Three out of four Ferguson residents have arrest warrants

Must make it easier to get people to not vote... (I know, link goes to an old story, but it happens every presidential election)

I do have to wonder how representative Fergusin's leadership is of its electorate.

Maybe this should be submitted instead of the linked article? (March 4, 2015)

Not that this detracts from the shock. Even if it's mostly warrants of people passing through the town, that is horrifying.

Searching through the report I can't find any information to support the statistic they give. Specifically:

According to the court’s own figures, as of December 2014, over 16,000 people had outstanding arrest warrants that had been issued by the court. In fiscal year 2013 alone, the court issued warrants to approximately 9,007 people. Many of those individuals had warrants issued on multiple charges, as the 9,007 warrants applied to 32,975 different offenses.

No where in the body of this statement does it specify how many of the people to whom warrant's were issued are residents. The other link aside from the report in the article is: http://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/343143937/in-ferguson-court-fi...

Which states quote:

In 2013, the municipal court in Ferguson — a city of 21,135 people — issued 32,975 arrest warrants for nonviolent offenses, mostly driving violations.

Note that the report corrects the 32,975 statistic to 9,007 warrants - where as the former number is the count of criminal charges. Furthermore no where in the NPR article does it state how many of those warrants issued were for Ferguson residents.

Combined with conclusions such as:

The DOJ report shows not just a racist criminal justice system, but one in which the very act of being alive has been made a crime, and in which nearly every resident is wanted by the law at every moment of every day.

I'm inclined to call it shoddy journalism.

We don't really know what "the real problem" is. Something big is going on, and I agree it's not simply about racism. I am seeing similar things in my city, and it's white and wealthy.

As with most things, I think it has to do with money. Police are paid to enforce the law, but no-one is paid to keep the police in check. As the article says, there's ~20k cities in America and it's doubtful that Ferguson is the only one, or even the worst one.

>I am not sure how this article has anything to do with HN

There's a market for justice, which means opportunity. I've wanted to build an app that helps citizens document every interaction they have with government, from parking tickets to DMV to small claims court, and then aggregate the data and then fund "corrective action" whatever that means, from a lawsuit to just filing a complaint. (The app would also make this action much easier to file.)

EDIT: wow, the parent deleted while I wrote this response. Weird.