If the shooting of Michael Brown had taken place about 500 yards to the southeast, he would have died not in Ferguson, Mo., but in the neighboring city of Jennings. The court system there, which is overseen by a white judge but has almost exclusively black defendants, routinely sends people to jail for failure to pay minor traffic fines, a new lawsuit alleges.

Had the shooting occurred three and a half miles to the north, the world’s attention might have turned to the city of Florissant, where in 2013, the police stopped black motorists at a rate nearly three times their share of the population. Less than four miles to the northwest, in Calverton Park, court fines and fees accounted for over 40 percent of the city’s general operating revenue last year.

But it was Ferguson and its government that came under federal scrutiny almost unprecedented for a city of its size, culminating in a Justice Department report last week that described explicit racism among city officials, abusive policing and a system that seemed to view people “less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.” And it is Ferguson that will almost certainly be forced to make wholesale changes.

Ferguson, a city of 21,000, is unusual in some respects — it has issued the most warrants of any city in the state relative to its size, for example — but the unfairness in its court system that the Justice Department highlighted is not limited to it, to St. Louis County or even to Missouri. In one meeting of federal investigators, a Missouri F.B.I. agent told colleagues that if he had been asked to predict which cities were most likely to erupt over racially charged policing, Ferguson would have been low on his list. Yet Ferguson’s neighbors are not under the same pressure to change.