Dammit. At work I'm being dragged to these horrific 9:30am meetings every day for the last 5 weeks. Which is bad because it means I have to take surface streets to work (the freeways don't really clear between 9:30 and 10:00.) And THAT's bad because between my house and work lies the biggest fucking fund-raiser speed trap that I have ever heard of in my life.

11th Street is a wide, one-way street with no foot traffic with a 30mph speed limit. I JUST got a ticket there about 6 months ago, and ever since I've been really careful about driving slowly on that road. But last week, I guess I, you know, sneezed or something, because they pulled me over again. Needless to say, I'm seething. Cops make me so angry. I have a friend who is a police officer, and he told me that you don't even have to give speeding tickets if you don't want to--- completely discretionary. So the pigs who DO give speeding tickets do so because

(a) they (incorrectly) believe that speeding tickets curb accidents and traffic deaths, or

(b) they like power tripping on pushing people like me around

On a given day when they set up their speed traps I bet they stop 20 cars an hour, for 4 hours of the morning = 80 cars, with a $200 ticket each that's $16,000 a day that the city can raise with their little traps. And they do them about once a week, so that's almost $1,000,000 a year that they drain out of the city's citizens, paid for by people who would otherwise never have any contact with the police for their whole lives. I had no idea that justice could be so lucrative...

Maybe I would feel better about it if the city wasn't allowed to keep the fine money. It just seems a little weird to have a legal structure where the city can make up an unreasonable law, selectively enforce it to whatever degree they choose, and then benefit directly from its existence. It's not even in their interest to actually prevent people from breaking the law--- they'd lose money! Their only interest is to maximize the number of convicted law breakers.