Atlanta Cops Go On Mass Ticketing Blitz, Tickets Written Nearly Double In Two Years

Chris | InformationLiberation
Jun. 11, 2014

Atlanta cops are waging one of the most ambitious revenue extraction campaigns in the world, nearly doubling the amount of tickets they wrote and revenue they collected over two years.

From WSBTV:
Park Atlanta wrote 141,000 tickets in 2010 and two years later, wrote 221,000, according to documents obtained by Channel 2 Action News. The city received thousands of dollars in ticket revenue, but Mayor Kasim Reed said money was not the motivation for the increase.

"The ticket and traffic enforcement process is actually a tool in combating crime. One of the off-shoots of that is you do have an increase in revenue," Kasim said.

Atlanta resident Joe Williams say he remembers Reed telling Channel 2 investigative reporter Mark Winne three years ago that this would happen.

“Police will be issuing more tickets to keep more people safe," Reed said.

Williams said he wonders if the push for more tickets is just an easy chance to increase the city’s revenue.

“I thought the purpose of police departments was supposed to be to serve and protect, and not ticket and arrest,” Williams said.

Channel 2 Action News filed an open records request for documents that show Atlanta police and Park Atlanta have issued more tickets during the Reed administration. According to the documents, in 2009, Atlanta police issued only 173,438 tickets. During Reed's first year in office, that number nearly doubled, documents show.


Police all over the nation are going on mad-dash ticketing sprees to extract revenue from a destitute population hesitant to fund their voracious appetite for never ending budget increases. Rather than "sacrifice" themselves to help the people claim to serve, police agencies have responded with hysterical fits, outright stealing through asset-forfeiture, and mass-ticketing blitzkriegs like this one and many others. In Rhode Island, police went on a mass ticketing blitz against the wards of councilmen who voted against giving them more taxpayer cash. A town in Oklahoma had to ban police outright from writing tickets because they were looting passers-through of obscene amounts of cash relative to their neighbors. If that's not enough, the next frontier in revenue collection is to have computers read your license plate and automatically send tickets to your home. Similar to the red light camera shakedown, it would be fully automated revenue extraction. As to the claim these ticketing schemes are about "safety," studies have shown speed limits have no positive effect on safety, only a negative effect to make the roads more dangerous if they're set too low. In towns where all the street signs are covered up, rather than chaos breaking out, traffic moves faster, and the road becomes safer.
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Chris runs the website InformationLiberation.com, you can read more of his writings here. Follow infolib on twitter here.













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