re: #167 Dark_Falcon

Close, but your example misses the certain charm that is the Ferguson city court system. A lot of towns here in Texas run off of fines for the same reason as the town your example mentioned: It’s the only real source of revenue for the town. We know those as places you don’t speed through, because they are looking for a reason to pull you over.

What makes Ferguson different is the stuff they pull after the ticket. They make you bring it in, and they shut the court doors early so you don’t make the hearing on time, which they then issue a fine for missing the hearing. Then they issue tickets for things like sleeping in a house that doesn’t have your name on the lease.

I would like to contrast the town you mentioned with the very white city I live in. At a dinner for those of us who volunteer for various city tasks (mine is CERT), the mayor bragged about the hundreds of thousands saved last year in taxes because of the people who volunteered for things like taking care of the parks, fire fighting (in a city of 40K), citizen patrol, etc. My city is so wealthy that large portions of the population don’t even need to get paid to work.