On Fines & Fees and Police Killings
Last year I partnered with an undergraduate student to do a study: Fines & Fees Collection and Enforcement In Wilmington, Delaware. In short, we found that the City of Wilmington has, over the years, grown more dependent on this source of revenue, despite it being inefficient and inequitable.
The project was initially designed as me supervising a summer fellowship project of my collaborator, Hoda Bazzi, but it soon became clear that this project was more than a summer’s worth of work. I still feel a satisfaction from how we, with only scraps of data from city budget documents and a flawed set of survey responses collected by advocates, outlined a system whereby city residents were getting fleeced while most of the revenue the City was getting went right back out to paying collection costs. The report got a good bit of local media coverage (see here and here and here), and while the City disagreed with our conclusions, it did not dispute our findings.
Since the report came out I’ve wanted to follow up by using Wilmington as a case study illustrating how high levels of fines and fees collection are linked to more incidences of police killing people. The more general connection between these two phenomena was shown in a 2023 study by Brenden Beck. Wilmington, which has had a couple of high profile police killings in the past few years, seemed well-positioned to illustrate how this association works at the ground level.
What would have made Wilmington an interesting case to look at is that police play a small role in actually issuing tickets and collecting fines and fees, which is done through private contractors and employees in the City’s Department of Finance. I hypothesized that tickets and shootings would be two very different, concrete manifestations of structural violence in a extension of what my UD colleague Yasser Payne and coauthors write about in their recent book Murder Town USA.
The more I looked into police killings, however, the less Wilmington’s numbers looked anomalous. Using data from the website Fatal Encounters, Wilmington, over the past decade or so, has roughly averaged 1 case of police killing someone in the line of duty every two years. Adjusting for population size, this rate is higher than most cities. But looking at the population adjusted numbers of such killings in six mid-Atlantic and northeastern cities that are comparable to Wilmington in population, in majority-minority status, high poverty, and high crime (Chester PA, Harrisburg PA, Camden NJ, Atlantic City NJ, Trenton NJ, Hartford CT), only Atlantic City had a substantially lower rate over the past quarter century. And looking at similar sized majority-minority cities with better poverty and crime stats (e.g., Hempstead NY, Mount Vernon NY, East Orange NJ, Plainfield NJ), all tended to have much lower levels of police shootings.
This doesn’t necessarily invalidate a structural violence-based explanation, but it precludes using Wilmington as a Rosetta Stone for explaining how the commonplace act of issuing fines and fees co-occurs with the more monumental and traumatic events where police inflict lethal force. I may continue to pursue this line of inquiry, which now looks to broaden to a more general study of Wilmington and the set of six comparable cities, and examine each city’s individual trajectory within these more general parameters. But before I do that, I’ll let this project sit for awhile.
In looking at my recent inquiries into city profiles and police killing, I’m struck how it feels like I’ve read a book where, instead of leafing through a bound volume, I have read pieces from here and there, browsed the internet, done some basic data gathering and analysis, and in this process have learned much and enjoyed doing it. In a literary sense, all of this came together to climax with the realization that while Wilmington shouldn’t be praised here, its police force does seem to kill at levels lower than those in comparable cities.
While this blog entry starts in Wilmington, it concludes in Camden. The two cities are very similar in size and socioeconomics. Larry Sherman’s 2018 article on fatal police violence described Camden PD’s deliberate effort to use less lethal force. Camden police have substantially reduced the number of people they killed since 2013, when it reorganized its police. In the decade prior to their reorganization, Camden police killed 14 people, compared to the eleven years after, when it has killed 3 (and no one in the five years since Sherman wrote his article). By comparison, in Wilmington since 2013, police have killed 6.
I wonder how much Camden collects in fines and fees.