Chart of the Day: When Times Are Good, Cops Ease Up on White Drivers

Here’s an interesting thing. Using data from Missouri, a team of researchers looked into what happens when cities face a revenue squeeze. As you’ve always expected, one thing that happens is that cops write more tickets. Interestingly, though, they found that citation rates of Black and Latino drivers stayed about the same. It was only the citation rate of white drivers that went up:

This is interesting, but I think the authors’ interpretation is backward. In fact, the citation rate of white drivers barely changes at the zero point. What’s more noteworthy is that when times are flush (right side of chart) and police can afford to ease up, they ease up on white drivers but not Black or Latino drivers. (The full set of charts is here on p. 25.)

That’s my take, anyway. The authors suggest that when times are tough, cops focus on white drivers because they’re more likely to be affluent and therefore more likely to actually pay their fines. That may be. But when I look at this data without the distracting discontinuity overlay…

What I mostly see is a fairly simple story where there’s one weird outlier (bottom left) and the most obvious overall interpretation is that white drivers benefit from improved municipal revenue across the board, with nothing special happening at the zero point. The better things are, the more that white drivers are let off the hook. But only white drivers.

Of course, this whole thing would be moot if traffic fines weren’t used as revenue generators in the first place. “Policiteering,” as Jack Hitt dubbed it five years ago, was one of the key features of life in Ferguson, Missouri, before Michael Brown was shot and killed:

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.

Is there any tax on the planet more regressive than this? It needs to end.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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