It’s an old story in Ferguson, Missouri. A female worker, dressed in nursing scrubs, is driving to work when she’s pulled over for expired tags she couldn’t afford to renew. She gives the cop a phony name because she has warrants for fines she couldn’t afford to pay to Ferguson and other municipalities whose ticket-writing cops and corrupt municipal courts prey on poor people like her. So the cop arrests her and takes her to Ferguson’s jail, where a city jail guard demands and gets oral sex in exchange for her release, and then forcibly rapes her.
Perhaps in another time and place, she wouldn’t have said anything. After all, it would be her word against his, and who are the police and courts going to believe? Certainly not her, because then the city would have to pay her compensation — perhaps a lot of compensation. Perhaps Michael Brown’s death has changed how people like her think about their corrupt and oppressive city government. Or maybe she thought of another woman, named Rosa Parks, who finally had enough of injustice and oppression.
She’s suing the bastard in federal court for violating her civil rights.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/246914773/Ferguson-Office-Rape-Case
Anyone who believes the unrest in Ferguson is merely about one cop shooting one black person to death is naive. What’s happening in Ferguson is a spontaneous citizen uprising against rotten, corrupt, abusive, predatory exploitation that disguises itself as government. An uprising that was years, lifetimes, in the making. In a place were a traffic ticket not only gets you fined, but also gets you raped.
The same kind of uprising we saw begin a half century ago when a brave black woman refused to move to the back of the bus.
Update: The ex-jail guard has now been fired, arrested, and charged with rape.
