Easy for you to say if you can pay the ticket.
When I lived back in California, an infraction would cost like $125 and that’s not counting the cost to attend traffic school so it wouldn’t go on my driving record.
They’ll still take the money because its technically not a crime. That’s how politicians abolished your right to trial by jury because the cop is handing you a summons instead of carting you off to jail.
Plea NOT GUILTY next time and see what happens.
You will be amazed.
if you don’t have 125 take Bart
I sat about two weeks ago and listened to an interview of a reporter who spent several weeks in Ferguson, and he started to branch out to examine various other conditions in surrounding communities, around St Louis.
What he came to find was a separated community system, various city/town councils, and each one had a fairly large police establishment....reporting only to that city/town. One burb, after another.
It appears, that the chief money-maker for all of them....are speed-traps and parking fines. They weren’t using their local force to whittle down on crime as we’d all expect in our own communities....they were using strictly as money-makers.
Once you got entangled in one community, you onto some state-wide register, and if you missed making that payment (you are minimum wage character, or a out-of-work individual), because you don’t have that $150 or whatever, then various court additions get tacked on, and you absolutely need a lawyer to get out of jail-time, but your whole savings is wiped out paying the lawyer to stay out of jail.
I grew up in the south, and know the speed-trap game, and how some communities have no choice but gimmick laws to pay for their stupidity, city parks, or ball fields. But when society hits “pothole” after “pothole”, going through five or six towns to get to their minimum wage job, and get a ticket on the average of every couple of months, and worry about the points and cash for the lawyers who just grin as you hire them....you lose faith in the system.
This kid in Ferguson did some thing stupid and got himself six-feet under. But the community is saying this is just the last straw in dealing with a screwed up system. I think they just latched onto this to vent their frustrations over how things work. Frankly, I think it’s time to open up the budget book of these towns....review traffic and parking tickets....and start to ask stupid questions.