John Shaw, chief executive of Ferguson



John Shaw runs Ferguson. As chief executive officer, he hires and fires whom he pleases. Not the mayor, but John Shaw, is king. Whatever Ferguson is or isn't, falls in his lap. In the six months since Mike Brown was killed, have you ever heard of him? Me neither.

Over and over again, Shaw is cited in the Ferguson report for being the primary driver of the system that over-criminalized black Ferguson residents for profit. While he actively engaged in conversations with the DOJ about how he would improve the system and pledged to make changes, he defiantly refused to actually to act on them.

Hired in 2007, Shaw had been at the job for eight years and drove revenue up year after year on the backs of Ferguson's black residents by any means necessary. No single person was more aware of how the Ferguson budget worked and why it worked that way than Shaw.

The Ferguson we know today doesn't exist in spite of him—he built it.







Ronald J. Brockmeyer, Ferguson municipal judge





Ronald Brockmeyer is the one and only municipal court judge who ran the show in Ferguson. A defense attorney by trade , Brockmeyer terrorized African Americans in Ferguson as his side job. He doesn't even live in Ferguson, but lives and works in neighboring St. Charles, and drove in to Ferguson to work as the part-time municipal court judge who brought full-time pain to African Americans. In the DOJ report, Brockmeyer is listed over and over again for boosting fees on African Americans to increase revenue for the city in ways that were both abusive and unlawful. The Ferguson report explicitly states that Brockmeyer colluded with the Ferguson police and prosecutor to boost fees for the government.

Radley Balko of the Washington Post revealed all the way back in September, just a month after Mike Brown was killed, how St. Louis area towns were squeezing its black residents for profit, that Ronald Brockmeyer not only served as chief prosecutor for the town of Florissant—where he routinely made life miserable for African Americans—but also served as head prosecutor in the towns of Vinita Park and Dellwood, drawing salaries for each position in addition to his salary as judge in Ferguson.



According to the recent white paper published by the ArchCity Defenders, the chief prosecutor in Florissant Municipal Court makes $56,060 per year. It’s a position that requires him to work 12 court sessions per year, at about three hours per session. The Florissant prosecutor is Ronald Brockmeyer, who also has a criminal defense practice in St. Charles County, and who is also the chief municipal prosecutor for the towns of Vinita Park and Dellwood. He is also the judge – yes, the judge — in both Ferguson and Breckenridge Hills.

Let's summarize this.

Brockmeyer, who still practices as a defense attorney, is:

—Lead Prosecutor for Florissant

—Municipal Prosecutor for Vinita Park

—Municipal Prosecutor for Dellwood

—Municipal Judge for Ferguson

—Municipal Judge for Breckenridge Hills

In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find one single person who is making more money in more ways off of violating the constitutional rights of African Americans in and around St. Louis than Brockmeyer. It's likely that he is used in and around all of these towns for the very reason that he so harshly judges and prosecutes African Americans for the single reason of boosting revenues for these local governments. He gets the job done.

In Florissant, Brockmeyer helped create similar conditions described by the DOJ in Ferguson.



Just inside the courthouse/gymnasium door in Florissant, two police officers and a court clerk check people in. In the middle of the gym, about 200 chairs sit neatly aligned in rows. Court has been in session for over an hour now, but most of the seats are still occupied. About 80 percent of the people in the gym tonight are black, even though blacks make up just 27 percent of the town. According to statistics compiled by Missouri’s attorney general’s office, 71 percent of the people pulled over by Florissant police in 2013 were black. The search and arrest rates for blacks were also twice as high as those rates for whites, even though whites were more likely to be found with contraband, a contradiction that has also been widely reported in Ferguson.

Alongside Shaw who managed the city and Brockmeyer who managed the court system, the corrupt system detailed by the DOJ could not have existed without Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson, who managed the police officers who routinely cited, arrested, assaulted, and harassed African Americans without cause. A stone-cold liar, as recently as last month Chief Jackson went on CBS News to boldly proclaim that "there is not a racial problem in the police department" and went on to detail how racial profiling simply doesn't exist in Ferguson.

Except it does.

Jackson oversees one of the most discriminatory police departments in America and has been at the helm for nearly every single racist incident in his department described in the DOJ Ferguson report. Not only was he fully aware of all of those incidents, he has stonewalled and denied that any of them ever existed for months, insisting that he and the department are simply misunderstood. More than ever, we now understand Jackson and the corrupt force that he has overseen very clearly.

These men cannot remain in office to oversee any type of renewal in Ferguson. They are the problem. Not only should they be terminated—these men need to face real consequences for their illegal and unconstitutional practices. They have violated the rights of thousands of people and fostered a deeply embedded culture of racism in Ferguson.