ArchCity Defenders is calling for the consolidation of St. Louis’ municipal court system in its latest report, a decade after the killing of Michael Brown Jr. The civil rights organization says the courts are harming poor and predominantly Black people.
The group released "In the Rearview Mirror: St. Louis’ Municipal Courts After a Decade of Reform and Regress" on Thursday to help the community better understand the area’s court systems, how legislation, litigation and supportive efforts have helped transform the courts and what the legal landscape looks like years after a Ferguson police officer killed Brown in 2014.
The report discusses how local municipalities generate revenue by overpolicing its poor and mostly Black communities with excessive ticketing, fines and fees for minor infractions and how reforms over the years helped scale back the number of tickets given and warrants filed. It also provides perspective through data and storytelling on why structural reform to St. Louis’ municipal court system through consolidation can help thousands of St. Louisans have a better quality of life.
The number of tickets is down significantly in cities like Ferguson, which changes the daily reality for people in that area, but there are still municipalities that operate more independently and are largely subject to self-enforcement, said Blake Strode, executive director of ArchCity Defenders.
“In part what we are trying to do is sound the alarm, that we really ought not rest on our laurels, it is entirely possible that we could end up right back where we were in 2012, and 2013 and 2014,” he said. “What has prevented that over the past decade has been a tremendous amount of pressure, of public reporting, of organizing, of literally thousands of people in the streets in 2014 and 2015.”
Strode also said class-action lawsuits against municipalities and legislation are preventing many people from being ticketed and jailed, but he said the community wants permanent change to make an impact.
Between 2015 and 2018, ArchCity Defenders filed seven class-action suits against the cities of Ferguson, Jennings, Maplewood, St. Ann, Florissant, Edmundson and Normandy. The suits claimed the cities violated the civil rights of people who were jailed. Most plaintiffs in the lawsuits said they were part of an alleged scheme to illegally jail people without asking about their ability to make bail or pay bond amounts and were threatened with jail time to extract fines and fees. The civil rights group settled all seven cases totaling more than $20 million.
“It's raised the cost of noncompliance, it's raised the cost of illegal and unconstitutional activity over this 10-year stretch, but we ought not be fooled into thinking that that is a permanent state of affairs,” Strode said.
In 2015 and 2016, Missouri lawmakers passed Senate Bill 5 and Senate Bill 572 after closely examining municipal court practices in St. Louis County. The laws imposed a 20% cap on a portion of a city’s annual operating revenue from fines, bonds and other costs related to minor violations or traffic offenses. It prohibited jail time for minor traffic violations. It also mandated municipalities to assess indigency, offer payment plans and allow community service in lieu of payment.
The Missouri Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that the Ferguson municipal court should focus on fairness and not increasing its revenue. Rule 37 also stated the courts should continue improving its practices by helping defendants understand their rights. The following year, the state’s Supreme Court changed the ruling to allow presiding judges of the circuit have administrative authority over the judges and court personnel, and it mandated municipal courts and personnel to “operate in substantial compliance.”
The report states that years after the ruling, the state Supreme Court revised Rule 37 to establish protective guidelines around fines and warrants. However, because many courts were under the supervision of the 21st Judicial Circuit presiding judge, the rule change relied heavily on self-enforcement by county courts.
There are 88 municipalities in St. Louis County. In 2013, St. Louis and St. Louis County municipal courts collected $61,152,087 in fines and fees. This is 46% of the statewide total, despite being home to only 22% of Missourians. In 2023, the courts collected $17,819,458.49 in fines and fees, which was 71% less than a decade before.
The impact of those changes are limited without more significant and lasting changes to the courts, Strode said.
Florissant resident Umi Okoli said she was swept up into the legal system for years because of different rules that each municipality abided by. At one point she had warrants in 11 municipalities, including Clayton, Florissant and Velda City. Okoli was ticketed for either driving without updated license tags or insurance. She said she fell through the cracks because she could not always catch a ride to work through public transportation.
The 55-year-old said what hurt her the most is the time she lost with her children while detained.
“That's something the court can't pay me back for my child sitting at my mother's house, not knowing when his mom was coming back home, my mother not knowing how long should I take care of my child, or how much more money she's going to have to loan me to get out of this situation,” Okoli said.
Okoli was a plaintiff in three of ArchCity Defenders debtor’s prison class-action suits. She hopes the settlements and the organization's recent report open up productive conversations about consolidating municipal courts to help keep more people from incurring fines and warrants in multiple cities.
“I was on payment plans in all these different places that had failed because I had no money, so I just had warrants stacked up everywhere from me trying to navigate the system unsuccessfully,” she said. “It was not a system I could ever get out of by myself.”
The civil rights organization's paper noted that many people like Okoli often ended up in municipal courts for petty ordinance violations like tall grass, trash or broken taillights.
The report also examines how the system changed during the coronavirus pandemic and the challenges the courts faced in the immediate years afterward. It also provides an analysis of revenue, tickets and warrants issued in Ferguson, Florissant, Berkeley, Maryland Heights, St. Ann, Calverton Park, Hazelwood and St. Louis and St. Louis County. The analysis shows there is a constant decline in tickets issued but not in warrants.
Moreover, the organization urges the consolidation of all municipal courts, because without it the legal system will exacerbate poverty and will not benefit the community.
“None of this is inevitable that we can change it; it requires the collective will and the political will to insist on a real, substantive structural transformation of this system, and it's far past time that we do so,” Strode said.
