eventually it will be all cops, and effectively 100% of all traffic stops will be on-duty cops pulling over off-duty cops
It's probably on some major highway. There's a lot of towns like this whose entire economy is fueled by leeching off travellers.
That must be such an insufferable place to live. I lived in a small town of 11.7k people and it apparently has 9 cops. That felt like way more than enough.
sucks for the other 25 officers then, they've got to do twice the work this year.
Literal highwaymen right? They're acting as a bully community that shakes down people who pass by. It's just the updated verison of a minor system within a greater whole indicating social decay and/or poverty. There must be technical anthropological words to describe this. I wonder how recent the community has subsided like this. Is it an old, old tradition, or something new based on socio-economic and cultural changes?
Apparently the new police chief, hired in 2021, quadrupled the number of cops with cops that were fired from other places. So they've got a dude just building an official bandit camp a couple hours north of Houston, I fucking love America
Here's where I'm pulling it from. I like that it says both that the current size is 5x larger than the largest force at a similar sized town, but the new head pig only quadrupled the force. So it's not a new thing but it's recently gotten drastically worse. Bonus points for the mayor pretending that they didn't know what was going on or that they don't have records for how many cops they have
If the cops are writing, let's say, $1.5 million in tickets each year, you'd have an average revenue of $30,000 per cop. According to the quoted police chief, the cops have salaries of $80,000 to $100,000, so it looks like the cops are robbing the town's coffers just as much as anyone who gets ticketed.
EDIT: Obviously, using ticketing as a net revenue generator is bad, but it doesn't seem like the town is benefiting from revenues: it's a purely parasitical relationship here.
The town is basically an ouraboros human centipede. The town shits into the mouth of the police, which then shits into the mouth of the town. A perfect closed system, a perpetual motion device which is refreshed every now and then by whoever is foolish enough to drive through this place!
