On a recent morning, Anne Stuhldreher, her long hair stuffed under a yellow helmet, biked from her home in San Francisco’s Mission District to City Hall and settled into the Office of the Treasurer and Tax Collector. In the cubicles around her, city workers processed tax payments and chased late fees for everything from fire alarm pranks to General Hospital bills. Stuhldreher was there, however, to question the fairness of those fees and more like them — the $71 parking ticket, the $116 Muni fare-evasion fine, the $150 homeless camping citation. She’s the country’s first-ever director of financial justice for a city. Her job is to figure out which government fines and fees unfairly punish the poor and middle class.

“I started thinking about this many years ago when I got pulled over near my house,” Stuhldreher said. “I didn’t come to a complete stop at a stop sign. Many people in my neighborhood had gotten this ticket, and I knew it was several hundred dollars.” At the time, she’d been working with the city on financial programs for low-income residents and had learned that, according to one estimate, 63 percent of Americans wouldn’t have access to $500 cash in a bind. “What happens when people can’t pay?” she wondered.

The ticket ended up being dismissed, and Stuhldreher didn’t think about the topic much further. Then, in 2015, Stuhldreher read about the withering U.S. Department of Justice report on Ferguson, Missouri’s police department, following the killing of Michael Brown. Investigators found that the city’s finance director had encouraged police to make up for a tax shortfall by aggressively doling out traffic tickets and petty fees. Many officers disproportionately targeted black residents, who were treated “less as constituents to be protected,” according to the report, “than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.” “I’m a big believer in the power of government to do good things,” Stuhldreher told me, “so when I started seeing what was happening in Ferguson, I’m like, this is predatory. This is predatory government.”

Stuhldreher began studying the countless fees meted out by local, county, and state governments. The bail system, for instance, puts a price on freedom that the wealthy can pay but the poor can’t. Many counties charge parents for the days their kid spends in juvenile hall, a double punishment that further stresses low-income families already in distress; others charge probationers for their electronic ankle bracelet, squeezing those who, because of their criminal record, usually have trouble getting jobs. If a homeless person in San Francisco is ticketed for urinating in the street or sleeping outside and fails to appear in court, a judge issues a warrant for his arrest, which disqualifies him from applying for housing programs in the future. And consider that ticket for rolling through a stop sign: If a traffic ticket goes unpaid in San Francisco for 20 days, it can be slapped with a $300 late fee and eventually sent to a collections agency, which can sink a person’s credit. Four million Californians — 17 percent of the adult population — have had their driver’s licenses suspended for unpaid traffic fines and fees, debts they’ll struggle with if they can’t get to work.