Are Cities Addicted to Fines?

The country, and even the world, is engaged right now in a massive conversation about race and policing. Over at our Community Site, there are several discussions underway about the multiple ways in which that global conversation intersects with the Strong Towns movement. This includes threads on how much our cities spend on policing, the effects of the protest and media coverage, and more.

There’s one conversation, in particular, we wanted to highlight. One of our Community members asked about the connection between race, suburban insolvency, and relying on fees and fines to cover budget shortfalls. Here was his question (edited slightly for clarity):

Is it true that Strong Towns-style examination of municipalities such as Powderhorn, Ferguson, reveals additional dimensions of police-vs-minorities relationship?

[In the Strong Towns book, Chuck draws] attention to the oddity of majority-black populations, majority-white police forces. Namely that it's caused by insolvency of such suburbs, driving people-with-choice away, whereas police are tied to the area via pensions. 

Is it also true that when a municipality is insolvent, a relative proportion of its budget shifts from tax revenue to "fees" (such as fines and penalties for non-criminal offenses such as possession and parking tickets). When the police [are] instructed/motivated to go collect such fines, I can imagine it's a downward spiral of bad policing, since the goal and tactics of collecting fines is quite different from those of "[keeping the] neighbourhood safe." I suppose this is something David Simon made a career of demonstrating via reporting and The Wire.

My question to you is, does such an incentive really show up on the city/town/burb balance sheet like that? Do you think it's a factor? Is there a clean example to point to?

Strong Towns staff are always active on the Community site, and Daniel Herriges, our Senior Editor, and Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn both weighed in on this thread. Here’s what they said:

Image source.

Daniel’s Response

I'm hesitant to make or endorse any sort of simple cause-and-effect claim—there's a ton of complexity to this question at the level of any specific place. That said, it's certainly true that a heavy reliance on fees and fines creates a perverse incentive for the city to try to maximize that revenue source (or at least maintain it)—with consequences for policing. And we've seen that unfold in Ferguson, a classic example. Strong Towns published articles about it, with some data, here:

• Ferguson Junk (2015) — describes the city's insolvency

• Stroad Nation (2014) — makes a broader point about how that insolvency goes hand in hand with a spiral of poverty and segregation (it's not as simple as cause and effect, but a place that's built in such a way as to make decline inevitable is going to end up with concentrated poverty, and in America, that almost always means a concentration of POC as well)

• Four Years Later, Ferguson Still Relies on the Poor to Pay Its Debt (2018)

Here's a report last year from Governing magazine about the broader trend of local governments being addicted to fines to pay their debt. This one focuses specifically on how dependent many small towns are on fines as a revenue source (so, not necessarily places with large minority populations), and the consequences for policing and other public policy.

However, overall, the reliance on fines for revenue is correlated with black populations—see this Vox article from 2017. My guess is this is multi-causal: direct racism may play a role (i.e. black residents are less politically empowered to resist being taken advantage of in that way), but it's also likely that a big factor is the concentration of black residents in places that have experienced decline and disinvestment and have heavy debt loads and fewer stable revenue sources—the Fergusons of the world.

Chuck’s Response

Correlation versus Causation, as Daniel suggests.

The only thing I would add to what Daniel wrote is that these are decisions we can make and so what you see in the complexity is the cumulative decisions of many people. Obviously, we can choose different things and those choices lead to vastly different outcomes. One city can descend into funding their government through fines and other cities facing similar circumstances can choose not to. It's hard to predict or to tease out because it's cumulative choices over generations. 

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