Cities with more African Americans rely more on fines for revenue

The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, also focused attention on how police and city officials use fines taken from communities of color to fund city administration. In new research, which examined revenue data from more than 9,000 cities, Michael W. Sances and Hye Young You find that cities with a larger African American population collect a greater number of fines. They also find that the relationship between race and fines is much weaker in cities with Black representation on city councils.