speed trap

Reason.com recently published a list of eleven U.S. towns where their police forces were either disbanded or their autonomy as a governmental entity was dissolved because of an addiction to, and dependence on, ticket revenue. We thought it would be informative to present excerpts from Reason’s article for those cities along with select driver-sourced comments about those same locations to the NMA’s National Speed Trap Exchange at https://www.speedtrap.org. Check out the first six speed trap cities featured in Part 1 by Clicking Here. Revenue hunting under the guise of traffic law enforcement is a crime against the public. While these cities eventually got caught, they showed that crime can pay. St. George, Missouri Residents voted in 2011 to disincorporate after a series of scandals, mostly involving its police department. The St. Louis County town had just over 1,300 people at the time. Reason: “St. George disbanded its police force in 2008, handing over traffic enforcement to the county sheriff’s office. In 2011, a local alderman, Carmen Wilkerson, ousted the incumbent mayor in a write-in campaign. Wilkerson ran on a platform of becoming St. George’s last mayor; she and a slate of other candidates wanted to dissolve the town, especially after learning that the incumbent mayor was plotting to revive the old speed trap by contracting with another town’s police force. Wilkerson’s campaign slogan? ‘Save Us From Our City.’” Speedtrap.org: “Because of the serious harassment video available on YouTube, this small town was dissolved and the area is now patrolled by St. Louis County police. However, the drastic drop in speed limit is still there just after the sharp curve (they get you before you can adjust speed), so the county still uses this trap to make quotas at the end of the month.” Maricopa, California Maricopa is located about 40 […]