Joy Gilfilen, host of iChange Justice, opens a conversation with a Wall Street bond market trader about how an arrest generates papers that become municipal assets traded on the stock market. This brings a new level of discussion to the tangled-up business of justice, and to the distortions that happen in our society as we get more siloed in our jobs.
In investigative journalism, people often talk about following the money trail. In this case, we are "following the number trail". How does a 911 incident or arrest produce a case or cause # (a ticket) given by a police officer, become a tracking number inside a municipal system, and a bond that is traded on Wall Street as part of a municipal asset bundle that produces revenue in retirement funds? Most of us working in each step of the paper trail transactions have no idea what the numbers mean, how they change form, or how to track them individually. Mostly we don't recognize the links and why this matters to us in our individual communities. It is all obscured behind layers of changing numbers embedded deep inside our complex systems of law and justice.
