US Highway 64
I happen to have two friends who are on the Oakland Police force and I have some ridiculous info about their policies:
They do *not* give tickets to Oakland residents. This is an unwritten but well known (verbal) policy, that an officer should only give a ticket to a resident if they are doing something VERY stupid like drunk driving or 25+ over the limit, and even then they will go far easier on them then they would on an out of towner.
You know what this is known as? City fund generation. If you take money from people in town it doesn’t bring any more money into the town. If you hit up out of towners by ticketing a couple hundred of them a day in town such as Oakland, a small town that tallied up to 1,200 residents in the 2000 census, (gives out more tickets in a week than it has actual residents)… you can generate some crazy "free" revenue.
The chief of police here taught a concealed weapons permit course that I took. During the class he flat out said they pull over black people when they see them because they’re typically up to no good. They also occasionally ask drunk passengers to step out of the vehicle – causing them to be publically intoxicated – and they get arrested for it. Let me reiterrate: they weren’t publically intoxicated UNTIL they stepped out of the vehicle, but they did it to obey the officer! That’s entrapment in the worst of ways – they are arresting people who are trying to be responsible!
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