The track record of “riot commissions” convened after major public disturbances is that they gather dust once they assure the public that something vaguely positive seems to be happening. To its credit, the commission of community leaders appointed to look into the volatile racial protests that rocked Ferguson, Mo., last year did not make that mistake. The 198-page report issued by the Ferguson Commission last week warns from its very first pages that palliatives won’t do this time: Leaders must enact a raft of urgently needed changes, or St. Louis and its ring of disjointed suburbs will never get beyond the deeply troubling mix of racial prejudices and government abuses laid bare in Ferguson.
“We know that talking about race makes a lot of people uncomfortable,” the 16-member commission says at the outset. “But make no mistake: This is about race.” In parsing the protests that followed the police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, the report offers 47 recommendations for change including:
— The consolidation of a crazy quilt of 60 local police forces and 81 municipal courts that, investigators found, preyed on black citizens in a fierce competition to fill municipal coffers. Minor violations were inflated and breadwinners unable to pay fines were jailed, all in a fundraising scheme to bolster local budgets. Black motorists were 75 percent more likely than white motorists to be pulled over by police.
— The creation of a statewide public database to begin tracking police use of force. Such basic data is widely unavailable across the nation — a fact uncovered in protests and controversies that erupted elsewhere. The report also recommended that the state attorney general be named as special prosecutor in cases where civilians are killed by police officers.
— Broad improvements in social, educational and economic conditions, starting with a near doubling of the minimum wage, to $15; a crackdown on usurious “payday” lending that chains needy families deeper in debt; “inclusionary zoning” policies to build low-income housing in communities offering better schools and opportunity; and the expansion of state Medicaid to cover those in greatest need of health care.
It is already clear that the state’s Republican-dominated Legislature is opposed in doctrinaire fashion to the expansion of Medicaid to enable poor citizens to take full advantage of the Affordable Care Act. This is irresponsible in a suburban region where, the commission points out, life expectancy varies from 91.4 years in predominantly white Wildwood to 55.9 years in mostly black Kinloch. Missouri legislators have refused to approve earlier useful proposals to control the use of lethal force, including one requiring body cameras on police officers.
The commission’s worthy recommendations will need strong support from top political leaders and even more from the community if true solutions are to be attempted. Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat who commissioned the report, vows not to be defeated by cynicism in demanding that the Legislature face up to what one member of the commission terms the “uncomfortable truths about this region we all call home.” Failure to act guarantees that the Ferguson report will slip into the sorry archive of might-have-beens in the nation’s continuing history of racial discrimination.