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Like my late mother would always say....""The US is NOT a FREE country anymore as you PAY, PAY, and PAY.
As stated we have TOO many Laws and our Freedom is being cut to the point some places are Not worth living in.
City and State fathers sit around dreaming up some NEW Law in order to collect revenue......heck, a Judge on the bench has to pull out his Law book to look up a VC code for verification.....too many to remember but has NO problem leveling a fine.
Go to any Traffic court and write down the fines imposed and multiply the amount by the number of Traffic courts in the area.
I've read that, nationally, 35% of murder cases are never solved, depending on the jurisdiction.
For the police to expend their time and effort to solve a murder would raise no money for the city, in fact, even with solving robberies, burglaries, it wouldn't raise any money for the city, either. Suspect captured, and to jail/prison they go, at a great cost to taxpayers!
So! Let's go after some quicker money for the city, traffic and non-traffic fines!
Let's have the police get back to the basics: to protect and serve!
Unless the charges are bogus, I don't see the problem. Shouldn't they give fines for traffic violations? Non-traffic violations? If you reduce the force, who shows when someone is breaking into your house while you are sitting there holding the phone?
The traffic and other more minor offenses help pay the salaries so they'll be around when you need them for more serious offenses.
If I was mugged tonite somewhere, the police wouldn't be there when it happens.
If someone broke into my house tonite, the police wouldn't be there while it happened.
If my car was stolen from my driveway tonite, the police wouldn't be there when it happened.
Yes, you call the police, and the suspect is gone with the wind!
Suspect apprehended, and you pray he/she didn't get a long prison sentence, to the tune of $40-50k a year in prison costs, as that may eventually raise your taxes!
We have entirely too many laws. Generations of lawmakers feeling as though they have to prove their worth are responsible for this problem. But it's not an insurmountable problem.
I used to know a guy who got eight - count 'em - DWIs. He was mad as heck. He said the police knew where he drank and just lay in wait for him to come out at night and drive drunk.
Not fair! Guess he couldn't figure out the solution to his problem.
Really, the only people who have to complain about this are the lawbreakers. The way I avoid being a cash cow for the city or state is not to do anything that might get me a fine. The solution is so simple a child could figure it out.
I was kinda slow. Took me two traffic tickets forty years ago before I got it.
Yep and most laws do nothing. Criminals don't care about laws just look at how overcrowded the prison system is. People with morals don't need laws.
Do you think most of society will deal drugs if there was no law against it? Nope. The same people will deal drugs.
I don't see a problem in enforcing the laws. mostly just people getting caught in violations complaining. Its the court that fines the person; not police dept.
We have entirely too many laws. Generations of lawmakers feeling as though they have to prove their worth are responsible for this problem. But it's not an insurmountable problem.
The way I avoid being a cash cow for the city or state is not to do anything that might get me a fine. The solution is so simple a child could figure it out.
I was kinda slow. Took me two traffic tickets forty years ago before I got it.
Shame on you! You're part of the problem!
If everyone in, say Ferguson, obeyed every single traffic law on the books, even obeyed all the rules for not getting a nontraffic fine, for one whole year, and with a big shortfall in their budget, what might happen, knowing that money has to come in some way or another to avert layoffs?
That's it! Create more laws, and hopefully no one will be paying attention! Or dust off some old laws that are still on the books!
Spitting on the sidewalk: $150 fine!
I was shocked stupid when I ran into someone, here in Las Vegas, who actually got fined $150 for spitting on the sidewalk in downtown Las Vegas. Perhaps the officer needed one more to fill his quota that night!
I polled 30 people at work, asked each one if they knew about this law. Only 1 out of 30 was aware of it!
I know where the law originated, in the 1800's when tobacco chewing/spitting became omnipresent in this country.
And to think of all the drunken visitors to Las Vegas who have puked on the sidewalks at night, which I've personally witnessed. A fine for that?
And how many other laws are on the books we are clueless about, until it's too late?
People want services but they don't want to pay for them. Something for nothing. That's why hotel rooms are taxed so high: the payer is not a voter. Countries have used law breakers to pay the freight for centuries. It's nothing new or even American.
If everyone in, say Ferguson, obeyed every single traffic law on the books, even obeyed all the rules for not getting a nontraffic fine, for one whole year, and with a big shortfall in their budget, what might happen, knowing that money has to come in some way or another to avert layoffs?
That's it! Create more laws, and hopefully no one will be paying attention! Or dust off some old laws that are still on the books!
Spitting on the sidewalk: $150 fine!
I was shocked stupid when I ran into someone, here in Las Vegas, who actually got fined $150 for spitting on the sidewalk in downtown Las Vegas. Perhaps the officer needed one more to fill his quota that night!
I polled 30 people at work, asked each one if they knew about this law. Only 1 out of 30 was aware of it!
I know where the law originated, in the 1800's when tobacco chewing/spitting became omnipresent in this country.
And to think of all the drunken visitors to Las Vegas who have puked on the sidewalks at night, which I've personally witnessed. A fine for that?
And how many other laws are on the books we are clueless about, until it's too late?
Well, you know, it's kinda a citizen's job to know what the laws are. . . So many of them just involve common sense.
The spitting on the sidewalk thing came about when tuberculosis was common. It's a health concern. And it will soon be again.
What kind of slobs spit on the sidewalk anyway? Ugh. And why should that be a right in a civilized country?
The Las Vegas guy should move to Minneapolis. They have repealed their loitering and sidewalk spitting laws. Guess they like spitting and loitering. I like people not loitering around my house and don't much care to step in gobs of goober on my front yard sidewalk but to each his own.
Troyfan speaks the obvious when he says it depends on what the people want. The money doesn't come out of thin air. If there are people who want lawless cities maybe it's time to wall off a few of those liberal cities that are going broke and just let people do what they want there? Maybe they don't need well-maintained roads, building codes, emergency management or safety officers. Just let the whole place go to heck. No one will complain about that, right?
I think this country is getting crazier by the minute. And I remember when this all started - you get enough people ignorant about why laws exist and then breaking the law you just forget about enforcing it. In my small city I'll bet only one out of ten drivers ever uses his signal lights. It makes running errands a real thriller of a guessing game.
Maybe people don't care any more or they feel too entitled to have to signal their intentions. Or maybe they're too busy on their phones to think to use them. But I'd cast a vote for a few less deaths and mutilations and a little more enforcement of signal light laws.
When you think about it that way it isn't such a trivial thing at all.
this is the worst kept secret in this country.I grew up in a small indiana town, you rarely saw the police doing much of anything, except the last day of the month they were out on full force with parking and speeding tickets , its hard to believe everyone decide to speed the last day of every month.
I just read To Collect and Serve, an article in a recent Mother Jones magazine, regarding the police being revenue generators for cash-strapped cities.
This year in Ferguson, MO, nearly a quarter of their $13 million budget is projected to come from traffic fines.
And now that Missouri has put a cap on the amount of revenue that cities can generate from traffic fines, they're now turning to non-traffic fines.
In Pagedale, a suburb of St. Louis: "you can't have a hedge more than 3 feet high, you can't have a basketball hoop or a wading pool in front of your house, you can't have a dish antenna on the front of your house, you can't walk on the roadway if there's a sidewalk, they must walk on the left side of the roadway. You can't have a barbecue in the front yard and can't have an alcoholic beverage within 150 feet of a barbecue. Kids can't play in the street, also restrictions on pants being worn below the waist. Cars must be within 500 feet of a lamp or a source of illumination during nighttime house. Blinds must be neatly hung in a respectable appearance."
As a result, Pagedale saw a 495% increase in nontraffic-related arrests, in Frontenac, an increase of 364% and in Lakeshire, a 209% increase.
Before it's too late, we need to come up with alternatives, before it gets any worse. And what alternatives may they be, to keep these cities afloat?
Ditch the car and turn to bicycles? Don't think so! My Mexican roommate, a few months ago, believe it or not, was ticketed on his bicycle for stopping at an intersection, and his front tire was a little over the white line!
Blame it on unfunded federal mandates. Which are in themselves mostly a result of the moronic "tax cuts/trickle-down" nonsense one party keeps pushing as if it's anything other than the voodoo economics it was correctly called in the 1980s. That, and massive debt attributable to the unbelievably stupid middle east wars. Which have been losses since the beginning. When cities lose federal funding they used to depend on, they have to make up the shortfall somehow. Raising property taxes would prove hazardous to local politicians' careers. Thus, new fines for a wide variety of baloney "violations."
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