REMINDER: MOST OF THESE CITIES ARE DEMOCRATIC PARTY STRONGHOLDS. Cities Dig for Profit by Penalizing the Poor.

During last summer’s riots in Ferguson, Missouri, reporters began to highlight one reason that relations between the town’s police and its citizens are so fraught: heavy reliance on tickets and fines to cover the town’s budget. The city gets more than $3 million of its $20 million budget from “fines and public safety,” with almost $2 million more coming from various other user fees.

The problem with using your police force as a stealth tax-collection agency is that this functions as a highly regressive tax on people who are already having a hard time of things. Financially marginal people who can’t afford to, say, renew their auto registration get caught up in a cascading nightmare of fees piled upon fees that often ends in bench warrants and nights spent in jail … not for posing a threat to the public order, but for lacking the ready funds to legally operate a motor vehicle in our car-dependent society.

So why do municipalities go this route? The glib answer is “racism and hatred of the poor.” And, quite possibly, that plays a large part, if only in the sense that voters tend to discount costs that fall on other people. But having spent some time plowing through town budgets and reading up on the subject this afternoon, I don’t think that’s the only reason. I suspect that Ferguson is leaning so heavily on fines because it doesn’t have a lot of other terrific options. . . .

Let me be clear: Using the court system as a revenue source is a terrible way for a town to make money. But it’s not surprising that towns turn there when they are out of all the good ways to do so. Public order violations have a lot of attractive features for a desperate town council, including the fact that you can collect them from people who don’t live there.

To reiterate, I’m not saying that this is OK. I don’t think that court fees should be assessed in criminal cases, unless maybe in the case of egregious repeat offenders who clearly aren’t trying to avoid a day in court. Law is the price of a decent and orderly society, and therefore that price should be paid collectively. If Ferguson cannot balance its budget without a Kafkaesque system of fines and penalties, then it should cut spending.

But that would mean less money for the apparat.