Small towns in much of the country are dependent on punitive fines and fees

https://www.governing.com/topics/finance/gov-addicted-to-fines.html

by wglb • 7 years ago

166 158 7 years ago

SteveNuts• 7 years ago

There are a few small towns in Minnesota where you will see an officer posted up right where the highway turns from 65mph to 45mph through town. They will be there almost all day, without fail.

I don't think it's a coincidence that their cruisers are all brand new. It's obviously a source of income more than anything.

ComputerGuru• 7 years ago

Yes, but thanks to this report you can now prove it and see how prevalent this practice is.

drivers992• 7 years ago

There aren't any Minnesota towns on the map in the article so it must not be more than 10%, presumably.

It is interesting to see some towns that are famous in my local area for it:

Morrison, CO (45.3%). 150,000 drivers pass through it daily, with a population of 431. It's hard to argue with as they stop people if they're going 15 MPH over the limit. [1] I think people here just get used to the lack of enforcement of the other cities.

Mountain View, CO is only 0.09 sq mi (0.24 km2), population ~528. Sandwiched between Denver and the next suburb over, writes more tickets combined than Denver, Boulder, and Aurora. A lot of the tickets are for things like seatbelts and cracked windshields [2].

[1] https://www.speedtrap.org/colorado/morrison/ Quote: "They got me going 41 in a 25. $135 ticket. They are making a killing by gouging people for no reason so beware!" LOL

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_View,_Colorado#Police...

lazerpants• 7 years ago

I'm not sure if 285 technically runs through Morrison, but there are lots of tickets issued right there because it is essentially a highway but has a low speed limit. They could raise the speed limit by 10-20mph and it would probably still be safe. There are also several elevation changes that make it easier for a traffic officer to hide.

Weird that Mountain View is in the mix. Maybe it's just a statistical anomaly because the "town" is tiny and is actually in a metro area and may include a portion I-70.

non-entity• 7 years ago

I grew up on the outer edge of the metro Atlanta area, and I remember a lot of people joking about this small mill town and how they made all their money off traffic tickets. Eventually, I'd here a ton of notes about these type of towns everywhere I lived.

wil4217• 7 years ago

In Georgia you can see the path I-75 and I-16 take through the southern half of the state.

16 is notorious for speed traps and other shadier stuff. Including road blocks on exit ramps with drug dogs waiting to sniff cars. They bait people into getting off at the exits by leaving fake signs about upcoming road blocks. When College kids were moving or getting out of school they’d be out in full force.

Sadly my Dad grew up in one of these towns. The fines were the only way to keep parts of the town alive.

BubRoss• 7 years ago

Why were the fines the only way to keep parts of the town alive?

wil4217• 7 years ago

The police lacked funding and the population of the towns were falling. If they raised taxes the very limited business could leave. The state did do something to prevent speed traps[1], not sure if it worked or passed.

Sheriff is a political job and even more so in small towns. It’s just as much of a mayor type job as it is a policing one.

Their entire school system had less students than my high school in metro Atlanta.

[1]https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/spee...

munificent• 7 years ago

Because small towns in the US are dying. Manufacturing and ag are down, services and tech are up. The former provided jobs evenly spread throughout the US where raw materials and good land were. The latter encourage consolidation in denser metro areas.

A local government is an economic entity too. It takes in income from some set of people and distributes services in return. Taxes mean getting income from the residents, which in turn means those residents need to be acquiring money from outside of the area to compensate for that. When jobs are dying, that money stops coming in. Traffic fines let a small town extract money directly from people outside of the city, which means it places no burden on the citizens receiving the services.

I'm not saying this is morally justified, but that's how the system works economically.

These small towns are in a really rough spot. Many services are not fully elastic and can't arbitrarily scale down. It's not like you can say "the fire department only puts out fires between 3 and 6 PM." A sewer line that only goes halfway to a house is not 50% useful. Below a certain level of wealth and density, a city simply can't sustain the services it needs to provide to its citizens. Their options are:

1. Take in money from larger government organizations. State and federal funding can keep these cities alive. This is how, for example, they're able to still provide mail service, because it's the US Postal Service. With this, basically the larger metro areas are supporting these small towns out of duty to the greater good.

2. Extract money from people living outside of the area directly. That's what this article is about.

3. Disincorporate entirely. This does happen sometimes, but obviously this has a lot of downsides. Actual humans do live in these places, and these cities have long histories. Times change and some things do naturally go away, but there is a material loss when it happens.

bksenior• 7 years ago

If you've driven between LA and SF you'll most likely be very aware of Kings County. A notorious speed trap that requires you to be on site to contest their questionable infractions.

mc32• 7 years ago

If you’re in the “Jefferson” counties of northern California it’s not unusual to have cops waiting at the bottom of an off ramp for those drivers who practice “California rolls” at their stop signs. Locals seem to know better.

xfitm33• 7 years ago

And then you hire a lawyer who "has a good relationship" with a judge

SamReidHughes2• 7 years ago

I never knew that was a speed trap. How do they enforce it? It seemed really easy to see cop cars, as long as you slowed down for bridges.

lunias• 7 years ago

"keep parts of the town alive"

Which parts? The police force?

Seems to me that if your city doesn't bring in enough tax revenue to support a police force then you'd opt to have a volunteer police force.

What's the situation with fire departments in these towns?

wil4217• 7 years ago

They are likely volunteer only fire departments.

mieseratte3• 7 years ago

Any specific examples of this? I've been taking I-16 pretty routinely for most of my life, never heard of or ran into anything resembling a speed trap let alone bait.

Admittedly, I have some friends with a story about Georgia highway patrol / local PD setting up a roadblock off an interstate exit right by a Phish concert.

wil4217• 7 years ago

Yes I went to Georgia Southern briefly and had friends who graduated from there. A couple of our fraternity bothers got busted by the road block ahead trick. Maybe it was around Dublin.

Metter was/is a speed trap but I’ve only been through once in the past 5 years. Here’s a list from the AJC[1]. I can vouch for Doraville being a trap.

[1]https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ajc.com/news/local/traffic-...

bigred100• 7 years ago

I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for such towns to die. I don’t know if there’s any reason to live in a place where you don’t really have a means to do anything productive or (apparently) provide for yourself.

wil4217• 7 years ago

In a county where 35% of households are under the poverty line you don’t really have that kind of choice.

My father was able to move because he got into Georgia Tech.

siruncledrew• 7 years ago

Basically:

  - Town is poor and economically desolate.
  - Town gets money from being legally petty to try to stay afloat.
  - Everyone who gets fines hates Town; wants to avoid it. 
  - Town is poor and economically desolate.

Not a prime long-term strategy. If the Town is already on life-support, then short-sightedness is their de facto choice if the Town going belly-up is their other option.

wil4217• 7 years ago

Yea if you think like a rational person. They don’t care what happens after they leave only the appearance of things while they are in office.

jessaustin2• 7 years ago

Missouri lawmakers responded by lowering, to 20 percent, a cap on the proportion of general operating revenues that could come from minor traffic violations.

Previously the limit was 30% and before that it was 35%. That higher limit was imposed to deal with Macks Creek, MO, a village on a US highway in a valley between two steep hills. That village was coated in brake dust, until the legislature decided it doesn't really need police. I'm pleased at the progress we're making in this state.

ceejayoz• 7 years ago

That was the town with one cop per 50 residents, wasn't it?

jessaustin2• 7 years ago

I'm not sure if they ever had four cops? They did have two patrol cars, though, so it could have made sense. They didn't want anyone to sneak through at 46 MPH.

btilly• 7 years ago

Punitive fines and fees are bad. Abuse of civil forfeiture is worse. But worse still are a minority of towns that not only are dependent on punitive fines, but that levy them in a racially biased way.

See https://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/343143937/in-ferguson-court-f... for an explanation of how this helped ignite the racial tension that Ferguson had a few years ago.

DanBC• 7 years ago

Here's a short BBC radio programme about St Louis County, and it covers the same sort of thing. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pqskm

This edition of Crossing Continents goes out and about in St Louis County to meet the people who say they are victims of a system which sees arrest warrants issued for relatively minor misdemeanours. Many of the victims are poor and black. The programme also takes us into the courts, and out onto the freeways with some of the County's police, who say they are upholding the law and promoting road safety.
The US government is not so sure. One of the towns in question is Ferguson where riots erupted after a white police officer shot a young black man dead last summer. In a recent report on the riots, the Department of Justice concluded that the Ferguson police had been stopping people for no good reason. It said they were putting revenue before public safety.

oconnor663• 7 years ago

This seems like a huge problem. At the same time, it's easier to point out that it's a huge problem than to suggest a solution that doesn't have bad side effects. If the courts don't enforce the laws somehow, the worst repeat offenders end up seriously abusing their neighbors with no consequences. Replacing fines with time-consuming punishments like mandatory community service would be problematic, because low income folks often have little flexibility in their working hours, and getting fired from a job is even worse at a low level of income than it is for everyone else. It might be that just lowering the size of fines would help some, but it seems like a fine that couldn't hurt anyone also effectively punishes no one.

Maybe there's a middle ground where fines are punishing for repeat offenders, but ordinary folks who show up in court get a few slaps on the wrist before fines kick in? Are some of the laws already structured like this?

frittig2• 7 years ago

and then arresting people when they don't pay [the fine].

So what should the government do if someone doesn't pay their fine?

xoa2• 7 years ago

So what should the government do if someone doesn't pay their fine?

Just go through the process of taking the money instead, no different then a civil party who was owed a legitimate debt? There is no reason a fine should be any different. Just go through the standard process, get a court order for lien, and then just seize the money from any bank accounts, liquid assets, salary, or property of any value the person in question has (or ever will have in the future up to the statute of limitations). In fact the only real difference is that I don't think a fine is dischargeable in bankruptcy.

But why do you think there is any need to use force against the person in question, or pay to imprison them? It's not some moral issue, it's just a matter of them legitimately owing money. So just take the money (possibly allowing the working out of a payment plan). For the vast majority of cases that's all that's needed, and the few who truly live as hermits can be written off and suffer their own effective punishment anyway.

mieseratte3• 7 years ago

Depending on the reason, anything from additional fines, commuting the sentence to community service, or perhaps jail.

There's a big difference between someone not paying a fine because their flat-out broke and not paying it because "fuck the system, I'm above the law."

Zero-Tolerance and One-Size-Fits-All policies are destructively stupid and result in bad outcomes. Context matters in a system of jurisprudence, but ignoring it makes the lives of those implementing and managing them easier though, which is probably the point.

southphillyman• 7 years ago

Yea this was the "elephant in the room" as I read this article. Even if the budgetary requirements necessitate that you pull a ton of people over regardless of race, I imagine the instances where probable cause requires you to pull an individual out of the car for a search are heavily biased.

ErotemeObelus• 7 years ago

Pressing charges on black people to extract revenue from them is stealing.

starpilot• 7 years ago

Every time on the 395 between Bishop and Mammoth.

sizzzzlerz2• 7 years ago

That's CHP, not town cops or country sheriff except when driving through Bishop or getting off 395 to drive into Mammoth.

motohagiography2• 7 years ago

If they are going to use minor violations of the law as a pretext for revenue collection, they should call it what it is: kleptocracy.

If those places are dying out, it's probably best to let them turn into ghost towns because they have succumbed to corruption as a way of life.

duxup11• 7 years ago

I think Kleptocracy would only apply if the folks in charge are funneling funds to themselves.

If it is just what funds the government, that isn't a kleptocracy. Bad policy maybe, but not kleptocracy.

HarryHirsch• 7 years ago

Let's call it something else then: road piracy.

LanceH2• 7 years ago

The first thing revenue collection funds is revenue collection. Then possibly more revenue collection. Asset forfeiture efforts dry up substantially when the money is returned to the general fund instead of the capturing agencies. Just imagine if they returned the revenue to the people.

dsfyu404ed5• 7 years ago

These towns don't provide many services to the residents (this is covered in TFA). They're basically just paying their own salaries with the money.

mikeash6• 7 years ago

The folks in charge get paid by the government and the amount the government is able to pay is highly dependent on the amount of funding it gets.

motohagiography2• 7 years ago

If that municipal or county government is operated by unionized public workers, including police, then the revenue collection is going primarily to pay that union, who in turn fund politicians who continue their revenue collection policies to pay their members. It's capture, so in effect, kleptocracy.

ocschwar• 7 years ago

If they are going to use minor violations of the law as a pretext for revenue collection, they should call it what it is: kleptocracy.

Fancy word, there, son. 'round here we call it Dixie.

crossman2• 7 years ago

I'm genuinely surprised not to see any Rhode Island cities/towns on this. Speed cameras have shown up like a plague in Providence in the past year and are expected to spread throughout the state.

https://www.wpri.com/news/providence-speed-cameras-were-a-mo...

dsfyu404ed5• 7 years ago

This article is talking about fines as a proportion of overall revenue. In the Northeast they can fine the crap out of anything that moves and taxes revenues are still high enough (because there's so much expensive property, high incomes and other taxable stuff combined with decently high tax rates) that the fines are still not a significant percent of revenue.

crossman2• 7 years ago

Valid, and I don't know what the total fines are, but if the speed cameras alone netted 3.2 million last year it seems quite plausible that fines are accounting for 10% or more if I'm reading this report correctly http://www.providenceri.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Accou...

But you know, I'm not an accountant

deadmetheny2• 7 years ago

There's lots of towns very well-known for being speed traps in my part of the Midwest. My hometown in particular has a police force of approximately 8 full-time officers for a population of 5,000. There's absolutely no good reason to have so many cops for a population of that size, especially when the crime statistics are very low for non-traffic infractions. The only traffic ticket I've gotten in 30+ years was at 12:30 AM coming home from a concert in a larger city, going 5 MPH over the speed limit there. I'm sure he was pissed off that he couldn't also write me up for a DUI.

Excel_Wizard• 7 years ago

The U.S. has 284 police officers per 100,000 people.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...) That would translate to ~14 police officers for a town of your size.

saagarjha• 7 years ago

The police force doesn’t need to be spread evenly, especially in areas with little crime.

deadmetheny2• 7 years ago

Ok, sure, but that's not really a useful metric for a low population density area. Crime in my area is very low, violent crime especially, there's simply no need for that many police - they'd be doing nothing most of the time, if not for running speed traps and harassing bored teenagers.

LanceH2• 7 years ago

A lot of rural towns are at least as dependent on highway patrol and sheriffs.

Ensorceled• 7 years ago

8 officers is barely enough for 24-hour police coverage, so that's a good reason.

SkyBelow2• 7 years ago

8 full-time officers for a population of 5,000. There's absolutely no good reason to have so many cops for a population of that size

Doesn't that mean 2 officers on duty at any one time? There is ~160 hours in a week, so that is 4 40 hour blocks. Having two police active at any time seems reasonable (probably with them staggered so that when one swaps the other is only half way through their shift).

sizzzzlerz2• 7 years ago

When towns can't raise taxes to cover basic services or the revenue they do have dries up as the population shrink, there aren't a lot of options left. Transient taxes on hotel rooms or traffic fines are pretty much it.

not_a_cop75• 7 years ago

Hell, I'd say that any town that leverages against the economically poor to benefit the economically elite is bad, and just going by the way fines are handed out, that happens everywhere. Only a handful of countries fine you by according to how much you make. While doing this can add an extra incentive for the rich to be dishonest (which happens anyway), by not doing it you are essentially telling the rich that they are above the law - which is something that large swaths of ultrarich both already believe and know to be true.

madhadron• 7 years ago

Only a handful of countries fine you by according to how much you make.

Example: speeding tickets in Switzerland. A guy driving his Lamborghini through a village at 60mph had a ticket for several hundred thousand dollars handed to him while I was living there.

xfitm33• 7 years ago

Which is bad.

julianwachholz• 7 years ago

At 60mph ~= 100km/h in city limits (50km/h) it is not a simple fine anymore but a criminal charge. Fines are fixed no matter how much you make. (e.g. 1-5km/h above limit is CHF 40.00)

distances6• 7 years ago

I'm from a country with so-called day fines: a fine is a multiplier of your daily earnings. It boggles my mind that a similar system isn't in use everywhere. It's easy to understand and fair to everyone; a deterrent against infractions independent of your income.

appleiigs4• 7 years ago

If it was independent to your income, then your income should not matter. The fine should be proportional to the infraction/crime/damage.

CapricornNoble• 7 years ago

Yet another reason for the wealthy to obfuscate their earnings.

SamReidHughes2• 7 years ago

For starters, there are constitutional barriers, one being the excessive fines clause.

And there are multiple jurisdictions. Imagine Arizona giving a California resident a $50000 speeding ticket. Or L.A. (city) levying income based parking tickets on Beverly Hills and Orange County residents (neighboring communities with ultra wealthy people).

AWildC182• 7 years ago

This is especially annoying because for every dollar they collect, you can end up paying your insurance company 4+ times as much because they now think you're a terrible driver for getting these minor BS citations.

porpoisemonkey• 7 years ago

If you get caught for speeding in Michigan, the Golden rule is to always appeal the ticket. Unless you've been excessively reckless they'll typically knock it down to "impeding traffic" which carries a slightly higher fine (depending on your speed) but is not a moving violation and doesn't get reported to insurance. [1]

Impeding traffic is a civil infraction punishable by a fine. It is also considered a non-moving violation that does not add any points to the offender's Michigan driving record. Non-moving violations are not reported to the Michigan Secretary of State and are less likely to be detected by automobile insurance companies as a basis to raise rates. Municipal attorneys will frequently offer to reduce speeding tickets to an impeding traffic charge which avoids points on the driver's record but usually results in a bigger fine.

It's a pure money making scheme.

[1] https://www.monroecountylawyers.com/blog/2018/12/what-is-imp...

mikeash6• 7 years ago

“Money making scheme” is putting it mildly. If they're offering to not tell your insurance company in exchange for paying a larger fine, I would describe that as “extortion.”

ChrisArchitect• 7 years ago

was a good article in NYT Magazine about this, almost the same kind of piece "How Cities Make Money by Fining the Poor" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/magazine/cities-fine-poor...

donatj• 7 years ago

I've always thought society would be better off if fines and money confiscated by police was redistributed as tax relief rather than going to the government or police department doing the confiscation.

As it stands it only encourages abuse.

adrr• 7 years ago

I like the idea of going towards the states general road fund. Fines are used to improve the roads.

floatrock• 7 years ago

Budget shortfalls from various forms of "tax relief" (exemptions, no income tax, etc.) is one of the main factors the article suggests leads municipalities to collect operating income using these alternative fees and fines.

It is expensive to operate a bureaucracy or a public school district.

aswanson• 7 years ago

That only incentivizes the sheriff to order his police to shake down more to passers-through to get reelected by touting how much he reduces the tax load.

mikeash6• 7 years ago

Fines must be completely decoupled from the people levying them. They should be required to, say, give these funds to a blind trust which donates them to charities which don’t operate anywhere within 500 miles of the dining jurisdiction.

SkyBelow2• 7 years ago

No one involved in levying the fine (or deciding what is fined or how large a fine is) can benefit if you want to remove the conflict of interest. Perhaps the best thing to do is stick it all in a fund for helping victims of crimes when the criminal doesn't have enough funds to cover damages to the person (but even that isn't great).

ryandrake• 7 years ago

Shred the money that gets collected. This helps everyone by increasing the value of the dollar by an extremely tiny amount.

JustSomeNobody• 7 years ago

Waldo, Fl until the "Waldo Bill".

duxup11• 7 years ago

"Actions taken by the legislature in Louisiana and in other states have likely compounded the issue. According to Census survey data, in states with the most fine-reliant jurisdictions, localities incurred notably steeper state funding cuts than elsewhere nationally over the decade. Many of those same states have also enacted numerous revenue restrictions for cities over the years. In fact, according to research from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in states that implemented caps or limits on local property taxes starting in the late 1970s, fees and charges substantially increased as a share of all revenues that local governments raised."

I think this speaks to the larger issue, a structural problem about how revenues are gathered.

State legislators restrict or eliminate funding and cut off any other sources of funding, so they gather funds the only way they can providing a perverse incentive.

There's way too much focus on "cut taxes wherever" without much thought as to good governance and the results of such cuts.

dsfyu404ed5• 7 years ago

It's not as though cities and towns are using fine dollars to educate children and feed the homeless. They're not. They're using it to pay more police salaries so they can write more tickets. They're simply using the money to further their own existence. God forbid the towns be forced to find an alternate way to pay for, reduce or cut a service in the face of shrinking revenues.

duxup11• 7 years ago

I think the article adequately describes how difficult it is to "find an alternative" particularly when the state legislature is cutting off those paths.

shados2• 7 years ago

I always felt like punitive fines and fees, tickets, etc, should be de facto given out to a third party, unaffiliated charity. Got a ticket for not picking up after your dog? Money goes to an animal protection group.

Of course, even WITH the economic incentive a lot of these things get little to no attention/enforcement, so without it will be even less. Sigh. At least ridiculously random road rules would go away?

siavosh• 7 years ago

3rd party contributions may then incentivize the formation of special interest charity lobbies pushing for more fines unfortunately.

shados2• 7 years ago

Heh, dealing with the intersection of money and people is hard.

Lets just use the death penalty for everything. Less money involved then.

Oh damn, the people making injection drugs will lobby too... I just can't win.

peter_retief• 7 years ago

Same here South Africa, it has been said that for many small towns their main income is from speeding fines. Quite irritating if you go on a road trip and come back to a couple of speeding fines in the post

known• 7 years ago

It deters Investors

jasonjei• 7 years ago

If and when autonomous cars become a reality, I wonder what will small towns do to find new punitive fines and fees...

jandrewrogers• 7 years ago

This is unfortunately and notoriously true. It is how relatively impoverished towns without a real tax base generate enough revenue to provide basic services. These fines are usually selectively applied to people from outside the area, so there is little adverse consequence for the townspeople. It works this way throughout the rural US, though easily avoided if you diligently pay attention to and comply with the signage when in those kinds of areas.

Insufficient local tax base for small towns is a problem throughout the world, with many diverse solutions. This is the evolved and ad hoc US flavored version in the absence of a top-down official solution.

jacobwilliamroy• 7 years ago

Perhaps changing location in title from "the country" to "the U.S." would help international readers; some of whom have told me they feel annoyed because they need some acknowledgement that other countries exist.

testplzignore• 7 years ago

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio if you'd like to see how extreme this kind of corruption can get. It could be described as a military occupation of part of the United States by a rogue nation.

Balgair• 7 years ago

Along those lines:

Lyons CO, a town along the highway from Denver to Rocky Mountain National Park has a section where the speed limit drops from 55 to 25 within about 1/4th mile. Cops sit there all day long just fining tourists.

Kingman AZ is essentially a speed trap with more steps.

Just about any village on I-50 in Nevada does the speed step down too, typically from 75 to 35, as the highway goes through the village. The cops are typically not very well hidden either. As is similar to the Rome OH situation, if you are within sight, you are getting a fine. Top Gear ran into this issue in Season 12, episode 2 [0] and Clarkson was quite irrate on screen. Fortunately, I-80 is a much better and faster way across Nevada.

[0] https://www.topgear.com/show/series-12/episode-2

balls187• 7 years ago

Two places to always drive the speedlimit:

* On US Military Bases

* Near small towns

0xdeadbeefbabe• 7 years ago

This was a major plot point in Disney's Cars.

bogus_323423• 7 years ago

Government is "sticky". War taxes stick around long after the end of the war, and city bureaucracies stick around long after a city declines.

Nobody wants to accept that maybe a town of 5-20k people don't need 20-100 man police forces, and a far lower level of public services in general.

Nobody wants to admit they have to lower their standards of living in the face of adversity; instead we double-down on reproducing (or improving on) the standard of living of our forebears and thereby immiserate ourselves with the debts (or oppression in this case) needed to square that circle.

Even the most economically irrelevant areas of rural america have paved roads these days when they could simply have stuck with gravel, etc. In many ways we are trying to exceed the prior standard of living (progress!) all the while forgetting that the economic base of most of these places has either not improved or significantly worsened.

We all increase our standards of living at our own peril; one must save and capitalize first (which is actively punished by low interest rate policy). Taking this as a given, should we have expected any other outcome?

temp-dude-87844• 7 years ago

The financialization of modern life puts extra pressure on areas without much economic activity. Self-government enables local needs to be discussed and addressed while serving as a job program for more than just the few elected positions; it raises its own revenues but also generates new costs. Locally-generated revenue has to supplement scant subsidies from the state.

Within this template, a fortunate jurisdiction can collect fines and fees from out-of-towners without significantly making locals' lives miserable. An unfortunate jurisdiction harasses locals too. This is not unlike how corporations take advantage of laws, but with the added abuse potential of being able to make up laws too.

The state stepping in and forcing a disincorporation of the local jurisdiction isn't necessarily a good answer. It stops the immediate symptom of near-abuse or actual abuse of power but doesn't provide a framework to substitute economic activity. Far better is limiting the level to which local governments have control over decisions of policing, but such measures are unpopular. The status quo largely continues, with investigations opened into a few high-profile cases of abuse of power, and the rest can keep doing what they do for now.

Spoom• 7 years ago

immediately looks for Linndale, OH as a former Cleveland resident

Yup, there it is. 96.2% of general funds from fines. $24,126 per adult resident. That's what happens when you have a tiny town with a small segment of an Interstate.

larrik• 7 years ago

NY shouldn't be overlooked here. Driving from CT to Ohio, I'll see 5x as many cops in the short part of the trip in NY than I will on the entire rest of the trip.

kiliantics2• 7 years ago

And this funding is disproportionately paid for by the poor:

https://gawker.com/ferguson-and-the-criminalization-of-ameri...

The use of bureaucracy to funnel wealth from poor to rich also operates in the same way for private institutions such as banks. Graeber goes into this modern tendency towards bureaucratic rule in detail in his book "Utopia of Rules"

kiliantics2• 7 years ago

I really don't understand what was so unpalatable to other users about this comment... The link I shared goes into the same details about Ferguson as the top comment and the notion that it is poorer people that bear the largest burden is also stated in the featured article. Is it the idea that these same issues also arise in the private sector that rubs people the wrong way?

vwcx• 7 years ago

Another worrying aspect is that many small towns contract with third-party companies to handle ticket processing, often tacking on extra surcharges (above and beyond a cc processing fee) to pay via credit card online.

RickJWagner• 7 years ago

All government relies on your money in some form or other.

Traffic fines just de-select those who don't travel by motor vehicle. And, to some degree, the fees are self-selected. (You choose to speed or not.)

cprayingmantis• 7 years ago

The town in East Tennessee is Bluff City and it’s notorious for its speed traps, cameras, and lazy law enforcement. It was so bad someone who got a ticket bought their domain when it expired https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/man-buys-police-dept-websi...

olliej• 7 years ago

A degree of this could be solved just by saying proceeds from fines, fees, and forfeiture go to the state or federal government.

Obviously that might encourage those governments too do such fines, but a. they already do that, and b. people have historically been better at limiting large scale abuse like this that is possible in each separate small town scattered around the state/country.

Also it might provide a more cost effective way to sue in response to disparate enforcement (one suit vs many).

aluren• 7 years ago

Fines should not exist. Anything that gets punished by a fine is basically codeword for 'you can break that law if you're rich'. The most spectacular example being Facebook's stock rising after being fined for a few billions because it was pocket money for them.

Alternatively, if you really want to punish minor things, fines could be dependent on your income.

flyGuyOnTheSly• 7 years ago

Others prop up their budgets using traffic cameras, parking citations or code enforcement violations.

I saw my town make over $1,200 within a split second the other night.

I was stopped waiting at a red light, as cars were passing in front of me.

The light turned yellow, then red, then not even what seemed like a nanosecond after it might have turned red... 3 cars entered the intersection and the light flashed 3 times.

$400, $800, $1,200... all within less than a second, for an infraction so minor that even a police cruiser sitting in my exact same position would have probably sloughed off as being "close enough".

Not to mention, these cameras probably cost orders of magnitude less than a human police officer and a dedicated cruiser.

All I am getting at is, from a business standpoint, it's obvious why these are so popular with poor municipalities.

Once again, the rich get richer, and the poor get kicked on their way home from their 3rd job with a $400 fine for being a nanosecond later than an ambiguously timed light decided they should have been.

This is not going to change unless federal legislation forces it to.

8bitsrule• 7 years ago

Hah. The last traffic fine I paid was for a highway speed-limit sign (65 to 30mph) more than a mile from, and around a curve from, a Midwest whistle-stop that a few hundred called home. A lot of these flat-plain potholes probably survived only because their leaders had the connections to get the highway routed through them.

( Akroid's 1991 film 'Nothing But Trouble' sums up my feelings.)

denton-scratch• 7 years ago

Aren't all fines 'punitive'? Isn't that the point?

Small towns in much of the country are dependent on punitive fines and fees

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