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Burdening the poor with vexatious fines—which potentially lead, if people are unable to pay their fines, to imprisonment—is bad for society. A new study from the Institute for Justice, “The Price of Taxation by Citation,” demonstrates the serious consequences not just for unfortunate citizens who have harmed no one, but for civic peace in general.

The study focuses on three Georgia cities that derive 14 to 25 percent of their revenue from such fines and fees: Morrow, Riverdale, and Clarkston. (The average for the state is more like 3 percent.) “The cities have their own courts to process citations, and the evidence shows these courts, which are structurally dependent on the cities, operate as well-oiled machines,” the study reports. “They churn through more cases than courts in similarly sized cities, and cases almost always end in a guilty finding, resulting in fines and fees revenue for the cities.”

The cities have small population bases on which to prey, ranging from 7,500 to 16,500. They are fined, among other things, for “traffic tickets…for non-speeding violations, such as expired tags, lane violations, illegal U-turns, parking violations and window tinting, among numerous others,” as well as “trivial infractions…dominated almost entirely by offenses like being in a park after closing, violating leash laws and not walking on sidewalks.”

Overall, the study found, most of these revenue-generating tickets are “for traffic and other ordinance violations that presented little threat to public health and safety. Traffic violations posed only moderate risk on average, while property code violations were primarily about aesthetics. This suggests the cities are using their code enforcement powers for ends other than public protection.”

The phenomenon, which the authors call “taxation by citation,” “(1) creates conflicts of interest, (2) distorts law enforcement priorities and (3) violates the rights of poor people.” When, as often happens, these citations fees fund the very municipal courts that levy them, that gives judges a pretty direct “personal interest in cases they decide, and municipalities should not have a financial interest in obtaining convictions.” Federal courts have found such practices constitutionally problematic.

In addition, “prosecutors’ duty to exercise their discretion neutrally can also be compromised if their office has a financial stake in convicting people.”

The practice also encourages law enforcement to spend time not worrying about actual public safety but searching for ways to ding people for cash. Such practices end up entrapping more citizens than the national norm in probation, where more fees, often reasonably unpayable, accrue. As a result, the risk of actual imprisonment and all its concominant problems looms over people for the pettiest of offenses.

The Institute for Justice observes that “Our review of the sample cities’ laws turned up few provisions that would meaningfully protect people from fines and fees abuse.” For example, none have ordinances that would “require municipal courts to provide jury trials when requested by a defendant, offer discovery or hold ability-to-pay hearings.”

Neither do any “require their courts to consider non-jail alternatives to fines and fees, such as community service, educational programs, or school or work attendance,” or to “prohibit courts from incarcerating or threatening to incarcerate people unable to pay fines and fees.”

Taxation by citation also leads to “lower levels of trust and higher levels of ill will toward city government on the part of residents. Trust in government is the level of confidence citizens hold that ‘authorities will observe the rules of the game and serve the general interest.’ Because many people’s primary experiences with the justice system involve dealing with police officers and local courts, excessive use of fines and fees can foment
distrust, damage residents’ relationships with law enforcement and harm judicial credibility.”

I suspect that no city official is going to stress so much about damaging citizen trust in institutions as long as they can keep turning poor people’s lives into revenue spigots.

But they should consider, as the study notes, that this dire phenomenon of city’s managing their finances on the back of petty harassment of poor citizens first burst to public prominence in the context of the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, following the 2014 police-caused death of Michael Brown.

It turns out that “from July 2010 through June 2014, Ferguson, a city of about 21,000 residents, issued 90,000 citations for municipal ordinance violations. And in the final 12 months of that period, police and code inspectors wrote almost 50% more citations than they did in the first 12. Significantly, the additional citations were largely for non-serious code offenses—not offenses like assault, driving while intoxicated and theft; the number
of citations for more serious crimes like those generally held steady.”

In the long run, destroying citizen trust in institutions can have bad effects far more serious than a cracked driveway or daring to tint one’s car window, even if officials want to forget—as they should not—how badly they can mess up someone’s life for no good reason.

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Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.

Next month, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether parents of an unarmed, unthreatening Mexican teen who was shot dead from across the border can sue the federal agent who killed their son. The Fifth Circuit ruled that they cannot. Click here to read an IJ amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to reverse. “Had Sergio Hernandez been killed by a federal agent in the 19th century, his parents could have brought a damages claim for the deprivation of their son’s constitutional rights,” says Anya Bidwell, who co-authored the brief. “The Supreme Court’s current jurisprudence that essentially eliminates the ability of individuals to sue federal agents for constitutional rights is simply inconsistent with this proud history.”

• Though facing charges in federal court for false statements and witness tampering, political consultant for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign persists in airing inflammatory comments about the judge, the investigation, and potential witnesses. And we will not disturb the district court’s increasingly strict restraints on his Twittering, Instant-Telegrams, and Facebookery, says the D.C. Circuit.
• Allegation: NYPD officer yanks compliant, unthreatening quinquagenarian arrestee out of her cell, tells her “don’t make me hurt you.” Frightened, she declines to tell the officer that he put on her handcuffs too tightly, which ultimately results in permanent, debilitating nerve damage. (All charges against the arrestee are later dropped.) Excessive force? Second Circuit: Yes, but qualified immunity. It was not clearly established that an arrestee who shows clear signs of distress but does not verbally inform an officer that handcuffs are too tight is being excessively forced. (Henceforth, it is clearly established, however.)
• After protests at abortion clinics, Pittsburgh officials adopt an ordinance creating a 15-foot “buffer zone” outside the entrance of any health care facility, in which no one may “congregate, patrol, picket or demonstrate.” A First Amendment violation? Third Circuit: Not if we interpret “congregate, patrol, picket or demonstrate” super-duper narrowly, so that it excludes the plaintiffs’ peaceful sidewalk counseling.
• Louisiana abortion clinic and two of its doctors bring a “cumulative-effects challenge” to the state’s abortion laws, arguing that, collectively, they pose an undue burden even if individual rules by themselves do not. Fifth Circuit: Maybe you can do that, but in quantifying the cumulative effects, you only get to count provisions that you would have standing to challenge individually.
• Victoria County, Tex. district attorney rescinds job offer to prosecutor applicant after another man lodges a complaint suggesting he’s a “flicking lunatic.” The man also files a state bar grievance accusing the applicant of posting on a white nationalist forum and issuing murder threats. The applicant sues the man for defamation and other torts, seeking a cool $100 mil in state court. The man invokes diversity jurisdiction, removes the case to federal court, and seeks to dismiss the claims under Texas’ anti-SLAPP statute. Fifth Circuit: Alas, as we decided two months ago, the state anti-SLAPP statute doesn’t apply in federal diversity cases.
• In 1999, Killeen, Tex. teenagers carjack husband and wife at gunpoint, keep the couple in the trunk for hours while they empty the couple’s bank account and try to pawn her wedding ring. From the trunk, the couple sings Gospel songs and invites the teens to church, but one of the teens shoots them both in the head, killing the husband but not the wife. She burns alive when they torch the car. Fifth Circuit: A 35-year sentence for one of the teens, who left before the murders, for aiding and abetting the carjacking is not unconstitutionally excessive. (The two teens who committed the murders have been sentenced to death and are awaiting execution. Two others were sentenced to 15 years.)
• Who is telling the truth about what happened when police arrested a Chicago resident for being a felon in possession? The police, who claim they calmly approached and asked whether the man had a gun, eliciting an immediate confession? Or the felon, who claims the cops ran up to him with guns drawn and patted him down before asking whether he had a gun? Seventh Circuit: We may never know, because the police allowed video of the encounter to be destroyed, but we think it was reasonable for the trial court to believe the police.
• When the feds place someone on the No Fly List (which bars the person from traveling in, to, or from U.S. airspace), must they provide an adversarial hearing where the person can challenge the allegations and evidence against them? Ninth Circuit: Maybe other plaintiffs can. But after reviewing the classified evidence that these plaintiffs (four U.S. citizens) had ties to terrorist organizations, we think the value of a live hearing is outweighed by national security interests.
• Affordable Care Act regulations require health insurance to provide free contraception. But some religions view contraception as sinful. So can the Trump administration exempt religious employers from having to pay (via insurance) for employee birth control? Ninth Circuit: Not in 13 plaintiff states. Injunction affirmed. Dissent: There’s already a nationwide injunction about this from outside the circuit. So what are we doing here?
• In which a legal secretary gestures from counsel table to instruct a witness not to answer. Tenth Circuit: Bad move.
• Sixth-grade girl commits suicide, and Polk County, Fla. deputies suspect her estranged best friend of having harassed her. They enter the friend’s home without a warrant and arrest her for stalking. The charge is dismissed. The friend sues the arresting officer. And her claims were rightly dismissed, holds the Eleventh Circuit: The officer had probable cause to arrest, and a jury reasonably found that he entered the friend’s home with her father’s consent.
• Allegation: Wildlife officers mount surveillance camera in the middle of plaintiff’s hunting and fishing property, which is accessible only by crossing two other private landowners’ properties and trespassing onto plaintiff’s property. A Fourth Amendment violation? W.D. Tenn: “Plaintiff simply had no reasonable expectation of privacy in his open field property.”
• “If we want to stop mass shootings, we should stop punishing police officers who put their lives on the line to prevent them.” So writes Judge Ho of the Fifth Circuit, dissenting from denial of en banc review of a decision denying qualified immunity to Kaufman County, Tex. but granting it to officers who fatally shot a man under circumstances that remain unclear.

Across the nation, municipal governments are reaping major fines and fees revenue from minor traffic and other code violations. This is taxation by citation, and, according to a new IJ study, cities—and their residents—may pay a price for it. The report, titled The Price of Taxation by Citation, explores the phenomenon and its effects via case studies of three Georgia cities that generated double-digit shares of their revenues through code enforcement. Among other things, the report finds taxation by citation may violate citizens’ rights and—not entirely surprisingly—people don’t love being treated like ATMs: In all three cities, recent ticket recipients reported lower levels of trust in city government than nonrecipients. In short, what cities may gain in revenue, they may lose in community trust and cooperation. Read the report.

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Limetown. Available now on Facebook Watch Original.

In 1998, when everybody was saying Saving Private Ryan was the most realistic war film ever made, I called my brother—who served several years in the U.S. Army, including a stretch in Vietnam, to ask if he’d seen it.

“Yeah, but I don’t know why people say it’s so authentic,” he grumbled. “You know that opening scene on Omaha Beach during the D-Day invasion? They showed that for 20 minutes. But in real life, it went on for like six hours.” I was afraid to ask if he’d ever noticed that no movie or TV character with a telephone ever dials seven digits.

Every movie and TV show requires a certain suspension of disbelief. We never see anybody sleep for eight hours or go to the bathroom (or at least, we didn’t used to). In sci-fi and horror, that goes double or maybe triple. Carl Kolchak, the Night Stalker reporter whose stories inevitably wound up being about werewolves and vampires, never once stopped to take any notes. (Maybe that’s why he never got anything into print?)

But there’s got to be a kind of broad verisimilitude in the details once you get past that suspension of disbelief. Saving Private Ryan‘s Captain Miller didn’t whistle “I Want To Hold Your Hand” or warn his men to set their phasers to stun as they stormed ashore at Normandy, much less seek peace by shouting praise of Wagner and Nietzsche.

And if he had, it still wouldn’t have been as nonsensically silly as Limetown, the new thriller from the Facebook Watch Original streaming service. Consider this scene:

Reporter Lia Haddock is trapped in a motel room, where a zombie-like lunatic is banging his head on the flimsy door, shrieking, “This is your warning!” Does she call the front desk for help? Does she call the cops? Nah, she whips out her cell phone to record a description of the loon “in case something happens.”

It costs nothing to subscribe to Facebook Watch Original, which is a fair price for Limetown. Tedious at its best moments, completely empty-headed at its worst, it would scarcely be worth mentioning if not for the buzz from public-radio cultists:  It’s based on an American Public Radio podcast that gives it built-in audience that, however small, is plenty noisy.

The premise of Limetown is potentially spooky. Fifteen years ago, a small, secretive town in the Tennessee mountains simply disappeared. Or, rather, the 300-some neuroscientists who lived there, working on a Manhattan Project-style classified government program, did.

The only trace of them was a single charred and crucified corpse left behind on the town’s main street. Other creepy but cryptic clues: a mass grave of pig carcasses—sacrifices? or results of an experiment gone wrong? and which would be more ominous?—and the presence of a 80-mile-long network of caves underneath the town, with entrances from every building.

Unfortunately, the premise is about all Limetown has going for it. The plot details are silly. For instance, when a single call for help came from the town that night (“Shut it off!” the caller yelled before the connection was broken), the police SWAT team that responded was prevented from entering by a private security force. Obeying whose orders? Nobody seems to have asked.

The town is still sitting there, protected only by a chain-link fence. But the houses and their contents are untouched since the moment their occupants disappeared. The army of squatters and grieving relatives camped just outside have never broken or taken anything. Which, I suppose, might be true if they were all public-radio listeners who were just there waiting for Garrison Keillor autographs. In Miami, where I live, there wouldn’t have been two bricks left standing the next morning.

To the extent that Limetown has a point (other than whatever corporate perfidy ultimately turns out to be responsible for what happened), it seems to be that the 24-hour news cycle has so scrambled Americans’ brains and scarred their souls that even the most profound tragedies have been forgotten by the weekend.

That, at least, is the thesis of the radio reporter Lia Haddock, who’s looking into the disappearance 15 years later. “What makes the Limetown tragedy unique, what makes it worth the continuing discussion in spite of the collective moving on, she says in her news report, is the complete lack of context.” (Or maybe she said “confidence,” not context. For a radio reporter, she mumbles a lot.) In this, at least, Limetown is on the mark—a public-radio reporter who’s interested not in what happened to the missing people, or why, but the media sociology of it.

Haddock is played by a stoic, foggy Jessica Biel (The Sinner), who seems to have found a few Quaaludes on the craft-services snack table. For somebody who finally has her dream job—as a little girl, she liked to put tiaras on the heads of her family members and conduct mock interviews with them—Lia seems curiously apathetic about her story, on which she’s already worked for four months.

Perhaps her drifting, disconnected performance is a writing, rather than acting, problem; the rest of the characters also seem to lack details, as if they weren’t fully composed.

Whatever the case, Biel’s Haddock makes Carl Kolchak look like Woodward and Bernstein. She has no idea what to ask her sources, or even how; she tapes one important interview by holding her phone up to the studio microphone, which will produce audio that sounds roughly like the screaming of bats.

Biel, by the way, seems completely on board with the idea that today’s Americans can’t hold anything in their heads more than 10 minutes at a time. When she first got the Limetown script, she told a (real) reporter at a screening earlier this month, she thought it was based on a true story. “I just thought I missed it, because our world is so insane that anything is possible really, right?” Biel explained. Move over, Nina Totenberg.

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