News briefs There is typical police over aggressiveness in this story ,but the resultant law suit says the police department is writing tickets for revenue. Residents are well aware of it. When I walk my dogs I usually see 3 people get tickets in about an hour. The clerks in the gas station on Telegraph say it all day long. On weekend morning usually 3 cop cars are picking people off. I saw a woman pulled over yesterday . She went into the gas station and said she got a ticket for failure to signal a lane change.
People at my racketball club talk about Heights cops and tickets regularly. It is not imagination. In 2004 they gave 24,000 tickets. Last year it was 43,000. I suppose we are just driving worse.
I’ve just assumed that every city has ranked up their ticket writing this last year and a half. I know here in Santa Barbara you see coos stopping people all the time.
Dearborn is 50 percent bigger that the Heights. They wrote 20,000 tickets. We are well over double while we are smaller.
I’m reminded of a small suburb of Cleveland that had a small piece of interstate I-71 running through it - less than 300 yards, I believe. To get to the nearest interstate on-ramp the police would have to leave their jurisdiction. They would then ticket people, and when they showed up for court to fight the ticket the judge would lock them up until they could pay the fine. I think they finally hit up a congressman, and it came to a screeching halt. (It’s been many years since this happened, so I don’t remember all the details.)
On preview, I believe it was Linndale, which has 117 people, and a total area of 0.1 square miles. I think they still have a rep as being a black hiole for speeding tickets.
On further preview - I found an article about Linndale. Some quotes, for those who don’t want to click:
That was the one I remember - so he wasn’t a Congressman, just a politician.
Am I the only person who had no idea what Hgts meant?
Also in Ohio was the infamous New Rome:
We have several Linndale-style spots in greater St. Louis. One stretch of I-170 goes through 3 townlets (one of them twice) in less than one mile of travel.
The 3-man “police departments” in those townlets have gotten hammered in recent years by the state & courts, so the most evil scammery has been largely stopped. But that doesn’t mean it has stopped, nor won’t restart as soon as somebody bigger takes their boot off the departments’ throats.
Heights ,it is the abbreviation.
This reminds me of a spot where I got a ticket years ago. I was exiting the freeway and merging onto a surface road. By the time I got to the road, I was probably going about 40, there was a car next to me (where I needed to merge) so I sped up a bit and got in front of him. I got pulled over and even explaining to the officer that I was just coming off the freeway and trying to merge into traffic. The fact that I made it through a stop light that the others didn’t made my case worse (“I didn’t see any cars near you when I clocked you”). Anyways, my fault, I deserved the ticket, I was speeding. What I thought was odd was that everything on the ticket was typed except for information about my speed and personal stuff.
A few weeks later our newspaper ran an article about that spot. In one year, two cops had written almost 5000 tickets between them in that location. ISTM, that when you can catch 5000 violators in one spot, something needs to be done…or you could just leave it alone and make over a quarter million dollars.
Rush Springs, OK (near me) is well known for such antics. I was pulled over for supposedly going 60 in a 45mph, and even though I had three people with me that told cop I was NOT anywhere near 60, and that I had told/shown them that the cruise control was set at 40mph (never went over 41-42 per ~accurate speedometer), cop did not deviate from a seemingly memorized script. The cops sit in the median right where limit turns to 65 from 45 (literally between the speed-limit signs) and say you were speeding long before you get to that point. A hill makes it impossible (line of sight) to ‘paint’ car with radar until about 50yds from area where limit changes. If safety is the issue, there would and should be enforcement a 1/2 mile before that point where the actual intersection is, or perhaps prior to intersection. They choose to ticket folks that are accelerating less than a few seconds from 65mph zone, so safety is clearly not what this is about. Their is never any radar happening the other direction or on other side of intersection - never. And it is an area where folks often run stop-sign to cross highway, too. The intersection cannot be seen from where they sit, so no chance at enforcement of that part of ‘safety’. /rant
The sickening part is that if you give them $50 extra dollars, they won’t report the event to DMV or insurance database. The clerks and cops really push that “an extra $50 makes this all go way forever”. Assholes to the Nth. Scam City, Oklahoma is what the map should indicate, imo.
http://www.speedtrap.org/ Perhaps they will be here . There are a few sites that show speed traps. Traps are illegal ,but many towns don’t care.
Nope. I HATE when people do that.
Allow me to add Pine Lake in Dekalb County, Georgia. They are about one mile of speed trap. They have about five officers and its all about the tickets their. They had an officer killed a little while back IMO because his tactics were terrible. Absurd…
Need the backstory on that one, Chicagojeff.
It stands for Hogwarts.
A local police chief calls his force to a meeting, and tells the cops:“you need to be writing more tickets-as an incentive, those of who who double your ticket quota get an extra weeks vacation”.
He then writes a memo prodding his men to increase the quota, and stations cops at intersections to catch speeders and red light runners. This increases revenues drastically, so he decides to have the city signal dept. cut down on the yellow light time.
Think this doesn’t happen?
Would this documentation be enough to establish a criminal conspiracy?
A conspiracy ,yes. Criminal probably not. They can always say they just wanted to make the streets safer.
There is pressure in Dearborn Hogwarts to write more tickets. I know cops and they tell me their ticket writing total each month is heavily scrutinized. They feel the pressure .