Sunday 6 September 2009

No... Ticket!

Every time, every single time that I assume I've maxed out on US-related WTF, I come across something new and uniquely disturbing. Jericho, Arkansas is a town so small (population 174) that it no longer has any businesses, but it has 7 police officers. That's 4% of the population, which the city can't pay for meaning they're cutting back on fripperies like fire department. Their desperate need to pay for themselves means it's now apparently almost impossible to get them to respond to emergency calls, because they're too busy writing as many parking tickets as humanly possible, so as to raise funds.

And, when you go to court to contest bullshit tickets, like fire chief Don Paye (edit: Don Payne, apologies) did last week, the cops will show up too, and they will fucking shoot you.

Seriously. They will fucking shoot you. Right there, in court. In the back.

Also, turns out the tickets were void, because the department had no power to write them in the first place.

So, let's summarise. A police force a city can't afford hand out tickets that it can't legally write like goddamn confetti in order to keep itself afloat, still ends up costing the city so much they start getting their fire engines repossessed. Then, when you stiff the guy in charge of using whatever engines were left to stop your city bursting into fucking flames, and he objects, you shoot him in the back.

I believe the relevant word here is guuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh?

1 comment:

Talia said...

WTF? Seriously...wtf?!

I have no other words.