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As the U.S. Department of Justice report on St. Louis County reveals, institutionalized racism has deep roots in Ferguson, Missouri — and its history begins long before the protests of August 2014.
“Mike Brown’s death is connected to [St. Louis County’s] predatory money making system of tickets and fines,” reporter and narrator Tim Pool says in director Orlando de Guzman’s “Ferguson: A Report From Occupied Territory.” He sees Brown’s death as not the straw that broke the camel’s back so much as “a stone, a massive cinder block” further straining an oppressive, deeply broken system.
Pool told The Huffington Post of a culture in which Ferguson residents “every day feel like they are going to get fined for some B.S. thing.” He spoke of a system of for-profit policing that has led to the debtors prison by which law enforcement funds the city with citations for misdemeanors, disproportionately affecting young, black men.
Brown had been approached by Officer Darren Wilson for jaywalking — an innocuous infraction not uncommonly ticketed in Ferguson. Pool interviewed two young men for the film who said they were fined $500 each for jaywalking, despite the lack of a nearby crosswalk. “There are some three or four block stretches where you can walk with no crosswalk,” Pool said. “It’s kind of crazy to think you have to walk half a mile if you don’t want to get fined $500.”
