Similarly, in March 2011, the Chief reported to the City Manager that court revenue in February was $179,862.50, and that the total "beat our next biggest month in the last four years by over $17,000," to which the City Manager responded: "Wonderful!" In a June 2011 email from Chief Jackson to the Finance Director and City Manager, the Chief reported that "May is the 6th straight month in which court revenue (gross) has exceeded the previous year." The City Manager again applauded the Chief's efforts, and the Finance Director added praise, noting that the Chief is "substantially in control of the outcome." The Finance Director further recommended in this email greater police and judicial enforcement to "have a profound effect on collections." Similarly, in a January 2013 email from Chief Jackson to the City Manager, the Chief reported: "Municipal Court gross revenue for calendar year 2012 passed the $2,000,000 mark for the first time in history, reaching $2,066,050 (not including red light photo enforcement)." The City Manager responded: "Awesome! Thanks!" In one March 2012 email, the Captain of the Patrol Division reported directly to the City Manager that court collections in February 2012 reached $235,000, and that this was the first month collections ever exceeded $200,000. The Captain noted that "[t]he [court clerk] girls have been swamped all day with a line of people paying off fines today. Since 9:30 this morning there hasn't been less than 5 people waiting in line and for the last three hours 10 to 15 people at all times." The City Manager enthusiastically reported the Captain's email to the City Council and congratulated both police department and court staff on their "great work."
Even as officers have answered the call for greater revenue through code enforcement, the City continues to urge the police department to bring in more money. In a March 2013 email, the Finance Director wrote: "Court fees are anticipated to rise about 7.5%. I did ask the Chief if he thought the PD could deliver 10% increase. He indicated they could try." Even more recently, the City's Finance Director stated publicly that Ferguson intends to make up a 2014 revenue shortfall in 2015 through municipal code enforcement, stating to Bloomberg News that "[t]here's about a million-dollar increase in public-safety fines to make up the difference."[1] The City issued a statement to "refute[]" the Bloomberg article in part because it "insinuates" an "over reliance on municipal court fines as a primary source of revenues when in fact they represented less than 12% of city revenues for the last fiscal year." But there is no dispute that the City budget does, in fact, forecast an increase of nearly a million dollars in municipal code enforcement fines and fees in 2015 as reported in the Bloomberg News report.
The City goes so far as to direct FPD to develop enforcement strategies and initiatives, not to better protect the public, but to raise more revenue. In an April 2014 communication from the Finance Director to Chief Jackson and the City Manager, the Finance Director recommended immediate implementation of an "I-270 traffic enforcement initiative" in order to "begin to fill the revenue pipeline." The Finance Director's email attached a computation of the net revenues that would be generated by the initiative, which required paying five officers overtime for highway traffic enforcement for a four-hour shift. The Finance Director stated that "there is nothing to keep us from running this initiative 1,2,3,4,5,6, or even 7 days a week. Admittedly at 7 days per week[] we would see diminishing returns." Indeed, in a separate email to FPD
- ↑ Katherine Smith, Ferguson to Increase Police Ticketing to Close City's Budget Gap, Bloomberg News (Dec. 12, 2014), http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-12/ferguson-to-increase-police-ticketing-to-close-city-s-budget-gap.
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