When Cops Become Self-Supporting

This story has been all over the tubz the past couple of days:

JERICHO, Ark. – It was just too much, having to return to court twice on the same day to contest yet another traffic ticket, and Fire Chief Don Payne didn't hesitate to tell the judge what he thought of the police and their speed traps.

The response from cops? They shot him. Right there in court.

Payne ended up in the hospital, but his shooting last week brought to a boil simmering tensions between residents of this tiny former cotton city and their police force. Drivers quickly learn to slow to a crawl along the gravel roads and the two-lane highway that run through Jericho, but they say sometimes that isn't enough to fend off the city ticketing machine.

"You can't even get them to answer a call because normally they're writing tickets," said Thomas Martin, chief investigator for the Crittenden County Sheriff's Department. "They're not providing a service to the citizens."

And I thought it was all ironic and stuff, and the reaction of the city fathers to disband the police department "until things calm down" was instructive - if the police turn out to be the problem, what exactly was their whole purpose again? And more than that I didn't really give it a lot of thought.

But Tam at View From The Porch had a pretty good take on the lessons to be drawn from that incident.

Jericho apparently didn't even have its own cops until a fed.gov grant in the "1990s" (I'm going to use my amazing Kreskin powers to guess "sometime after September 1994") financed a cop shop. Most grants of this nature run out after two years, but the newly-formed Jericho P.D. apparently found a way to keep the dough rolling in even after the federal teat was withdrawn: traffic fines.

And they didn't care who they ticketed, or how unfairly:

"When I first moved out here, they wrote me a ticket for going 58 mph in my driveway," 75-year-old retiree Albert Beebe said.

So here's this little hamlet that gets "free money" to start its own cop shop, and that seemed to make sense because, well, every town's got its own police, right? Except there wasn't money for it before, and there won't be money for it after, and ... what exactly did they expect those cops to do when the grant ran out? Go get honest jobs? You hired a bunch of guys who made good money for sitting on their asses in cars, looking for chances to push people around. Y'know, that's pretty much the definition of a thug. Did you really expect them to go away when the free money ran out?

Thugs know a good thing when they see it. When you've got a license to molest people, there's always free money. It's there for the taking.

Or did those people really think the cops were there to protect them? From what?