That’s a huge part of why some of these towns stay afloat. Your ticket is revenue for their population 12 town. It’s for sure a racket. I still remember the $500 ticket I got in Beaver, Utah for going 10 over…
It’s legalized banditry.
Catoosa, OK used to be infamous in the late 1990’s. It’s on Rt 66, and back then thry would stop you for any reason they could make up. It became a large enough problem that businesses started to leave, because neither customers nor employees wamted to risk driving there.
Something happened around the mid 2000’s, and the police became lesa crazy. Since then the town has exploded in size.
Sounds more like a problem with how they’ve structured their taxes if they NEED to fine people…
Why do you want to defend cops fucking people over?
$500 for beaver sounds expensive.
Depends on the beaver
$500 for a ticket is wild. I think the worst I have gotten (when I first started driving 30 years ago) was like $200, and that was 25 over.
The town had 250 people and 50 police officers.
Jfc 😅
half of the department’s 50 officers “had been suspended, demoted, terminated or dishonorably discharged from their previous law enforcement jobs,” the station said, citing personnel records obtain under a Freedom of Information request.
The shocking part is where it says that’s only 5X the cops for a town that size. Wtf? One or two should suffice in a town that small. We have a town here with just over a thousand, and they have no city cops at all.
10 cops means 1-2 on shift at a time, once you figure in days off, needing people working 24 hours a day, a leadership position or two, and people out sick/vacation, 10 people isn’t as many as it sounds.
However, even 10 is a huge amount for a town of 250. I think most towns of 1-2k people generally don’t have a department and usually rely on county police.
Yeah, I had a town of 15k and 5 miles up the road we had one around 300. They just contracted ours out. 300 peoples’ taxes is not a lot, why waste it on police who will what, catch that one kid every once in a while, or have to throw a drunk out of the only bar? Not worth it.
typical amount of police in countries vary between 0.1-0.7% of the population with most having around 0.2-0.4%
Read the article. It explains the scam and why it got shut down.
I read the article. How do you think I got that information that was in the article? I understand what was going on. What I don’t understand is the average town of that size even needing 10. How about some reading comprehension, smart guy?
POOP?
Username checks out.
I thought piefed people were required to be nice?
They still have to pay or show up in court, though.
Small towns want every scrap of income they can get and tickets are part of it. There’s also a motivated synergy there between cop and a small town with no other crime really happening because it justifies the small town even having a cop on payroll.
Yup, they deliberately setup drops in speed limits for the sole purpose of catching out of towners
God I started a new long distance deive for work recently and its half on a rural highway. Like 10 tiny towns over arpund 60 miles.
Every one…
Outside speed limit is 55 mph
Hit town, 45 mph
30 feet later, 35 mph
2 blocks in the middle, 30 mph
Back to 35 mph
35 mph feels like it lasts riiiiiight up to the edge of the town.
And half the time the first drop going in and the 55mph sign going out are obscured by overgrown trees.
Its just designed to catch people traveling the corridor.
Are there any actual dwellings around the road? If so, those speed limits are quite reasonable or even on the high end. In Europe it is 50 km/h (30 mph) if there are houses around a road, and 30 km/h (18 mph) for actual town streets. The streets are also specifically designed to be narrower and there are a lot of traffic calming measures to make drivers naturally want to drive the speed limit. This way it is safe & pleasant for townsfolk to cross the street, the town doesn’t end up split in two by the highway, and if you’re a sane driver you won’t get fined even if you accidentally miss a speed limit sign.
Perhaps the best solution is to make the highways go around towns completely to avoid all of this. (and then we can also work towards banning cars in populated areas)
I’m the asshole who will drive 4 hours just to make the cop show up to court over it.
My state doesn’t have absolute speed limits, so if you can show that the speed was safe for the road conditions, you can get off.
Or just get a paralegal to file discovery paperwork. It usually costs the city more to do that than the ticket is worth, so they’ll drop it.
It feels like paying racist assholes is counter productive. Especially when you have to pay settlements.
Most settlements are paid by insurance companies. And in small towns the judge and cops are likely friends, if not related.
Tickets don’t go to taxes…? Just directly to the local police?
He left the part about small towns being mostly conservative and politically uneducated.
When no one wants to pay taxes…
And big town cops… and medium town cops. Goddammit cops, ruining towns for everyone!
“You cops sure are a contentious people.”
Here in Minnesota we have several “Speed Trap Towns” along country roads and highways with 50+ mph speed limits where suddenly the speed limit drops to 30 and there’s a cop hiding behind the bush.
Yep. Wisconsin too. Learned very quickly that cruise control set to 1 mph under the limit is the way. There’s quite a few towns on the way out to Taylors Falls that pretty much always have a cop sitting in the same spot just waiting for out-of-towners, and it’s remarkable how successful they are.
There will be a brief moment of satisfaction when these types all lose their jobs to drones before things get even more dystopian
So Flock cams.
