Fenton, population 226, brings in over $1 million per year through its mayor’s court, an unusual justice system in which the mayor can serve as judge even though he’s responsible for town finances.
We held a hearing about whether or not the mayor should also be the Judge. The mayor has decided that the mayor runs the court impartially and there is no need for a 3rd party magistrate.
“I’m the mayor after all”
“I am the Senate!”
So much freedom in communist Louisiana
This isn’t communism, it’s totalitarianism…
Very different thing.
No it’s not. It’s quite literally just american capitalism
I hate to break it to you, but capitalism in its purest form is very close to totalitarianism, it’s just that instead of a centralised government calling the shots it’s whoever has the fattest wallet.
Edited to remove american from before capitalism.
Nope. Same difference
Totalitarianism - A system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state
Centralised government - centralized government (also united government) is one in which both executive and legislative power is concentrated centrally at the higher level
Communism - a theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs
It’s so easy to research and not look stupid…
It’s easy to get these confused when every example of national communism has resulted in a totalitarian state.
I will give you that.
I hate to be that person but I’d also say if I claimed to be a Christian that didn’t believe in God or Jesus it doesn’t mean Christians don’t believe in God or Jesus, it just means I’m not Christian.
Amen.
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I’m not sure if you realize this but using that term when it’s not really applicable looks silly. Using that term when it’s 100% not remotely applicable makes you look like a moron.
Says you dupshit
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Damn, did you get banned from Reddit or something? I feel like you might fit in better over there, or maybe Truth Social.
Define communism. Go ahead. Define it.
That’s government by the cows, right? Cow-moo-nism. They swapped some letters to make it more pronuncable.
??? Mate you need to read something. I suggest starting with Cocomelon books. Since you clearly don’t understand half the words you have used.
Lol. What?
All the other corruption and such aside, imagine how terrible this is for the urban development of your town.
The municipal government has no incentive to invest in forward-thinking policy that will lead to healthier and more economically sustainable communities. If they invest in any kind of maintenance or developments that increase road safety - and thus decrease fines - it hurts the government’s ability to operate. Indeed, they have direct Financial incentive to make the roads less safe. Not to even mention that they have no incentive at all to do things that improved the city in ways that won’t affect their traffic fines.
They’ve committed to giving up on good governance of their small town. They found a way to function by just parasitizing others. They’ve given up.
It’s a town of 226 people, I don’t think they’re too interested in urban development or anything that would involve taxes instead of extorting out of towners.
Yes this village basically exists to give traffic tickets, and everyone else in the area hates them. Talking about building city infrastructure here is kind of absurd. Sure the mayor-judge could start attempting civil projects, but the 226 residents live there because of how things are now.
It has an elementary school that could use some work. My company re sided the Catholic Church missed in the report. This town also has more than 225 people in it.
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They’re basically acting as modern day robber barons.
The cynic in me feels the need to point out that this is Louisiana we’re taking about. This might be the most forward thinking policy they’ve had for decades.
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I’m generally for local control over local matters, but this shit should be illegal at the federal level. The right to due process is impossible to implement when the executive and judicial branches are run by the same person.
the most, worst, and most blatant corruption is usually in local government. it’s just so much harder to get people to notice or care until it’s like Flint Michigan water levels of bad.
Flint’s still fucked I believe.
Case in point.
It’s also much harder to investigate and shine a spotlight on it, since local news sources have been in decline for years. For many smaller metros, the only local news source may be a weekly newsletter or NPR affiliate, and those rarely have the investigative impact that an old-school local paper would have had, and small-town corruption has flourished like fungus in the dark.
yes! like, I’ve worked in local news, some of it is still ok. I think all tv news is too surface level to be that meaningful, but some local channels still try to actually investigate local things that matter.
but like you said, bigger cities have nothing like that. neither do small enough communities. and many local news companies have been gutted or taken as puppets by Sinclair or fts or whoever. I was working at a local fox affiliate in 2018. they weren’t bad when i started because they were owned by hearst. Hearst is a broadcast distributor that affects minimal control over the content its stations produce. they recognize the value is preserving the teams and practices of the stations they buy. in 2019 that were bought by Fox directly. after that we were required to run every second of trump talking and kept having national anti abortion stories pushed on us. we had almost no time available for local content and even the stuff that did get scheduled would get bumped by trump being late for a press conference. he was over an hour late on average and we had to sit there and wait for him through every second of it.
There’s gotta be some way to do something like turning NPR and PBS into a multi-media state funded NGO to support the news industry at the local, state, and national levels. Probably international too but that’d probably require oversight from the Dept of State because of the heightened risk of international journalists becoming political prisoners. Maybe making journalists diplomats as a shield for their reporting.
IDK how it’d all have to work, you need to balance the need to keep all tiers of journalism funded with the authoritarians who’d see that and immediately begin seeing opportunities to coerce desirable reporting.
This is the exact all powerful executive situation the foundation intended to stop from ever happening.
I found this telling (emphasis mine):
Mayor’s courts operate in a gray area of Louisiana law. Like municipal courts, they handle violations of local ordinances. Municipal judges must hold a law degree and pass the bar; a mayor can preside over court without meeting any qualifications. Yet, like a municipal judge, a mayor can impose fines or sentence people to jail.
Mayor’s courts must ensure defendants have fair trials. But unlike other courts in the state, they aren’t subject to rules like the Code of Criminal Procedure that are supposed to ensure courts are run fairly and properly.
Wow. Truly land of the free. /s How is this permitted to go without consequences?
In The United States we believe in freedom in the abstract and only the abstract.
My guess is no one has taken it to the Supreme Court.
I’d guess it’s because Louisianna law is based on Napoleonic Code rather the English common law. LA law can have oddities because of that.
And then we got someone below talking about Supreme Court, as if they would here such a case. This is one that would, and should, be deferred to a lower court.
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FWIW, this story is about an African American mayor/judge in a town with a slight black majority.
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I’m from this area. A mayor got in trouble for embezzlement a few year ago. Look it up.
Does this town have a reputation?
Yep. Do not speed. You go 50.
With the size of the population, is it safe to assume they’re not sending out a helicopter search patrol if you were to say…not stop and just outrun the Ford?
Or is it that part of the south where discontinuing pursuits is based on how the officer “feels” vs actual safety regulations?
The cops can’t go 110? I had a gutless 96 horsepower 89 Nissan pulsar that could do 120 easy. At least that’s the highest I pushed it.
Maybe its like in my city where the cops kept drag racing their patrol cars so the city had limiters installed into them.
the most expedient solution would be to drive nowhere near Fenton, LA
This is impossible. You have no choice but to drive through Fenton to get to lake Charles without at least an hour detour through moss bluff. I live in this area and my in-laws live in Fenton (it’s bigger than it seems. The town itself is small but the surrounding area has lots of home. A lot more than 225 people in the town too.) You just don’t speed. You get a warning sign about it changing to 50. Go 50. I used to pick up my buddy in kinder, one town over heading to lake Charles for work, and we would wait to light the blunt till we passed though.
I’ve seen this movie. Stars dan Aykroyd and John candy.
Nothing But Trouble is the movie for those curious.
Great movie, great actors.
Or just not break the speed limit?
I get the concerns about possible corruption (though the article didn’t show us anything in this regard), but I’m like what’s the problem? If you break the law you get a fine. I’d be more concerned about the paces where you don’t!
“Yeah, I clocked you going 20 over”
“But I was driving the speed limit”
“Take it up with the judge”
—Later—
“You were going 20 over, pay at the desk”
“But I was going the speed limit!”
“Got any proof?”
“No?”
“Then go pay at the desk”
More like “you were going 1 mph over, the law’s the law”
Speed trap towns aren’t reasonable. That’s the point.
No way they will be satisfied with the fine for 1mph over, they are going to crank that fine up as high as they can get away with. Which sounds like a lot.
Still, going 1mph over is usually a bit less expensive of a ticket than going 20mph over is. One is a speeding ticket. The other is typically a reckless driving ticket.
The article said they only write tickets for going more than 61mph in a 50mph zone. That’s 20% over, 44% longer brake distance if there is an accident and more noise for the people living nearby.
If this happens it will be a scandal. The article only showed cases of:
“Yeah, I clocked you going 20 over”
“I’ did, but will still fight the ticket in court”
“Take it up with the judge”“You were going 20 over, pay at the desk”
“All right, I actually did driver too fast. But it’s not fair!!!”
“Alright, go pay at the desk”So I’ll wait until someone can actually show that evidence is faked and people are sentenced without due process, violating the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”. Because what the article showed were a lot of people who broke traffic laws, but none who were bribed or who sentenced people to fines without evidence.
I’m sure the only people getting ticketed are ones who have genuinely broken the law. There is no conflict of interest here at all.
If you have any proof on the contrary I’d like to hear it. Because the article didn’t provide any.
I live in Louisiana. Fenton is what’s known here as a speed trap town.
Except for the i-10, every major highway in LA has these. The trick is that the average speed limit on these highways is around 60 or 70, and then it drops to 30 or 40 for a mile stretch where cops are waiting for you just after the sign.
If you missed the sign or haven’t slowed down sufficiently by the time you reach it, they pull you over and write you a ticket for ~$600. I got one of these in 2018 for the latter reason.
It’s not just about obeying the speed limit. You can follow the speed limit to the letter and miss one sign on accident. It actually is a trap. It’s a main source of income for the small towns along the highways of LA.
The speed limit is often artificially low to entice people to speed though. Especially in towns like this that subsist off speeding fines.
Back in 2007 a group of UGA students drove the 285 loop around Atlanta at exactly over the posted speed limit (at the time 55mph). This caused traffic to back up for hours and the teens were arrested for blocking the flow of traffic.
And, from personal experience, driving on 285 at less than 70mph is absolutely terrifying. You’re liable to get hit by someone who is just moving with the flow of traffic. It’s substantially less safe to adhere to the posted speed limits.
So what is the expectation then, if not to speed?
The street design may be a massive problem, indeed. And I welcome any change towards more reasonable street design and more public transport. This part of the high way system seems to be rather busy - perfect for a high speed train connection.
But that’s not what the article criticizes and this misdirection is exactly what I find problematic about the article. Until better roads are designed “just break the law” doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.
I think you missed my point.
The roads are designed with people travelling 75mph in mind. They easily support those speeds. There is no design problem.
There is a policy problem in that, despite the roads being designed to safely operate at 75mph+, the law has the limit set at 50mph. This creates an environment where you are encouraged to speed, as going the speed limit feels like moving at a crawl.
There is no safety requirement for setting the limit so low. It is entirely to allow the police to pull over people arbitrarily, as everyone is always in violation of the law.
Reading the article, there is obviously there’s some shady-ass conflict-of-interest shit going down in this specific case.
However.
Literally any municipality in America could make bank if they enforced the traffic laws to the letter. Conditions permitting, most drivers regularly go 5-10mph over the speed limit. Distracted driving is common, and evolving (apparently the new things is people watching streaming videos while driving). In certain areas drivers leave their cars parked on sidewalks, blocking crosswalks, inside bike lanes, etc. Laws about stopping for pedestrians waiting to cross the street may as well not exist. Buzzed (and more recently, mildly-stoned) driving is socially acceptable. My local municipality could probably fund itself exclusively off tickets from drivers who don’t have their lights on in the rain.
To be very clear: enforcement is a terrible way to get people to follow traffic laws (an outsized number of encounters that end in police violence started with a traffic stop, traffic stops are disproportionately made against people of color, tickets are regressively priced, etc etc). However the case study of this little town reveals a big truth: lawbreaking while driving is widespread on American streets to a level so extreme that nearly all drivers on the road will break the law (however minutely) every time they get behind the wheel. What kind of a broken system is that?
Especially re: road safety, this is the American approach. Build with unsafe designs according to decades out-of-date engineering practice and design philosophy. Blame enforcement when things inevitably go wrong (which they are doing – most American towns are heading towards financial insolvency because of their idiotic design and planning patterns and American roads are among if not the least safe ones in the developed world).
In threads about roads, people will inevitably bring up two pieces of perfectly-harmonized bullshit. First, that the drivers are just particularly bad in their context. Second, that there is way too little enforcement. Both are total bullshit. Drivers are basically the same everywhere. It is literally not possible for the police to enforce enough to make a dent on road safety.
When some municipality decides they want to get serious about safe roads, they do so primarily through better engineering of the roads. It’s proven effective. And bonus points: the same design practices that make roads safer encourage better development patterns creating safer and more pleasant streets for EVERYONE. Especially people outside of cars. Which creates a virtuous cycle of multi-modal development patterns. Safer streets mean more people are on them, and not just in cars. This leads to lower crime, more productive neighborhood businesses, more aesthetic neighborhoods (since people are actually there to look at them, they care how they look now). Everything just gets better when you use better road engineering.
But no, we still rely on AASHTO standards and their ilk which rate roads according to “level of service”. They literally put everything, including safety, as secondary to how many cars the road can move.
And that’s not even jumping down the rabbit hole of what it means for my country to be a police state. How insane it is that we have laws that criminalize completely mundane, normal, predictable behavior that can be selectively-enforced or used as pretexts for unnecessary violence.
What kind of a broken system is that?
Just to be clear, you mean that people ignoring the laws is what makes it broken, right? Not the laws themselves?
Cause your last sentence threw me off for a second.
If so, I totally agree with you.
I’m not from the US, but are people really streaming while driving? Cause that’s just ridiculously stupid.
I know people are driving much longer distances in the US than here, but at least put on some podcast or music to entertain you. Nothing that keeps your eyes off the road.
But speeding tickets are the most common type of infraction, and I think that’s probably a good example of a systematic issue.
There are areas in this country where the speed limit is set artificially low, just to always allow for police to issue tickets capriciously.
The Atlanta beltway for example would literally grind the city to a halt if everyone adhered to the speed limit signs, and it’s actively dangerous to attempt to do so as an individual.
That’s not a people issue, it’s a systems issue.
Nearly all drivers on the road will break the law (however minutely) every time they get behind the wheel. What kind of a broken system is that?
All of this is intentional. Think about the phrase “I have nothing to hide” when you see flagrant privacy violations. Yes… Yes you do
lawbreaking while driving is widespread on American streets to a level so extreme…
Is this not the case everywhere? If anything, speeding, distracted driving, and running stop signs / ignoring traffic signals is much more common in other parts of the world.
Honestly, just put up cameras at points where following the law is the most critical for road safety, place notices something like a mile before it on the road, and if anyone’s still breaking the law after seeing the warning, just send the ticket to the home address the car is registered to with a picture that captures the driver.
Voilà, road safety AND reduction of unnecessary cop civilian conflicts.
Still send out patrol vehicles but for like, actual dangerous situations that need an immediate responder, because the patrol effect is a real and observed phenomenon (literally even just having a dude in uniform sitting on a horse in the area reduces crime), something that would actually be improved on by having cops spending less time babysitting highways and more time being visible in high crime areas to deter petty criminal behaviour.
This is how it’s done in Korea, cameras everywhere and signs telling you where they are. The built-in gps systems in newer cars also have all the camera locations within their maps. It’ll warn you by dinging if you’re speeding ahead of a camera and give you a happy ding-ding if you pass the camera while driving under the limit. Seems to work fairly well, although it’s kind of annoying on their highways as everyone seemingly races to the next camera where they then rapidly slow down, then speed up, again and again and again.
Oh and cops don’t pull people over. I never saw it and drove many miles over several different visits.
My cat’s name is Fenton!
He does look like he would take peoples money
Gotta pay for that tux rental somehow
Hey, it’s the plot line to “nothing to lose”. Is there a coal fire under the courthouse?
There was once a town that the state took its town charter away for the shitty way they pulled people over.
Louisiana needs to do the same.
Exactly.
People should literally stay away from this town, and drive around it. It’s simply unacceptable for any municipality to work or either exist this way. It’s better for everyone besides the 221 people living there not to ever visit or even passthrough the place
Another commentor said that it’s very difficult to drive around this town and it’ll add a lot of time to your commute. For people who have tight schedules (e.g. pick up or drop off children) it might not be possible to add an hour or more to their drive time.
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Reminds me of Waldo Florida, back in the day.
Can you elaborate?
For about 20 years AAA designated Waldo as a speed trap because profit from tickets was a motivation for that city. They issued tickets based on quotas, so cops had to pull over an enough drivers to meet their quota. They also had something like a half dozen speed limits or something crazy like that set up to trick drivers.
Geez that’s insane
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And here I thought that city that the Spiffing Brit did in Cities Skylines (and, to a lesser extent, Tropico) that subsisted entirely on toll tickets were just too dumb to be real. If that game allowed you to exist on fines, I suspect it’d be exactly like this place
PS - Invidious link to the vid - https://inv.tux.pizza/watch?v=gBe39Tn_75c
He also did a city that paid for itself using the worst possible mass transit system one could possibly imagine. IIRC, by the end of that map it took a person over 24 hours to go from their residential zone, over to their job no matter what it was, and that trip would cost them over $100 each way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xx0EJCOUyQ
Correction: a trip was over $9000!!! In fact it was over $9,000,000 apparently.
Second correction: the trip was extended to three days of time, but due to how time works in Cities Skylines 2, that’s 3 months of transit time on top of the 24 hours he already had set up.
The mayor/judge:
