Small Town Tyrannies Preserve Race Inequities

Voter registration has surged by more than 3,000 people in Ferguson, Missouri, since August 9, when the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, by a white police officer touched off sometimes-violent protests.

That's good news for democracy. Racial unrest in Ferguson has underscored how much elections matter. Although 67 percent of its 21,000 residents are black, the mayor and five out of six council members are white, and only three members of its 53-person police force are African-American.

Yet shortly after liberal organizers set up voter registration booths near where Brown died, Matt Wills, the Republican National Committee's executive director for Missouri, expressed outrage. "Injecting race into this conversation and into this tragedy," he said to the conservative Breitbart News, was "disgusting," "completely inappropriate," and "fanning the political flames."

It is better to fan political flames, I would say, than to ignite real ones. Democracy fails when civic engagement is weak. In our system, if you feel misruled it is not only your right but your civic obligation to vote the old rascals out, even at the risk of voting new ones in.

Otherwise you leave the choice up to other people who may not have your community's best interests in mind.

Ferguson's tragedy has put a spotlight on a situation that is hardly unique. Mostly black cities with mostly white councils are a fact of life in scores of American cities, particularly in the South, according to a recent New York Times report.

Professor Jessica L. Trounstine, a political scientist at the University of California, Merced, has found the most common reasons include voter apathy in low-visibility local elections, transient populations and lack of information about the candidates and election days.

Off-year election turnouts tend to be older, more white and include more homeowners than the voters in presidential election years.

Ferguson's racially tilted government, many reasonably believe, reflects a similar disparity in voter turnout in its local elections. Blacks and whites had very similar turnout rates in Ferguson in the 2012 presidential year, according to an analysis by the Washington Post and the Catalist data-collection organization; however, white Ferguson residents in the April 2013 municipal elections were three times more likely to vote than the black turnout rate, which was only 6 percent.

Ferguson matters, then, not only as a racial tragedy unfolding in news media, but also as a symbol of what The New Republic's editor Franklin Foer recently called "boom times for provincial autocrats" across the country.

As much as some politicians howl about "big government," Ferguson raises larger questions about threats to liberty posed by small governments.

One well-known example highlighted by the Ferguson unrest was the militarization of local police, causing local peace officers to look and behave more like an invading army.

A less visible menace is posed by what Professor Trounstine calls "political monopoly," unobstructed one-party rule that leaves incumbents and their cronies free to abuse the privileges of their safe seats.

The most egregious example of this era of virtually unchallenged state and local abuses, as Foer argues, may be civil-asset forfeiture. Intended originally to go after drug lords and the like, civil-asset forfeiture allows law enforcement in many states to seize a person's cash or property without ever charging him or her with a crime.

All the authorities have to do is claim they believe the property was acquired illegally. Although this tactic is often used legitimately, horror stories include a SWAT team raid on a party at the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit in May 2008. Guests were knocked to the ground and forced to hand over their cars. Their offense? Partying in a space that wasn't properly permitted.

Justice Department investigators are looking into a similar abuse in Ferguson, where police processed an average of three warrants for each household. Millions in fines and court fees were collected from the city's poorest residents to fund various city operations.

Those are the same sort of residents who are least likely to turn out and vote in local elections. I expect their future turnout to improve significantly.

Or, as the Rev. Al Sharpton told local residents after Brown's death, their abysmal voter turnout "is an insult to your children."

I don't often quote Rev. Sharpton, but in this case he's right on point.

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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.