When reading actual anecdotes about those riots against police brutality (which has occurred mainly in the Midwest cities, and quite regularly for numerous year

When reading actual anecdotes about those riots against police brutality (which has occurred mainly in the Midwest cities, and quite regularly for numerous years, from much before the BLM protests), you start to have a very different picture of what’s really going on, that doesn’t get articulated in the mainstream media. From the book Hinterland by Phil A. Neel, talking about the Ferguson protests: “The perfect storm had been building for some time. Ferguson is at the bottom of the income spectrum and has acted as a sort of vanguard for the outward march of suburban poverty. Like many postwar suburbs, its heyday was in the 1950s and ’60s, which saw successive doublings of the population until it reached a peak of nearly 30,000 in 1970. Deindustrialization beginning in the ’70s was then matched with a continual drop in population to about 21,000 today, in line with St Louis’s historic population loss. As the city grew smaller and poorer, its racial demographics also flipped. As late as the 1990 Census, Ferguson was still 73.8 percent white and 25.1 percent black (close to the proportions of neighboring Florissant today), but by 2010 this situation had entirely reversed (to 29.3 percent white and 67.4 percent black). Inflation-adjusted income dropped, and unemployment doubled from around 5 percent in 2000 to an average of 13 percent between 2010 and 2012. The political establishment reflected this history. At the beginning of the riots, the city government was helmed by a white mayor, a white police chief, and five white and one Hispanic city council people. Combined with this, the dwindling population, fleeing industry, and plummeting property values had created a budgetary crisis, forcing many of the area’s small municipalities to rely less on their shrinking tax base and more on extra-tax fees and fines, enforced by the police and facilitated by the city’s arcane court system. The result was that Ferguson and similar suburbs existed in what the Huffington Post called “a totalizing police regime beyond any of Kafka’s ghastliest nightmares.” Out of a population of roughly 21,000, over 16,000 Ferguson residents had arrest warrants issued. And this number only counts individuals with warrants, not the total number of warrants. In 2013 this figure was a staggering 35,975, roughly 1.5 warrants per person in the city. These warrants were part of a complex racket designed to impose unrelenting fines on the poor population in order to fund the city government, which itself had largely been redesigned to facilitate this predatory practice. In 2013 fines, court fees, and other such extortions accounted for some 20 percent of the city’s budget. These fines were disproportionately applied to the city’s black residents, with black drivers twice as likely to be stopped, searched, and arrested as their white counterparts.”