘episodes of youthful vandalism or a minor civil disturbance’, and did not really call for a curfew, the mayor likened the situation in OTR to Beirut, which by all counts was a stretch of the imagination.32 As community activist Thomas Dutton observed, although uprisings are readily lamented as unreasonable violence, violence takes many forms. In Cincinnati, the problem was not merely police-community relations, but many inter-related forms of violence that have been affecting black inner city residents for a long time. Unlike the episodic violence of the uprising, these other forms of violence – unemployment, poverty, displacement, police harassment and brutality – were systematic. As City Councilwoman Alicia Reece put it: ‘This situation has been festering for over five years. It is a time bomb that has exploded’. At the time of the uprising, Cincinnati was the most segregated city in the country, and OTR was its poorest neighbourhood with about 77% of its residents black (Cincinnati was 43% black). The city invested in OTR to turn it into a marketable area, but the investment led to the displacement of existing OTR residents, who were not provided with alternatives.33 After the incidents, the mayor asked the Department of Justice to review Cincinnati Police Department’s use of force. The preliminary findings of the investigation were outlined in an October 2001 letter.34 There was evidence of excessive use of force by Cincinnati police officers, regarding, in particular, the use of chemical irritants and dogs. Police officers used chemical irritants at close range, sprayed them up people’s noses or down their throats, and emptied entire canisters on single individuals. The canine unit used a ‘find and bite’ – rather than ‘find and bark’ – policy. The use of force was under-reported, and police officers were too willing to draw their guns and point them at citizens even for minor traffic violations. Finally, as we have already seen with Ferguson and Los Angeles police departments, there were concerns about the complaints procedure, which discouraged the filing of complaints and prevented effective monitoring. Even the mayor admitted that ‘the protest shows there is a huge outcry in the community about legitimate frustrations between police and African-American residents’.35 The day after the mayor uttered these words, Cincinnati police provided one more reason to be frustrated. On 14 April, following Timothy Thomas’s funeral, hundreds marched peacefully through OTR. Suddenly, however, two police cars stopped, eight police officers, six from Cincinnati’s SWAT team, got out with shotguns

to shoulders, and fired, unprovoked and without warning, on the crowd with beanbag rounds. Four people, two of them children, were injured. Cincinnati Police Chief defended the officers, who, he said, were ‘damn good people’. The injured thought otherwise. ‘We cannot deny’, the mayor had said the previous day, ‘that we have a serious racial divide’. At the time the Cincinnati police force was three-quarters white. But urban rage still erupted in cities where blacks were in majority in the police and the government, as the most recent uprising in Baltimore showed. On 12 April 2015, Freddie Gray, a 25-year old black man, was arrested for no apparent reason and put to a police van in Sandtown-Winchester, one of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the already quite deprived and 96% black West Baltimore area. Gray was conscious when he entered the van, but when he came out, less than an hour later, his spinal cord was nearly severed. He died in hospital a week later. The six officers involved in his arrest, three of them black, were later indicted on charges including second-degree murder. Staring from 18 April, peaceful protests were organised for about a week. There was some escalation of violence during a downtown protest on 25 April, but it was only in the evening of 27 April, soon after Gray’s funeral, that rage erupted in the streets of West Baltimore. The next day the mayor declared a curfew, and a 2,500-strong National Guard arrived. Incidents continued the following day, but calm returned gradually. The curfew was lifted on 3 May, and the National Guard withdrew the following day. We saw with our earlier examples that urban uprisings are triggered not by some isolated police action, but by police practices that have long become routinized. Baltimore 2015 was no exception. The police action that cost Gray his life was part of an established pattern of police brutality. An investigation by Baltimore Sun revealed that between 2011-2014, the city had to pay about $6 million in settlements to more than 100 victims of police violence, most often blacks, including a 26-year old pregnant woman and an 87-year old grandmother. Injuries inflicted by police officers ranged from broken bones to organ failure, and led to death in some cases. Serious injuries during police van rides were not unprecedented either. Baltimore police had an established practice of going for ‘a rough ride’ – driving to harm handcuffed but unbuckled detainees in the back of the police van – which had already left several people paralysed by fracturing their necks.36 Just like we saw with the

police departments of Ferguson, Los Angeles and Cincinnati, Baltimore police department has a long history of brutality and misconduct. Until Baltimore Sun’s investigation in 2014, the city did not even keep track of its police officers who faced multiple lawsuits because of brutality, and police officers with a history of violence were promoted, and some even became supervisors. What sets Baltimore apart from our other examples is that blacks hold prominent positions in city government and police department. The city is 63% black, the mayor is black, her police chief is black, the majority of the city council, including its president, is black, the top prosecutor is blacks, and practically half the police force is black too. This suggests that class, not just ‘race’, plays an important role. As we saw in the introduction, our era of urban rage is marked by sharp inequalities unmatched since the nineteenth-century, and cities are places where inequalities are at their starkest and most obvious. Sandtown, where Freddie Gray grew up, is a neighbourhood with a long history of problems including mass unemployment, poverty, vacant buildings and crime. More than one third of the houses are abandoned, more than one third of the residents do not have a high school diploma, more than 20% of working-age residents are unemployed (twice the city average), and more than a third of the families live below the poverty line. Gray suffered lead poisoning – another unflattering feature of the area – as a little boy, leading to educational problems later on. Sandtown, like rest of West Baltimore where it is located, is a racially segregated neighbourhood. Baltimore has a long history of racial segregation. It was the first American city to legalise it in 1911 through a racially restrictive zoning law. Racial segregation and concentrated poverty still mark Baltimore’s urban landscape. West Baltimore residents are excluded from the privileges enjoyed by others, such as waterfront homes, restaurants and bars – or simply good schools, jobs, a safe environment and a living wage. There are, as a Washington Post article suggested, ‘two Baltimores, one affluent and predominantly white, the other impoverished and largely black’. As David Bramble, a black developer, put it, it is possible to go from ‘feast to famine in a matter of blocks’ in Baltimore, just like in parts of Cincinnati.37 Material difficulties were aggravated by heavy-handed policing that targeted poor and stigmatised neighbourhoods. In Baltimore, the seeds of rage that erupted after Gray’s death were partly sowed during the previous mayor Martin O’Malley’s term marked by

the targeting of poor and black neighbourhoods with a zero-tolerance approach. Hundreds of thousands were arrested, though not necessarily charged, even for minor offenses such as loitering and littering – referred to as ‘quality of life’ arrests. This policy got so out of control that in a single year the Baltimore police arrested practically one in six people in the city: in 2005, more than 100,000 arrests were made in this city of about 640,000. More than 23,000 were released without charges, which means that the police arrested 23,000 Baltimore residents for nothing. This policy of mass arrest was eventually challenged with a lawsuit filed in 2006, and Baltimore agreed to pay a $870,000 settlement.38 The effects of this policy on the poor and black population of the city have been devastating. Arrest records make it very difficult to get a job or qualify for housing. Moreover, this mass arrest policy turned residents of areas like Sandtown into criminal suspects in the eyes of the police, who, just like in Ferguson, were under pressure to perform. Targeting stigmatised areas with aggressive policing – just like in Watts, South Central, Over-the-Rhine, the ‘second’ Ferguson – created only more resentment among residents who already had to face economic hardship and discrimination. Arbitrary arrests and brutality did not help. Even the police officers who arrested Freddie Gray could not provide an account suggesting Gray was involved in any wrongdoing. Why did he run then when he saw the police? Perhaps he knew better, as Timothy Thomas of Over-the-Rhine did, although it ended badly for both. As Thomas’s mother had said at the time: ‘They keep asking me why did my son run. If you are an African male, you will run’.39 As the differences between the two Los Angeles uprisings show, exclusion and oppression are not uniquely black experiences, although blacks in the United States have always had to face unique challenges. The Baltimore uprising suggests that class plays an important role as well. Urban uprisings are marked by ‘race’, class and rage, as Mike Davis observed after Los Angeles burned in 1992. The context for the uprisings in each case we explored was prepared by inequalities, poverty, and aggressive and targeted policing. These were, we saw, results of policy choices that hit racially stigmatised groups hardest, rather than outcomes of inevitable trends, cultural peculiarities, or individual pathologies. This brings us to a central argument of this book. Urban rage builds up from systematic exclusion and oppression, which go beyond police violence and expand to all areas of urban life, including housing, employment, social encounters and political worth.

Urban uprisings, then, are not signs of individual flaws or cultural traits, but manifestations of grievances that expose such problems and defy the normalised workings of the established order. If the examples of Ferguson, Los Angeles, Cincinnati and Baltimore have not sufficed to dispel doubts about this, or if this looks like an American eccentricity, perhaps examples from across the Atlantic may help.

Notes 1 Joanna Walters (2015) ‘Troops referred to Ferguson protestors as “enemy forces”, emails show’, The Guardian, 17 April 2 We will see that most of the publicised incidents involve black males. This should not make us neglect, however, the grievances of black girls and women. In Cincinnati, for example, activists talked about police officers routinely raping black women. A New York Times article recently reported on this problem when a former Oklahama City police officer was found guilty of raping black women, targeting those with criminal backgrounds so that their stories would not be believed. See Dave Philipps (2015) ‘Former Oklahoma City Police Officer Found Guilty of Rapes, New York Times, 10 December 2015. As Treva B. Lindsey observes, ‘Black women and girls occupied a marginal space in most discussion about Black violability, despite being on the frontlines of protests against anti-Black state violence occurring across the nation’. See Lindsey (2015) ‘Post-Ferguson: A “herstorical” approach to black violability’, Feminist Studies 41(1); page 235. 3 Molly W. Metzger (2014) Section 8 in the St. Louis Region: Local Opportunities to Expand Housing Choice (Washington University in St. Louis: Center for Social Development) 4 Colin Gordon (2008) Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press); Richard Rothstein (2014) The Making of Ferguson: Public Policies at the Root of Its Troubles (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute) 5 Elizabeth Kneebone (2014) ‘Ferguson, Mo. Emblematic of growing suburban poverty’, Brookings Institute blog, 15 August, http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the- avenue/posts/2014/08/15-ferguson-suburban-poverty 6 Sasha Abramsky (2013) The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (New York: Nation Books) 7 Peter Edelman (2012) So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America (New York: The New Press) 8 Sean F Reardon and Kendra Bischoff (2011) ‘Growth in the residential segregation of families by income, 1970-2009’, report prepared for Project US2010; John R Logan and Brian Stults (2011) ‘The persistence of segregation in the metropolis: new findings from the 2010 census’, census brief prepared for Project US2010 9 Elizabeth Kneebone and Emily Garr (2010) The Suburbanization of Poverty: Trends in Metropolitan America, 2000 to 2008 (Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program).

10 Rothstein (2014) The Making of Ferguson. 11 http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/why-did-the-michael-brown-shooting- happen-here/article_678334ce-500a-5689-8658-f548207cf253.html 12 Unless otherwise stated, this section is based on this report: Department of Justice, Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, 4 March 2015. The epigraphs are from this report, pages 13 and 12 respectively. 13 City of Ferguson, Missouri, Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for the Year Ended June 30, 2014. 14 City of Ferguson, Missouri, Annual Operating Budget, Fiscal Year 2015-2016. 15 ArchCity Defenders (2014) Municipal Courts White Paper (St. Louis). 16 Jon Swaine (2015) ‘Ferguson judge behind aggressive fines policy owes $170,000 in unpaid taxes’, The Guardian, 6 March 17 http://fox2now.com/2014/08/11/video-protester-justifies-the-looting-in-ferguson/ 18 ‘$3-million settlement accepted in police raid’, Los Angeles Times, 6 February 1990; ‘The raid that still haunts L.A.’, Los Angeles Times, 14 March 2001; Mike Davis (1992) City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage) 19 Janet Abu-Lughod (2007) Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Mike Davis (1993) ‘Uprising and repression in L.A.’, in R. Gooding-Williams (ed.) (1993) Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (New York: Routledge); pp 142-54; Paul Ong and Evelyn Blumenberg (AAAA) ‘Income and racial inequality in Los Angeles’, in A. Scott (ed.) The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press); pp 311-35. 20 Melvin L. Oliver et al. (1993) ‘Anatomy of a rebellion: a political-economic analysis’, in R. Gooding-Williams (ed.) (1993) Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (New York: Routledge); pp 117-41; Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western and Steve Redburn (eds) (2014) The Growth of Incarceration in the United States (Washington, D.C.: National Research Council); page 2 21 Cited in Robert M. Fogelson (1970) ‘Violence and grievances: reflections on the 1960s’, The Journal of Social Forces 26(1); page 157. 22 Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1993) ‘The Los Angeles “race riot” and contemporary U.S. politics’, in R. Gooding-Williams (ed.) (1993) Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (New York: Routledge); pp 97-114 23 Oliver et al. (1993) ‘Anatomy of a rebellion’. 24 Abu-Lughod (2007) Race, Space, and Riots.

25 David B. Oppenheimer (2010) ‘California’s anti-discrimination legislation., Proposition 14, and the constitutional protection of minority rights’, Golden Gate University Law Review 40: 117-127 26 Robert M. Fogelson (1967) ‘White on black: a critique of the McCone Commission report on the Los Angeles riots’, Political Science Quarterly 82(3): 337-67; Violence in the City – An End or A Beginning? A Report by the Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, 2 December 1965 (the ‘McCone Report’). 27 Mike Davis (1992) City of Quartz. 28 Report of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, 1991 (the ‘Christopher Commission report’). 29 Amnesty International (1992) Torture, Ill-Treatment and Excessive Force by Police in Los Angeles, California (New York: Amnesty International) 30 Michelle Cottle (2001) ‘Did integration cause the Cincinnati riots?’, The New Republic, 7 May: 26-9 31 Expert report of Cecil L. Thomas, United States District Court, Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Case No. C-1-99-317; Cottle, 2001. 32 Alice Skirtz (2012) Econocide: Elimination of the Urban Poor (Washington, DC: NASW Press). 33 Thomas A. Dutton (2001) ‘”Violence”: in Cincinnati’, The Nation, 18 June; ‘Appeals for peace in Ohio after two days of protests, New York Times, 12 April 2001. 34 Preliminary technical assistance recommendations to improve the Cincinnati Division of Police, Letter from Steven H. Rosenbaum, Chief, Special Litigation Section, Department of Justice, 23 October 2001. 35 ‘Curfew restores calm’, The Cincinnati Enquirer, 13 April 2001. 36 ‘Undue force’, The Baltimore Sun, 28 September 2014; ‘Freddie Gary not the first to come out of Baltimore police van with serious injuries’, The Baltimore Sun, 23 April 2015. 37 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/28/these-two-maps- show-the-shocking-inequality-in-baltimore/; ‘Baltimore leaders agree: city has a race problem’, The Baltimore Sun, 14 March 2015. 38 ‘As Baltimore mayor, critics say, O’Malley’s police tactics sowed distrust’, The Washington Post, 25 April 2015; ‘Arrests for minor crimes spur resentment in some Baltimore neighborhoods’, The Baltimore Sun, 23 August 2015. 39 ‘Appeals for peace in Ohio after two days of protests, New York Times, 12 April 2001; ‘Why Freddie Gray ran’, The Baltimore Sun, 25 April 2015.