The Missouri Supreme Court has effectively put the Ferguson Municipal Court out of business by transferring all of its cases to a judge from the court of appeals, who will handle the cases as a circuit court judge.
That's a good first step. But it's only a first step. There are a hell of a lot of other towns that use their municipal court system as an ATM to fill the town coffers, and not only in Missouri. They all need to be shut down. Enforcing the law should be about public saety, not about revenue generation.
Spanks, But No Spanks
1 hour ago
5 comments:
It's like they don't have cops at all. Just highwaymen.
They used to call towns like that "speed traps," but fifty years ago, the speed trap cops only went after cars bearing out-of-state license plates. Many a New Yorker, driving to Florida, would get stuck with a fine that he'd have to pay before he got out of town.
These days, the towns are trapping their own, sort of like guppies eating their own fry. But that's what happens when "taxes" becomes a dirty word.
Yours crankily,
The New York Crank
You younguns out there will understand what NY Crank's talking about if you look up Ludowici GA in Wikipedia...
Linndale, OH is another one.
GA snagged a Vermont State Trooper in the early `80s. The trooper showed his badge, the GA cop wrote him for everything.
The VST guy wrote down the cop's name. For a long time after that, the Vermont cops made a point of pulling over cars with Georgia plates, writing them a ticket, and then giving them the name of the Georgia cop in case they wanted to yell at someone. (And if they pulled over a Georgia cop, out came the microscopes!)
It turns out that Ferguson's PD had a more sinister purpose to all this: 75% of Ferguson's adult black population has arrest warrants out for them. The net effect is to keep them from voting, since the police set up outside of poling places looking for people to arrest. So we finally know how Ferguson could have an all-white power structure despite being majority black... they did it the old fashioned White League way: by keeping blacks from voting under penalty of arrest.
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