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.
deleted by creator
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
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
They’re basically acting as modern day robber barons.
It’s Louisiana, they would go back to 1800 if they could.
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.
This is a great summary of the our entire economy
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
deleted by creator
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?
*Nothing But Trouble
🎶"All around the world, it’s the same song"🎵 🎶
I get that song now.
Thank you, I should google my references before posting them.
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.
deleted by creator
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
deleted by creator
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.
Hey aren’t there a bunch of 2A, anti-government tyranny people in that area? Wouldn’t that be 220 people vs 1?
That 1 will be you, the traveler who got the ticket, not the mayor. They understand they need that money to exist and they aren’t the ones getting tickets. Lots of bridge troll towns scattered around the nation.
