
How St. Louis County, Missouri Profits from Poverty - mgulaid
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/09/03/how-st-louis-county-missouri-profits-from-poverty/?hpid=z2
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brown
If you're a millionaire, a $50 speeding ticket is barely a deterrent. If
you're poor, the same $50 speeding ticket can completely break you. That
doesn't feel right.

As much as I personally would dislike it, Finland's model for traffic fines is
probably a more "fair" strategy.

[http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/multimillionaire-
faces...](http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/multimillionaire-
faces-130-000-speeding-ticket-article-1.1486072)

(edited for clarity)

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brps
As a resident of North County this rings very true. I had a crack in my
window. Several hundred to repair that I did not have. Worked part time
minimum wage while in college. Need my car to get to work and school.
Registration renewal came up. I could not get it renewed because I had a
cracked window. Over the next few months going to work to make money to fix my
window so I can renew my plates, I get five tickets from three jurisdictions.
Then proceed to get a warrant because I lost track off all my ticket court
dates and missed one. Get arrested, and finally have to beg my parents for the
couple thousand I needed to get out of jail, pay off my warrant, pay my court
costs, pay my tickets, fix my window and get my registration up to date. I am
white and luckily have middle class parents to fall back on.

~~~
gizmo686
One of the biggest gifts my parents gave me was the instructions "if you run
unexpected trouble and need money, come to us immidietly". Fourtuantly, I have
not had to take them up on this, but this type of safety net would prevent a
relativly minor cost (like a broken window) from spiraling like it did in your
case (as well as allow me to take more risk by having less in savings to pay
off debt faster).

Of course, this 'advice' only works if you are coming from an upper/middle
class family...

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thaumasiotes
> Quinn’s client, for example, was the victim in a domestic abuse incident.
> But when the police arrived, they checked her occupancy permit, which only
> allowed for one person to reside at the apartment. The officers then cited
> the woman and her boyfriend $74 each for violating the permit. When Quinn
> protested that the law makes no effort to distinguish visitors from unlawful
> residents, the municipal prosecutor stated that “nothing good happens after
> 10pm” when single men and women are alone together — a sentiment later
> echoed by the judge.

In a different case, a Tennessee judge ruled that a child had to be renamed by
its parents because

(1) "Messiah" is a title, not a name,

(2) that title is held by only one person,

and (3) that person is Jesus Christ.

Obviously, that ruling was grossly unconstitutional. But local courts often
have only a hazy, at best, grasp of the law. I suspect it wouldn't be hard to
have the principle that a single woman is prohibited by law from entertaining
male visitors after 10 pm overturned in very strong terms... if anyone who
could work within the court system were ever affected by this.

It would be nice if our legal system didn't deteriorate so badly at the bottom
tiers. My guess is that the staffing levels necessary to provide our current
levels of "oversight" preclude the obvious approach of only hiring people who
can be expected to know what they're doing.

~~~
mikeash
I wonder if there should be a rule that if the police are called out for
something, they can't leverage their presence to nab somebody for a crime of
lesser severity. If they get called out for domestic abuse and see a freshly-
murdered body, obviously they should take care of that. But if they get called
out for domestic abuse and find a minor violation of an occupancy permit,
maybe they should be required to ignore it.

~~~
thaumasiotes
This doesn't work very well as a remedy for the problem "civil servants
[judges/police/etc.] at low levels don't know what's legal and what's not".
Police officers are even routinely given immunity for violating laws they
weren't supposed to have known.

~~~
mikeash
Presumably they'd at least know about _that_ rule, which would then prevent
them from busting people for trivial crap when they show up for something
serious, whether or not that trivial crap is legitimate.

As for the bigger problem, if we started holding civil servants liable for
damages caused by failing to do their jobs correctly, it might help.

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crazypyro
As someone that's lived in STL for the past 3-4 months, I cannot believe how
many different police cars there are on my 20 minute commute every single day.
On one road (St. Charles Rock Road actually) I drive to work on, I pass at
least 3 different jurisdictions that generally has at least 2 cops on it every
day. After that road, I get onto the highway and about a few miles down,
St.Ann Police Department sets up a speed trap about once a week on I-70. There
are of course other cities that set up speed traps, but St.Ann is one of the
most obnoxious and common because they are next to the airport and there's a
curve that makes it ridiculously easy to catch speeders and there's always
speeders near an airport. The entire time St.Louis County police are also
within the same overall area also trying to catch people on their way to and
from work. Everyone just trying to get their money so their useless department
can stay open.

~~~
madoublet
I live in St. Louis and see cars blow by me everyday going 20+ MPH over the
speed limit and weaving in and out of traffic. I am personally glad the cops
are there to act as a deterrent.

~~~
mikeash
Doesn't that imply that the deterrent isn't working?

~~~
madoublet
My experience is anecdotal at best, but it does seem that speeding is less
common on roads where there are frequent speed traps.

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freehunter
>And when I’m late, I speed.

How the poor are treated in our country is a crime, yes, but if you can't
afford a speeding ticket, you can avoid getting a speeding ticket by not
speeding. Going faster than the speed limit doesn't really get you there
appreciably faster, but it _does_ increase your chances of being in an
accident substantially and greatly increases your chances of getting a
speeding ticket.

Stealing food to support your family is one thing. That literally means you
can eat that night. Speeding is completely avoidable. It doesn't mean a
corrupt officer won't still pull you over for something, but it surely would
reduce the odds that they would look your way.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Technically true, there is an interesting book you might want to read titled,
"Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much"
([http://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Having-Little-Means-
Much/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Having-Little-Means-
Much/dp/0805092641/)). Its central theme is that scarcity changes the value
calculus of our decision making process, and it isn't just about money, it can
be making poor choices when you don't think you have enough time for example.

In order to choose not to speed, once speeding is inevitable because of a lack
of time, the woman in the article has to accept the consequence of being late
(forced) or the consequence of getting a ticket (probabilistic), and she (and
most people) choose the risk choice rather than the 'forced' choice. The
correct answer is to wind that transaction back to what she was doing before
she was late, and finding the places where she ended up with not enough time,
and those are then filled with a series of what appear to be inconsequential
choices with respect to time vs time availability.

I found it a fascinating read, and it gave me quite a different perspective on
problems like these where the 'obvious' answer seems to be "if it hurts, then
stop doing that."

~~~
brudgers
_before she was late_

For a poor single mother holding a job with few or no benefits and with a
support network often consisting of people in worse circumstances, that time
may have been back in the heady days of 2005 or 2006.

One might say, some people are born into lateness.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I disagree. I have some of the same issues as the single mom profiled here,
and reading the book helped me connect the dots. Having less of something than
is required to meet all of the requirements for that something (the definition
of scarcity) triggers this behavior in people. And if you don't actually stop
and think about what is happening, you start making choices which are counter
productive to your situation.

If you've read the Seven Habits of Highly Successful people one of their
points is to invest time to work on 'important' but not 'urgent' things. They
argue that by doing so these things do not contribute to 'urgency' later by
becoming a crisis. They back into the same, rather powerful concept. Which is
that if you don't take time to externalize all the 'costs' you don't
effectively manage the resource. In my case I would get a free hour of time
and think I could do "anything" with it, but once I started keeping track of
things I had put off in my notebook I started recognizing where I'd spend that
hour doing something unrelated to the stuff being put off and later that
activity was going to be 'urgent' if it didn't get done. By choosing instead
to put that hour toward one of my projects needing time I keep them under the
crisis threshold. I also recognized things I really wasn't ever going to get
to and got rid of those projects entirely from my 'queue.'

It can be challenging to realize that you can only do one thing tonight even
though three things are vying for your attention, and pulling an all-nighter
(my go to trick for college) really taints the hours you spend on projects the
next day, which then take more time than they would have, which means even
more things vying for your attention. You have to 'back up' to before that
point where you are over loaded and understand what you can really get done in
that time and then prioritize based on overall progress against the goals.
Relatively easy to say, _really_ hard to do.

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mgulaid
Reading this article reminded of the time, I used to go to community college,
while doing a part time job and interning in downtown SF. In one semester I
accumulate about $475 worth of parking and traffic fees. My schedule was too
hectic that I could not afford to take public transportation and slow down.
Being a working-person the United States is very stressful and undignified in
some instances. You can't afford to make mistakes or get sick. In my case, I
was lucky that the judge in SF granted me to do community services to pay off
the majority of my fees.

Secondly, I am amazed why there are too many policing jurisdictions in each
county. You have the City Police, County Police, Highway Patrol, local SWAT
teams, and State Police, in addition to Federal and drug enforcement agencies.
Too many inefficiencies and redundancies.

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imgabe
How much does it cost to incarcerate people for this long? Does it outweigh
the cost of the fines in the first place? If not, why even bother?

~~~
brudgers
Your question suggests the answer. Jails are very often a revenue source.
States and the Federal government often provide funds to build and operate the
facilities. Courts impose fees on defendants to cover expenses. And of course
there are all sorts monetization schemes that work when people have no
options:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=cost+of+phone+call+from+jail](https://www.google.com/search?q=cost+of+phone+call+from+jail)

[http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/why-does-it-
cost-18-...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/why-does-it-cost-18-to-
make-a-call-from-prison)

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MrMan
Does everyone agree that Uber will make these problems a thing of the past?

~~~
dogecoinbase
No, I don't think that Uber will solve poverty, the actual cause of these
issues.

