I swear the reporter must have doing on purpose (I lol’d, literally) when she said ‘Harper’s name was found on an envelope’.
Short story, a DPW worker finds the envelope amongst a garbage strewn alley (I assume reported it) and Harper, a 2 year old, gets a ticket. Parents make several calls to the city, they tell her to pound sand. Parents call the news and they come out and do a report. While filming a city inspector shows up (not knowing the crew is there and says OMG, she’s couldn’t have done this (cuz apparently all the other people assume a 2 year old could) and waives the ticket.
I have to wonder if the ticket would have been waived if the news crew didn’t just happen to be there. On the one hand I hope he would have seen the alley, seen how full of trash it was and said ‘well, I assume the two year old didn’t do all of this, therefore she may not have done this as well’ and waived it. OTOH, Who knows? maybe if the crew wasn’t there he would have seen their bin on it’s side and still issued the ticket, either way, it’s clearly their trash, is it their responsibility? I don’t know. On the other other hand, if he wasn’t planning to waive it, he might not have gone out and he certainly would have just waited in his car until the news crew left unless he was sure he had the law/code on his side (and kinda wanted to be a prick, ready for the facebook backlash, whether he was right or wrong, legally).
But seriously folks, they only way this could have been funnier is if they tried to make her pick up all the garbage (and had 27 8x10 colored glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was (and the judge was blind) (eta and maybe broke out a guitar and played the riff)).
I also wonder what would happen if they just didn’t pay the ticket. ISTM the statute of limitations should run out long before it would be any kind of problem. Assuming it’s seven years, between 2 and 9 years old, it’s not like she’s going to apply for any government licenses or be filing a tax return that they could hold over her head. She’s (likely) not even going to cross paths with an officer in such a way that she would be required to show an ID and could be arrested.
Incidentally, whenever I see roadside advertising, ya know, those ones that say ‘we’ll buy your house’ or ‘stump grinding’ stapled up really high on utility poles, I’ve always thought that a great way to get rid of them would just be to send the offending business littering or permit tickets as a way to get them to knock it off. However, besides some of the other issues I foresee with that, I always end up thinking that I could use that to my advantage, I could put up those type of signs for my competitors and let them start getting tickets. If this gets people a littering ticket maybe I’ll start writing the name and address of people I don’t like on envelopes and start tossing the around the city (not really though).
