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Perhaps you are a white, middle-class resident of south or west St. Louis County who has never received a speeding ticket. Or maybe you did receive one, but you paid it and you had no issues with the court. Maybe you’re even a black, middle-class resident of the county who has never had a problem with the law. Whatever your situation, your reaction to the municipal court crisis has been fairly simple:

Shut up and pay your tickets. Don’t break the law. Stop whining. No problem.

Personal experience colors our understanding of events. That can make it hard to have empathy for the literally thousands of residents of this county who have had their civil rights violated by a secretive court system that is bringing shame to the entire Missouri judiciary.

So, if you’re in the “just pay the tickets� crowd, .

The 54-year-old manager of a behavioral health center and resident of Northwoods had been unable to renew her driver’s license since March because the city of Northwoods had asked the state Department of Revenue to put a hold on it because of unpaid tickets.

How did she get those tickets? Her car, sitting in her driveway because she didn’t have the money to repair it, was ticketed by Northwoods police for expired tags, failure to obtain an up-to-date Northwoods city sticker on her windshield, and then a second time for expired tags.

Repeat: The car was in her driveway. Her taxes and insurance were paid. She was a responsible, working citizen of Northwoods, which, with no legal authority to do so, stopped her from obtaining a driver’s license.

On Thursday, after Post-Dispatch reporters Jeremy Kohler and Jennifer Mann brought to the attention of the state, the Department of Revenue lifted the hold. It is not legal for cities to place a hold on driver’s licenses for nonmoving violations, but the state has been doing it in many cases, possibly hundreds or thousands of cases, because some municipalities in St. Louis County have been throwing their weight around.

On Friday, as Ms. Ross was waiting to obtain her new license, she asked an important question: “How many other people have this problem right now?�

The answer, Mr. Kohler and Ms. Mann found, is lots. Determining a precise number is difficult because the same municipal courts that have been violating the law by forcing improper suspensions of driver’s licenses have also been violating the Sunshine Law. They are ignoring requests seeking open records about what has happened to people who have been through their court system.

In Breckenridge Hills, for instance, the clerk has been regularly threatening people who owe fines for nonmoving violations with license suspension, even when she knew such an action was outside the power of the court.

Amazingly, even those pushing to reform the municipal court system because it had been for cash-strapped cities, even those who knew that changes were necessary, people like Frank Vatterott, a judge leading other municipal court judges and attorneys in devising some reform measures, didn’t know this sort of low-rent government tyranny was happening.

Yes, tyranny. We use that word because that’s what conservatives, in particular, call government overreach into private lives. And that’s what this is. It is yet another symptom of a rotten municipal court system that, for the most part, should not even exist.

If keeping the system in place is the goal, there is no easy fix to its myriad problems. This week, Judge Roy L. Richter of the Missouri Court of Appeals Eastern District issued his report on the Ferguson municipal court to the Missouri Supreme Court. The state’s highest court had taken over the Ferguson court after the Department of Justice found a pattern of civil rights violations and outright racism in the application of justice.

What is that because the judges and prosecutors in municipal courts are mostly part-time players who have other jobs, the clerks do much of the legal work, but on behalf of the wrong branch of government. The clerks work for the city, not the courts, and that creates an inherent conflict. Their job becomes helping the city raise money, not applying justice according to proper legal principles.

This is why the by the Missouri Legislature, which will reduce the incentives for municipal courts to be sources of revenue by capping at 12.5 percent of total budgets what cities can take in from traffic offenses, must be only the beginning.

The most important reforms can continue to come from the Missouri Supreme Court. Taking over the Ferguson court was one good step. So was changing the rules that limit the courts’ ability to jail poor people for inability to pay steep fines. But the conflicts of interest identified in Judge Richter’s report must be addressed. So must the ongoing legal conflicts that see attorneys taking turns being judges in some cities, prosecutors in others and defense attorneys in others.

And with courts refusing to operate in the open, it is impossible to know how many Angela Rosses there are in the system, taxpaying citizens whose rights are being violated by a government operating out of the bounds of law.

The fixes must be radical.

Today, we renew our call in all of the St. Louis County municipal courts. The proper response to a system that won’t follow the law and can’t properly be audited is to wipe out the offenses for a period of time. No revenue. No fines. Just start over.

Next, the Supreme Court must hasten its trip to the logical end-point: mass consolidation of courts. There’s no need for anything like 82 municipal courts in St. Louis County. The current system is a travesty that taints the entire judiciary with suspicion.

The municipal courts in St. Louis County should be consolidated into one countywide municipal court with multiple divisions, perhaps as many as four, with full-time judges and clerks, all reporting up the line to the Supreme Court, just like the rest of the state’s courts. The Seven Supremes don’t have to wait for the implementation of Senate Bill 5 to start the dominoes falling. They alone are in charge of the court system. They alone bear the responsibility of maintaining its integrity.

That’s what justice would look like. Anything less is a compromise, and justice is not served when it’s compromised.