The Diminutive Bounty Hunter

At 4’11” and just over 100 pounds, Michelle Gomez doesn’t look like the sort of person you’d hire to retrieve earthmoving equipment stolen by a Peruvian crime family. But in the summer of 2013, that’s exactly what she was doing.

 

From Wired.com, it’s long but truly fascinating.

Red Light Camera Usage Declines for first Time

It’s about time. There have been few such blatant attempts at revenue generation by jurisdictions in the last 25 years.  From Ars Technica:  Finally law makers are responding to citizen concern:

But doubts crept in. A year after supporting the Redflex system, Marsh wanted to see the actual camera setups. He drove out near Highway 99 at Sisk Road in the northwest corner of town, close to the Vintage Faire shopping mall. What he saw surprised him. The red light camera at the intersection was “set up to only monitor the lane coming off of Highway 99 onto Sisk, going north,” Marsh said. “That was the only monitored lane—the turn lane is not the T-bone situation,” he said, referring to a dangerous scenario where one high-speed car plows into another at a near-right angle.

 

 

Related articles

• California: Municipal Discontent With Red Light Cameras On The Rise (thenewspaper.com)
• New red-light camera rules drawing criticism from local law enforcement (kcci.com)

How Not to Get Arrested

An Ex-Cop’s Guide on How not to get Arrested via Instapundit:

Dale Carson is a defense attorney in Jacksonville, Florida, as well as an alumnus of the Miami-Dade Police Department and the FBI. So he knows a thing or two about how cops determine who to hassle, and what all of us can do to not be one of those people. Carson has distilled his tips into a book titled Arrest-Proof Yourself, now in its second edition. It is a legitimately scary book—369 pages of insight on the many ways police officers profile and harass the people on their beat in an effort to rack up as many arrests as possible.

This goes further to a recent post on how to avoid speeding tickets.  As citizens we are considered a revenue stream.  As we’ve developed as a society we have unfairly increased the burden on law enforcement and thrust them into this position.  We entrust law enforcement to “Protect and Serve” anything beyond that enters social policy/social engineering and is the purview of politicians and apparatchiks whose agenda is often shallow and misguided.