Some Ferguson residents protested potential cuts to the city’s consent decree during a public hearing Tuesday, arguing they would halt progress made over the past nine years.
The proposal approved 4-3 last week would cut funding in half, to about $210,000 over the next fiscal year.
The cuts would affect funding of the Ferguson Monitor team, which oversees the city’s compliance with the consent decree. The new budget wouldn’t cut funding to police training, one of the 19 areas that the city had to reform under the decree, Councilman Nick Kasoff said.
“The consent decree has been a tremendously expensive thing for what is frankly a small and not very affluent city,” said Kasoff, who voted for the cuts. “We want to keep doing the good work, but we’ve got to stop paying all the lawyers and bureaucrats that are literally taking hundreds of thousands of dollars a year out of our city’s budget.”
Kasoff said the consent decree is fully funded through the end of the calendar year. The cuts are expected to be finalized through a resolution at the next council meeting later this month.
The city has spent about $6 million on the consent decree since 2016. Kasoff said that while it has led to successes in reforms, it’s also been a financial burden.
“If you’re a family of four in Ferguson, you’re paying nearly $400 a year for the consent decree,” Kasoff said.
The tense hearing Tuesday featured commenters who argued this would still set the city’s accomplishments back.
“We’re too close,” Ferguson resident Donald Stevens said. “I can't say it's an arm's length, but I'm thinking that we're very close.”
At least one commenter agreed that it was time to cut funding, arguing that the city has made strides in policing.
“Any racist cops that were here, and they were here and they were everywhere, they’re gone,” Wendell Phillips Berwick said.
The city entered into a consent decree in 2016 a couple of years after a white Ferguson police officer killed Michael Brown Jr., a Black teenager. The decree compelled the city to make changes to its municipal codes, policing and municipal courts following an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice that found the city’s policies perpetuated racial inequities.
Earlier this year, Ferguson officials announced it was three to five years away from finishing the compliance and had completed about 45% to 60% of the agreement. City officials said last month that they’re finished changing municipal ordinances and are almost finished with municipal court reforms.
Other updates include improvements to the city’s community policing initiatives, including regular interactions between residents and officers and a safe streets program in which residents and officers participate in a neighborhood watch initiative.
“All the work will go on, we’ll just stop paying the people in Washington,” Kasoff said. “We just want to get the bureaucracy done.”
The Trump administration has attempted to back away from enforcing consent decrees in municipalities across the U.S., including in Minneapolis and Louisville. Those cities were at the center of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor by police in Louisville.
Even if the Justice Department pushes to end the agreement, any attempt to drop the decree would need the approval of U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry.
Cutting funding right now would stall progress that the city has already made, St. Louis County NAACP President John Bowman said in a statement.
“If we are just now beginning to connect the community to law enforcement, wouldn’t it make sense to give it more time,” Bowman said. “This seems like a low-ball attempt to bail on the remaining reforms.”
Former council member Fran Griffin worried the cuts could bring legal troubles, including a contempt of court finding.
“That's the first thing that comes to my mind,” Griffin said.
Councilman Jamil Franklin was also concerned about legal consequences.
“Our city attorney did not advise us to cut funds,” Franklin said. “We’re taking a risk of upsetting the judge.”
