Originally Posted by
I-Like-To-Bike
You arrived at this description and conclusion about "the system" from getting a ticket for not stopping at a stop sign?
Originally Posted by
Iride01
I think you should just file it under somewhat less suspicious things like ...
* There's a first time for everything.
* New guy on the job wanting to show that no infraction of the law is too small to ignore.
* Cop just having a bad day and had to take it out on someone.
* Or maybe just... you broke the law and the law won! So far, at least till you cop a guilty plea and pay or go to court before a judge.
Don't read too much into the conspiracy theory you are suggesting.
I began on this path by noticing that for the first time in >10 years the police in my area called and mailed me asking for donations, and almost simultaneously they began enforcing fines they'd never enforced in >10 years. Thinking this is too much of a coincidence, I read that it is consistent with a pattern called taxation through citation. As a new user I can't link the research study, but statistics show that when cities need revenue they start enforcing fines without warning, and it’s an open secret that police in many jurisdictions are instructed to go find some number of fineable offenses per hour. If it were actually about public safety, they would have enforced it before, and the first offense would just be a warning. And there’s no reason that multiple things can’t be true. i.e. the officer is a ************* *and* the city is compensating for revenue issues. Then I read a bit into what prairiepedaler wrote as well as multiple news articles I can't link as a new user, and how my county has been sued for snowballing these fees and incarcerating people for their inability to pay. And ultimately it costs taxpayers more to jail them than the revenue that the city gets from the fine. Setting aside the moral hazard for a moment, just from a practical perspective it would be 100x cheaper for taxpayers if they just paid for the fine instead of putting these people in for-profit jails, not even accounting for the fact that most of these people would otherwise work jobs and pay off loans and taxes. The first larger question is why a stop sign ticket that is nominally supposed to be manageable $50 ends up as an extortionate $300 when they actually send the fine (answer: court fees and city revenue). The second larger question is why taxpayers are sending people to jail at a cost of $75,000 per year over a $50 previously unenforced ticky tack offense (answer: legal system built to find ways to shake down citizens, self-expand, and inflate costs)