Re: Police Shootings Won't Stop Unless We Also Stop Shaking Down Black People

[MJ]

MARCH 31, 2010
WORLD GLOBAL NEWS BLOG
What happens when you remove all traffic signs? A German town finds out.
In a counterintuitive approach to reducing car accidents and making streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists, a German town has nixed all traffic signs and traffic lights in the town center.
By Isabelle de Pommereau, Correspondent

NIEDER-ERLENBACH, GERMANY ­ • A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.

This unpretentious villagelike neighborhood in Frankfurt’s far-northern tip is known for the idyllic character of its old half-timber homes and its views of rolling hills.

Now it is a symbol of Germany’s effort to rescue its streets from the hegemony of cars and give more space to pedestrians and cyclists.

To prod drivers to better share the road, in February Nieder-Erlenbach got rid of all traffic signs and traffic lights in the town center. It also erased marked crosswalks, leaving only one sign that says “common street” and calling for a reduced speed of 30 km/h (18 m.p.h.). The only other rule: “Always give way to the person on the right.”

Thus Main Street turned into a “naked” square shared equally by bikes, pedestrians, cars, and trucks. With the change, Nieder-Erlenbach adopted a radical traffic-management philosophy gaining popularity in Europe. Pioneered by a Dutch engineer who thought towns were safer with fewer rules, “shared space” envisions open surfaces on which motorists and pedestrians can “negotiate” with one another by eye contact, other signals, and a greater consideration for one another.

Segregating cars and pedestrians was wrong, argued Hans Monderman, the Dutch engineer who put in place more than 100 shared-space schemes in the Netherlands. Prodded by European Union funding for shared-space initiatives, seven European towns have launched shared-space initiatives, including Ostend in Belgium, Ipswich in England, and the small northern town of Bohme, Germany.

But in Nieder-Erlenbach, not everybody is enthused. With no indications as to where to park, drivers tend to park everywhere, stalling traffic. Ulrike Markus finds the lack of sidewalks unsettling. “Children don’t know where they feel secure anymore,” Ms. Markus says.

While it’s too early to assess the impact of the changes on traffic incidents, the no-traffic-sign rule is forcing everybody to behave more responsibly, most residents agree. Juarita Lascarro says that the changes have created a new atmosphere on the street. “We all have to be careful all the time.”

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2010/0331/What-happens-when-you-remove-all-traffic-signs-A-German-town-finds-out


At 10:16 AM 7/12/2016, you wrote:

Good Morning Michael;

I semi-agree with your assessment.....Laws should not be written for he sole purpose of generating revenue for a State or municipality. Â

Having said that; for our highways and roads to work effectively, we must have speed limits.  (We can agree that the speeds set are revenue generating and unreasonable!)   but I'm sure you've been driving when someone is on a highway going way, way, wa to fast or excessive; (and likewise way to slow, in a left lane).  Drunk drivers don't pick up the phone and call the Police (Like the Fire Department) and announce they're getting ready to leave the bar.

Just as important are the inner cities; predominately all of which are ghettos that have been under Democratic Rule for decades if not over a century;  and the Democratic Party's intent to have a compleete segment of our Society become dependent upon government for their subsistence.  In these communities; both Chicago and Baltimore come immediately to mind;  we see constant murder and Black on Black killings where a strong police appearance has proven to be a deterrent to this crime. Â

On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 12:45 PM, MJ <micha...@america.net> wrote:

Government Gang has criminalized a bunch of that which should not .... as well as created revenue possibilities for police (many, contrary to due process and the like) ....

If one ENDS the inane drug war .... no need for these Boys in Blue to concern themselves with hassling Mundanes for possession, trafficking and the like.

If Boys in Blue or no longer Revenuers .... no need for these Boys in Blue to concern themselves with hassling Mundanes for not doing as Daddy Government decrees in the course of driving one's vehicle.

If these Crime Historians and Revenuers sat around in a station house awaiting calls like a the Fire Department .....

Regard$,

--MJ

"Progs have a robotic and formulaic response to any problem or crisis based on their irrational ideology. Ignore how government contributed to the problem, find non-governmental scapegoats, advocate making government more powerful to go after the scapegoats." -- James Ostrowski

At 12:34 PM 7/11/2016, you wrote:

That article has an incredible amount of bullshit in it - just like most from Mother Jones.

First, the sentence claiming Darrin Wilson was "fired" and implying because he'd done something wrong is a blatant lie. If you read the linked article, you see that he was NEVER given a citation for bad performance, and in fact, quite the opposite. He was awarded for peacefully arresting someone involved in a drug deal. The town didn't fire the entire police force and replace them because they were all bad cops, but rather because some cops were bad and resulting in lawsuits that the town couldn't afford. The town voted to pay St. Louis county to provide policing instead; that is when Darrin Wilson moved to the Ferguson PD.

Second, examine this paragraph:

Take the St. Louis suburb of Pagedale, where, among other Norman Rockwell-worthy features deemed illegal, "you can't have a hedge more than three feet high," Maurer says. "You can't have a basketball hoop or a wading pool in front of a house. You can't have a dish antenna on the front of your house. You can't walk on the roadway if there is a sidewalk, and if there is not a sidewalk, they must walk on the left side of the roadway. They must walk on the right of the crosswalk. They can't conduct a barbecue in the front yard and can't have an alcoholic beverage within 150 feet of a barbecue. Kids cannot play in the street. They also have restrictions against pants being worn below the waist in public. Cars must be within 500 feet of a lamp or a source of illumination during nighttime hours. Blinds must be neatly hung in respectable appearance, properly maintained, and in a state of good repair."

Pagedale, Missouri is 93.4% African-American. Let that sink in. The clear implication is that it's somehow racist to pass ordinances that end up mostly fining black residents, when the truth is, it's black DEMOCRATIC lawmakers passing this dumb shit in a community that is almost exclusively black. And the black democrats just keep electing more ignorant black democrats who keep passing and funding the enforcement of this dumb shit. This is not something any sane person can blame on white people or racism. It's far more about democrats being democrats IMO - and controlling the masses, while sucking them dry every step along the way. And it happens in urban areas governed by democrats of all races all over the country.

And then this one...

A different strategy in San Diego simply tacks on various fees to an existing fine. A 2012 Union Tribune investigation revealed that while speeding is a simple $35 fine, other government agencies can tack on as many as 10 other surcharges, including: a state penalty assessment, $40; county penalty assessment, $36; court construction, $20; state surcharge, $8; DNA identification, $16; criminal conviction fee, $35; court operations, $40; emergency medical air transportation penalty, $4; and night court, $1. When it's all said and done, that $35 ticket comes to $235.

What I find fascinating is that this shit goes on everywhere and is a sign of out-of-control governance at EVERY level - not just at the federal government level. But what do we do in most places? Keep electing the very politicians who get money from those they are sworn to represent by any means necessary. Where it *doesn't* happen is in rural America where ordinances are passed by conservatives instead of liberals.

I live in a community whose only law enforcement officer fifteen years ago was an elderly town constable. That's all that was needed, as there was almost no crime. He could be seen telling someone at the convenience store that he knew they'd been drinking and if they got behind the wheel of the car they'd be arrested. Then he'd take them home. That was the way it was when I was in high school in rural America too.

Now we have a small police force that spends most of their time writing speeding tickets. In 23 years there has been one murder and two suicides. That is the extent of gun violence and largely because the vast majority of us own and carry guns. The one murder here in 23 years was just last year - a domestic dispute resulting in murder committed by someone who lived in a nearby county and not here.

Compare that to Ferguson, MO and then ask yourself what the very real difference is. Though we are armed at a far higher rate in my (mostly white) community, we don't kill each other. That's not happened even ONCE in the 23 years I've lived here. But I can drive 15 miles away and be in the heart of urban Indianapolis, where you see the same dumbass ordinances and massive numbers of murders, armed robberies, and countless other violent crimes on the news every single day.

Last, but not least, examine this paragraph:

There is still no comprehensive study to determine just how many cities pay their bills by indenturing the poor, but it is probably no coincidence that when you examine the recent rash of police killings, you find that the offenses they were initially stopped for were preposterously minor. Bland's lane change signal, DuBose's missing plate. Walter Scott had that busted taillight­which, we all later learned, is not even a crime in South Carolina. Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes. When Darren Wilson was called to look into a robbery, the reason he initially stopped Michael Brown was for walking in the street­in Ferguson, an illegal act according to Section 44-344 of the local code. Between 2011 and 2013, 95 percent of the perpetrators of this atrocity were African American, meaning that "walking while black" is not a punch line. It is a crime.

SO much dishonesty; so little time!

The officer in Sandra Bland's case had written a warning - not a citation or fine - when she decided to mouth off to him, resulting in charges and confinement, where she CHOSE to hang herself because her family refused to bail her out of jail (as they'd done many times before for crimes including reckless driving and DUI).

The Walter Scott murder was just that - murder. And the cop was immediately charged with murder and multiple federal charges (and rightly so).

Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes (a crime) in a state whose DEMOCRATIC GOVERNOR had issued a directive to every police force in the state to end this practice, as the state's tax revenue from legal cigarette sales had plummeted. If you want to blame someone for his death, blame HIM (as he'd been arrested for illegally selling cigarettes multiple times) or the democratic governor who told cops to focus on ending this crime to improve the state's sales tax collections.

Michael Brown was shot by Officer Darrin Wilson who was combing the area looking for a robbery suspect who'd just assaulted someone at a nearby convenience store - NOT because he was walking in the middle of the street! He then assaulted the cop and died that day due to his own thuggish, criminal behavior and abject ignorance.

To claim the incredibly lazy and false "it's a crime to walk while back" is pathetic. It's a crime to rob and assault someone and then to assault the cop looking for the dumbass criminal that just robbed and assaulted someone.

On Monday, July 11, 2016 at 9:48:16 AM UTC-4, MJ wrote:

[ALL people ... actually]

September/October 2015 issue

Police Shootings Won't Stop Unless We Also Stop Shaking Down Black People

The dangers of turning police officers into revenue generators.

Jack Hitt

In April, several days after North Charleston, South Carolina, police officer Michael Slager stopped Walter Scott for a busted taillight and then fatally shot him, the usual cable-news transmogrification of victim into superpredator ran into problems. The dash cam showed Scott being pulled over while traveling at a nerdy rate of speed, using his left turn signal to pull into a parking lot and having an amiable conversation with Slager until he realized he'd probably get popped for nonpayment of child support. At which point he bolted out of the car and hobbled off. Slager then shot him. Why didn't the cop just jog up and grab him? Calling what the obese 50-year-old Scott was doing "running" really stretches the bounds of literary license.

But maybe the question to ask is: Why did Scott run? The answer came when the New York Times revealed Scott to be a man of modest means trapped in an exhausting hamster wheel: He would get a low-paying job, make some child support payments, fall behind on them, get fined, miss a payment, get jailed for a few weeks, lose that job due to absence, and then start over at a lower-paying job. From all apparent evidence, he was a decent schlub trying to make things work in a system engineered to make his life miserable and recast his best efforts as criminal behavior.

Recently, two more deaths of African Americans that have blown up in the media follow a pattern similar to Scott's. Sandra Bland in Texas and Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati were each stopped for minor traffic infractions (failing to use turn signal, missing front license plate), followed by immediate escalation by the officer into rage, and then an official story that is obviously contradicted by the video (that the officer tried to "de-escalate" the tension with Bland; that the officer was dragged by DuBose's car). In both cases, the perpetrator of a minor traffic offense died.

When incidents of police violence come to light, the usual defense is that we should not tarnish all the good cops just because of "a few bad apples." No one can argue with that. But what is usually implied in that phrase is that the "bad" officers' intentions are malevolent­that they are morally corrupt and racist. And that may be true, but they are also bad in the job-performance sense. These men are crummy cops, sometimes profoundly so. Slager had a record for gratuitously using his Taser. Timothy Leohmann, who leapt from his car and instantly killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, had been deemed "weepy" and unable to "emotionally function" by a supervisor at his previous PD job, who added: "I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct these deficiencies." Ferguson's Darren Wilson was also fired from his previous job­actually, the entire police force of Jennings, Missouri, was disbanded for being awful.

When you ask why such "bad" cops are nevertheless armed and allowed to patrol the streets, one begins to see that lurking beneath this violence is a fiscal menace: police departments forced to assist city officials in raising revenue, in many cases funding their own salaries­redirecting the very concept of keeping the peace into underwriting the budget.

We saw a glimpse of this when the Justice Department released its report on Ferguson in March. In his statement, then-Attorney General Eric Holder referenced a lady in town whose life sounded Walter Scott-like. She had received two parking tickets totaling $151. Her efforts to pay those fines fell so behind that she eventually paid out more than $500. At one point, she was jailed for nonpayment and­eight years later­still owes $541 in accrued fees.

The judge largely responsible for the extraction of these fees from Ferguson's poor, Ronald J. Brockmeyer, owed $172,646 in back taxes, a sum orders of magnitude greater than any late fine coming before his bench. Even as he was jailing black ladies for parking tickets, Brockmeyer was allegedly erasing citations for white Ferguson residents who happened to be his friends. After the report's publication, he resigned so that Ferguson could "begin its healing process."

But consider: In 2010, this collaboration between the Ferguson police and the courts generated $1.4 million in income for the city. This year, they will more than double that amount­$3.1 million­providing nearly a quarter of the city's $13 million budget, almost all of it extracted from its poorest African American citizens.

Evidence also suggests that this new form of raising revenue­policiteering?­goes far beyond Ferguson. Remember the recent Oklahoma case involving Robert Bates, a 73-year-old millionaire insurance broker with scant law enforcement background who was allowed to go out on patrol­likely because he had donated lots of money and equipment to the local sheriff's office? He killed an unarmed black suspect when he grabbed his gun instead of his Taser. In the days that followed, we learned that other deputies had long resented this guy's freelance incompetence.

"Essentially, these small towns in urban areas have municipal infrastructure that can't be supported by the tax base, and so they ticket everything in sight to keep the town functioning," said William Maurer, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice who has been studying the sudden rise in "nontraffic-related fines."

Take the St. Louis suburb of Pagedale, where, among other Norman Rockwell-worthy features deemed illegal, "you can't have a hedge more than three feet high," Maurer says. "You can't have a basketball hoop or a wading pool in front of a house. You can't have a dish antenna on the front of your house. You can't walk on the roadway if there is a sidewalk, and if there is not a sidewalk, they must walk on the left side of the roadway. They must walk on the right of the crosswalk. They can't conduct a barbecue in the front yard and can't have an alcoholic beverage within 150 feet of a barbecue. Kids cannot play in the street. They also have restrictions against pants being worn below the waist in public. Cars must be within 500 feet of a lamp or a source of illumination during nighttime hours. Blinds must be neatly hung in respectable appearance, properly maintained, and in a state of good repair."

Where did this Kafkaesque laundry list come from? Maurer explains that in 2010, Missouri passed a law that capped the amount of city revenue that any agency could generate from traffic stops. The intent was to limit small-town speed traps, but the unintentional consequences are now clear: Pagedale saw a 495 percent increase in nontraffic-related arrests. "In Frontenac, the increase was 364 percent," Maurer says. "In Lakeshire, it was 209 percent."

This racket now has many variants. South Carolina hosts " Operation Rolling Thunder," an annual dragnet in which 21 different law enforcement agencies swarm stretches of I-85 and I-26 in the name of catching drug dealers. In 2013, this law enforcement Bonnaroo netted 1,300 traffic citations and 300 speeding tickets. But after everyone had paid up, the operation boasted exactly one felony conviction.

A different strategy in San Diego simply tacks on various fees to an existing fine. A 2012 Union Tribune investigation revealed that while speeding is a simple $35 fine, other government agencies can tack on as many as 10 other surcharges, including: a state penalty assessment, $40; county penalty assessment, $36; court construction, $20; state surcharge, $8; DNA identification, $16; criminal conviction fee, $35; court operations, $40; emergency medical air transportation penalty, $4; and night court, $1. When it's all said and done, that $35 ticket comes to $235.

Another report released earlier this year connects the dots: African Americans and Latinos make up less than a third of San Diego's population but represent 64.5 percent of those searched during a traffic stop.

There is still no comprehensive study to determine just how many cities pay their bills by indenturing the poor, but it is probably no coincidence that when you examine the recent rash of police killings, you find that the offenses they were initially stopped for were preposterously minor. Bland's lane change signal, DuBose's missing plate. Walter Scott had that busted taillight­which, we all later learned, is not even a crime in South Carolina. Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes. When Darren Wilson was called to look into a robbery, the reason he initially stopped Michael Brown was for walking in the street­in Ferguson, an illegal act according to Section 44-344 of the local code. Between 2011 and 2013, 95 percent of the perpetrators of this atrocity were African American, meaning that "walking while black" is not a punch line. It is a crime.

And not just a crime, but a crime that comes with fines that are strictly enforced. In 2014, Ferguson's bottom-line-driven police force issued 16,000 arrest warrants to three-fourths of the town's total population of 21,000. Stop and think about that for a moment: In Ferguson, 75 percent of all residents had active outstanding arrest warrants. Most of the entire city was a virtual plantation of indentured revenue producers.

Back in Pagedale, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Jennifer Mann recently calculated a 500 percent increase in petty fines over the last five years. "Pagedale handed out 2,255 citations for these types of offenses last year," Mann wrote, "or nearly two per household."

"Once the system is primed for maximizing revenue­starting with fines and fine enforcement," Holder said apropos Ferguson, "the city relies on the police force to serve, essentially, as a collection agency for the municipal court rather than a law enforcement entity."

In Alabama, a circuit court judge, Hub Harrington, wrote a blistering opinion three years ago asserting that the Shelby County Jail had become a kind of "debtors' prison" and that the court system had devolved into a "judicially sanctioned extortion racket." This pattern leads to a cruel paradox: One arm of the state is paying a large sum to lock up a person who can't pay a small sum owed to a different arm of the state. The result? Bigger state deficits. As the director of the Brennan Center's Justice Program put it, "Having taxpayers foot a bill of $4,000 to incarcerate a man who owes the state $745 or a woman who owes a predatory lender $425 and removing them from the job force makes sense in no reasonable world."

When the poor come to understand that they are likely to be detained and fined for comically absurd crimes, it can't be a surprise to the police that their officers are viewed with increasing distrust. In this environment, running away from a cop is not an act of suspicion; it's common sense.

Cops like to talk about "good police." They say, "That guy is good police"­a top compliment, by which they mean cool under the pressure of the street and cunning at getting people to give up the details of a crime. Good police look bad when sharing the street with crummy police. But when budgetary whims replace peacekeeping as the central motivation of law enforcement, who is more likely to write up more tickets, the good cop or the crummy one? When the mission of the entire department shifts from "protect and serve" to "punish and profit," then just what constitutes good police?

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/police-shootings-traffic-stops-excessive-fines

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