In some Texas towns, excessive traffic ticketing has become a source of revenue–and in at least one cash-hungry municipality, officials put so much pressure on a judge to ticket residents that he resigned.
A few weeks ago, local WFAA conducted an investigation into what they called the “Dirty Thirty,” a group of four towns along a 30-mile stretch of interstate south of Dallas known to dispense a lot of tickets.
After gathering and comparing data from 800 cities, their findings on these four–Wilmer, Ferris, Palmer and Rice–were stunning.
Following that report, a former judge from a similar cluster of towns—an area southwest of Waco they call the “Texas Triangle”—came forward to tell reporters that he had resigned after years of volunteering as a judge, over precisely this problem.
“When I first became a judge, we had one reserve officer,” former judge David Viscarde told WFAA. “That’s all he did on Friday and Saturday every other weekend. He’d write 100 citations.”
After officials began asking him to “push speeding tickets through court,” according to WFAA, he stepped down.
“Their municipal court is their cash cow,” he said.
All this ticketing is likely a violation of the law. Texas can fine any city collecting over 30 percent of their revenue from traffic cities.
Read more on the investigations here.
(h/t TheBlaze)
