it's a modest suburb of San Luis with its porches and picket fences but it's perfectly ordinary appearance belies what locals tell us is a predatory system of fines apply to the mostly poor and black residents 84 year old Miss Mingo makes sure to have her lawn cropped to avoid any trouble with the authorities and if it gets a bit long do you get a reminder of the city yeah I do so they what they stop by another drive-by okay and they'll say uh miss mingoue you better get your learn cut cut you know this is page del it's just 15 minutes drive from Ferguson and it's the kind of place where you can get a citation if you walk on the road rather than the footpath if you don't paint your house if your hedges more than three feet tall if your barbecue is on your front porch and if you drink a beer too close to that barbecue expect to find Paige Dale's list of local ordinances runs to hundreds of pages like any place it has mundane rules ranging from rubbish collection to keeping pets but it's also forbidden to have a basketball hoop on the front of your house or a window without drapes or blinds and if a teenager wears their genes too low their parents can be fined or even go to prison we'll get ourselves a question it's not just pagedale similar laws are in place in towns across America activists say they criminalize the poor ordinary folks of ordinary means either don't have the means to pay or they forgotten to pay an arrest warrant is issued people get picked up it's thrown into jail and here they find themselves with a criminal record as a consequence of really a minor offense the extreme of this is my crown as a consequence of jaywalking police officer confronts him this leads us to an interaction which led to illuminate global civil rights crisis when reviewing the systemic racism faced by african-american citizens of Ferguson last year the Department of Justice found police were basically a collection agency maximising revenue but pagedale city officials say they're not using their laws to raise revenue they're trying to keep neighborhoods safe and many of the tickets they issue are simply warnings and the town of just over 3,000 people the city issued more than 2,000 citations last year that had to repaint the house so that the handrails of the front porch the back porch the roof you know the parking lot the fence I put the fence up they dropped me a ticket off in the mail a month later after I put the fence up it just goes on and on and on so how much have you had to pay out thousands of dollars they call it police at earring don't they that's one of the terms I've heard roadside pirates as well police policing for profit is another one Larry Kirk is the police chief in old monroe 30 miles drive from pagedale he says the increase in ordnance citations is driving a wedge between police and the communities they meant to serve we're no longer seen as a protector of the community but somehow kinda like the harasser of the community there's times where I actually despise it do the fact that I know that it's a good person might neighborhood or community and I know that they may be struggling they've been laid off and I have to go there and can remind them of a struggle big whoop small town rules and big time problems it is hardening reality here Kylie Morris Channel 4 News pagedale Missouri you