Mother Jones has a really important piece of analysis pointing to solving the puzzle of police shootings of unarmed, disproportionately poor, minority citizens. As the article points out,
When you ask why such "bad" cops are nevertheless armed and allowed to patrol the streets, 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.
The judge largely responsible for the extraction of these fees from Ferguson's poor, Ronald J. Brockmeyer, owed $172,646 in back taxes, a sum orders of magnitude greater than any late fine coming before his bench. Even as he was jailing black ladies for parking tickets, Brockmeyer was allegedly erasing citations for white Ferguson residents who happened to be his friends. After the report's publication, he resigned so that Ferguson could "begin its healing process."
The article also mentions the shooting cases involving such victims as Sandra Bland in Texas and Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati, as well as Walter Scott, who was pulled over for a busted taillight and then fatally shot, among others.
Some police, when asked, will admit that they are put into awkward positions via this expectation to be revenue generators. One particular retired police officer admitted
I just read your article about the current state of affairs in law enforcement. After 20 years in law enforcement in the NYPD I must say it was spot on. Not everything we did was to combat crime as revenue generating was considered more important. The amount of officers dedicated strictly to revenue generating would shock most people. Most of my reports were after the crime was committed that went nowhere. I would laugh when people would ask if we were looking for their car, property, missing loved one or the person that just assaulted or robbed them. We had no time to do these investigations and was as you stated simply for insurance purposes. Only high crimes such as serious assault, murder and rape are investigated by the detective bureau or prosecuted by a district attorney. This got much worse after 911. Now “terror” takes precedence over even more high crimes as looking for “boogeymen” under every rock takes a lot of manpower.
So, perhaps if we are to be serious about substantially reforming our institutionally racist criminal justice system, we need to also, simultaneously, tackle the expectation that police officers should be motivated to quickly generate revenue as if they were anonymous hourly workers at a call center soliciting for funds via telemarketing. Of course, though, this would also mean recognizing a larger paradigm of neo-liberalism in effect, accompanied by austerity for the many, vast benefits for the few, and the reliance on gimmickry for funding basic government functions. And again, quoting from the Mother Jones piece,
When you ask why such "bad" cops are nevertheless armed and allowed to patrol the streets, 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.
In the meantime, check your taillights, especially if you are dark skinned, and watch out for the speed traps out on the road, and give them less of a reason to pull you over. You never know what the outcome will be — especially if you are working class and/or a person of color.