This forum is hosted for free by Boardhost. Create your own free forum!
1 of 1- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
Offline 
- Registered: 1/29/2015
- Posts: 13,427
A Blunt Picture of Inequity
Panel Studying Racial Divide in Missouri Presents a Blunt Picture of Inequity
By MONICA DAVEY
SEPT. 14, 2015
A commission appointed by Missouri’s governor after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a white police officer is calling for sweeping changes across the St. Louis region on matters of policing, the courts, education, health care, housing and more.
In a 198-page report to be made public in Ferguson, Mo., on Monday afternoon, the commission lays out goals that are ambitious, wide ranging and, in many cases, politically delicate. Among 47 top priorities, the group calls for increasing the minimum wage, expanding eligibility for Medicaid and consolidating the patchwork of 60 police forces and 81 municipal courts that cover St. Louis and its suburbs.
The commission offers a blunt, painful picture of racial inequity in the region. Black motorists were 75 percent more likely to be pulled over for traffic stops in Missouri than whites last year, the report notes. The average life expectancy in one mostly black suburb, Kinloch, is more than three decades less than in the mostly white suburb of Wildwood, the report finds. And 14.3 percent of black elementary students in Missouri were suspended at least once during a recent school year, compared with 1.8 percent of white students.
“We know that talking about race makes a lot of people uncomfortable,” says the report, which is titled “Forward Through Ferguson: A Path Toward Racial Equity.” “But make no mistake: This is about race.”
The 16-member Ferguson Commission, announced last fall by Gov. Jay Nixon, has been praised for the diversity of its members, which include people from law enforcement, the protest movement, business, education and the clergy. Over the past 10 months, they held 17 meetings of the full commission, convened dozens of times in smaller groups and heard from nearly 2,000 members of the public in sessions that sometimes grew tense.
The Ferguson Commission’s costs, which have reached about $550,000, not including in-kind donations, have been paid for by the state and foundations.
The commission agreed on the report — and its 47 top priorities among 189 total “policy calls to action” — though members disagreed, at times, over some of the recommendations.
The report “is a milestone and not an end,” Rich McClure, a co-chairman of the commission, said in an interview.
The next step, the commission says, is to designate an organization to guide the recommendations into reality. “This is a foundation for the future, but there is a great deal of work to do going forward, and we realize that this is but a step in a long process,” Mr. McClure said.
Many in the region have praised the Ferguson Commission’s efforts, but some have raised questions about whether its findings — however meaningful — might wind up gathering dust. No doubt, many of the commission’s recommendations would require significant action from the State Legislature, locally elected councils and boards, and others.
“What this group has done over the last year has just put into written form what so many people have already voiced for years about change that needs to happen in the St. Louis region, but identifying a problem and fixing it are different,” Antonio French, a St. Louis alderman who has been active in protests, said on Sunday.
Maria Chappelle-Nadal, a Democratic state senator, said she feared that the commission’s findings would be announced with great fanfare, “but then we’re just going to hear crickets, crickets, crickets.”
She added: “The practicality of getting any of this done is close to null.”
Ms. Chappelle-Nadal and others have criticized the Republican-controlled Legislature for not doing more over the past year to address concerns that emerged in the months after Michael Brown was killed by Darren Wilson, then a Ferguson police officer, in August 2014. Bills to require body cameras on police officers and change the state’s rules for using lethal force were among those that failed to gain traction.
State lawmakers did pass legislation limiting how much revenue municipalities can keep from traffic fines. And some on the commission point to other signs of change already afoot: St. Louis last month passed an increase in the minimum wage, and Governor Nixon, a Democrat, last month called for improved training for law enforcement officers in his state, including more education on “fair and impartial policing.”
In remarks prepared for the release of the report on Monday, Mr. Nixon praised the Ferguson Commission’s work as channeling “the pain and energy” of the protests. “The way to prove this work means something is to do something,” he said. “And much already has been done.”
The commission, though, envisions many more shifts ahead. It calls for an end to predatory lending practices, and the creation of “inclusionary” zoning laws. It wants a task force to study the complex education landscape in the St. Louis region, and a revision of the state’s schools accreditation system.
On questions of policing, the proposed changes are among the most extensive. The commission calls for assigning the state attorney general as a special prosecutor in all cases of police use of force resulting in deaths; requiring the state highway patrol to investigate most police use of force cases ending in deaths; creating a statewide use of force database, available to the public, charting use-of-force complaints; and directing police departments to revise their policies and training to authorize only the minimal use of force needed.
“While there is movement on these critical issues, particularly the issues of police oversight and accountability, there is not enough movement,” the Rev. Starsky Wilson, a co-chairman of the commission, said. “It is a group of citizens saying to our elected officials that this moment is urgent and you must move with greater intentionality to getting justice for all of our citizens.”
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.