Police in tiny AL town make more arrests than town has residents, tow 1.7 cars per household

[RDCanecutter 26452]

On 1/21/2022 at 11:40 AM, NeverMarryAStripper said:

I like how it has rescue stenciled on it like its purpose is to drive into burning buildings or something.  Also surprised they didn't round up a 25mm chain gun to put in that mount on the roof

fify bc heroes just want to make it home alive at the end of the shift.

[Godzillatron 292]

I grew up north of the Red River, and there were a handful of small towns that were notorious speed traps. About 20 years ago, in a rare example of the Oklahoma Legislature doing something smart, they passed a law that stated:

1. If more than 30% of a town's revenue came from ticket fees, or
2. More than 50% of speeding tickets were less than 10 mph over the speed limit

Then the town forfeited all of their ticket revenue.

[RDCanecutter 26452]

3 minutes ago, Godzillatron said:

I grew up north of the Red River, and there were a handful of small towns that were notorious speed traps. About 20 years ago, in a rare example of the Oklahoma Legislature doing something smart, they passed a law that stated:

1. If more than 30% of a town's revenue came from ticket fees, or
2. More than 50% of speeding tickets were less than 10 mph over the speed limit

Then the town forfeited all of their ticket revenue.

So, steer clear until later in the year?

[Gil Bang 25975]

My late uncle was a small-town police chief out here, until his retirement.   Same department his entire career, from rookie to chief. 

 

Once I was in his office shooting the shit, and he had some police chief magazine of some sort, and he showed me a full-page ad from some company that sold police motorcycles and trained cops to ride them.  It straight up showed how "profitable" the investment would be.  The price of the Kawasaki 1000 and their training was peanuts compared to how much revenue the motorcycle cop would generate in the form of tickets.

 

And, a csb:

I'm 18 or so.  My Uncle's right hand at the PD was a cop named "John" that I knew well from BBQ's, going to the races out at RIverside and Ontario, etc.   My uncle calls me and says hey, I need your help.  We've got a big problem with stores selling beer and booze to minors.  I'm like, OK, well, what does this have to do with me? 

He says, I want you to come out this Friday night.  I will reimburse you for your gas.  John will give you some money, and a list of stores, and he will follow you.  You go into the store, and try to buy beer.  If you come out with beer, just get in your car and wait while John goes in and cites the store.  Then go to the next store. 

I'm like, uhh, what do I get out of this?   Uncle says, oh, at the end of the night, you, me, and John go back to my house and drink whatever beer you were able to buy.  

And that's what we did. 

[RDCanecutter 26452]

38 minutes ago, Gil Bang said:

My late uncle was a small-town police chief out here, until his retirement.   Same department his entire career, from rookie to chief. 

 

[Francisco 2.0 32395]

Long time ago, I used to subscribe to Car & Driver.  They had an article about New Rome, Ohio that sounds similar to this.  The town had 1000 feet of street, and in 2001 handed out $377,000 in traffic violations.  They gave tickets for driving too slowly.  60 residents, but 14 policemen.  It was so bad, the town was legally disolved in 2004. 

There was even a website about the city's police that still exists today

And here's the wiki page

Here's the article from April 2003 from the magazine:

Spoiler

In the past decade, the village of New Rome, Ohio, suffered a severe case of urban flight—46 percent of its residents packed up and moved away, according to the latest U.S. Census numbers. Folks familiar with New Rome and not fond of it may sanitize their explanations for this exodus, but in simple English it usually comes down to this: New Rome is a chickenshit town, a little police state.

Well, it's not really a town. It's a "village." In 1990, the population was 111, and 10 years later it had dropped to 60. The village consists of nine or 10 hardscrabble little houses, average value $42,000 or so; three apartment buildings, 18 units in all; and a string of businesses. The village is just three blocks long and three wide, and through the middle of it runs a bleak stretch of about 1000 feet of Broad Street, old U.S. 40, once the main road west from the state capital of Columbus seven miles to the east.

New Rome is scruffy and empty-lotted and raggedy-looking in spots. Big shopping centers can be found just outside the village borders at both ends, so New Rome's bureaucrats don't get much in the way of property taxes, about $15,000 in 2001. Then again, the village doesn't spend anything on its residents. It has no fire department, no library, no parks or playgrounds, no nothing, really, not even sidewalks.

But the village does have one big asset—1000 feet of Broad Street. The revenue from traffic citations on that little stretch of four-lane roadway has gone from $101,223 in 1990 to $377,651 in 2001, enough to pay for its notorious police department, a handful of municipal workers, and the village council.

The speed limit all along Broad Street is 45 mph—except inside the 1000-foot gauntlet of New Rome, where it is 35. The typical speeder here is cited for going 42 mph in a 35 (the fine: $90). The Ohio Department of Transportation has gone so far as to say the reduced limit "may not be legal" but hasn't done anything about it. Still, speeding accounts for a small portion, perhaps 12 percent, of the citations.

The real money comes from violations that elsewhere would likely merit a warning at most—no front license plate ($55), driving a commercial vehicle without a commercial plate ($105), driving with headsets ($90), with a cracked windshield ($55), with a chipped taillight ($55), without a rearview mirror ($55), with tinted windows ($105), with dirt or anything obscuring a license plate ($55), without a seatbelt ($60), with loud mufflers ($55), driving too slowly ($90), backing up improperly ($90), making an "unsafe" lane change ($90), stopping past the stop line ($90), no backup lights ($55), a dim bulb over the license plate ($55), making a U-turn ($90), tailgating ($90), and on and on. Pity the unsuspecting kid who hitchhikes ($135). And many pulled-over drivers wind up with multiple citations (no seatbelts on passengers and kids without safety chairs are typical ones). "Court costs" can be tacked on, and there's a $13 charge for paying with a credit card.

The state of Ohio abets in this revenue-raising scheme through New Rome's use of its LEADS computer system. Cops simply park near the village's only stoplight, call in a stopped car's license-plate number, and before the light turns green, they have the owner's current driving status and the car's.

From June 2001 to June 2002, New Rome cops wrote 3390 tickets along that 1000 feet of Broad Street, 352 for speeding. There are a lot of citations for driving without a license, for failure to provide proof of car insurance, and for expired tags. Often these are issued to drivers who have come on hard times, who have failed to make their car-insurance payments and after their insurers report these lapses to the state, the state invalidates their licenses, as the law forbids a person to drive without insurance. Judging by a dozen or so that turned up recently for court, they are in large part young people with financial and employment problems, people without clout, the poor, minorities.

New Rome cops are persistent, and they have a lot of time to make sure a cited driver doesn't just drive off and toss the ticket. Once stopped, drivers are routinely asked where they work. Fail to pay the fine on time, and a New Rome cop or two may appear at your work place the day after, handcuff you in front of the boss, and haul you off for payment discussions. The police station, the village offices, and a courtroom are housed in a dingy double-wide trailer-the old village building was condemned years ago-and if you look like a flight risk, there's an old wooden bench with ankle cuffs to ensure you stick around.

So, New Rome would be just one more traffic-ticket trap to steer clear of were it not for the fact that a lot of this ticket money has a long history of disappearing.

Don't try selling this story to Hollywood. It has major believability problems.

For one, who's going to believe that in this day and age a family clan can still run a town? The makeup of the village council begins with Nancy Chapman, the wife of Charles Chapman, who had been mayor during the 1990s and ran the traffic court. The Chapmans' son and daughter, Charles Jr. and Alisa Gibbs, have been on the council. Councilwoman Patricia McCormick is Nancy Chapman's sister, and councilman David Tisler, who works for a towing service on Broad Street, is McCormick's live-in boyfriend. Councilman Richard Plants is Nancy Chapman's nephew. Christopher and Valerie Gamble have been on the council; Valerie is the daughter of Connie Tucker. Who is Connie Tucker? She's the clerk/treasurer of New Rome.

Second, none of these council members was ever elected-they were all appointed, by one another. The last time a council member was elected by voters was in 1979, and even that involved a pair of write-in candidates. The clan's position is that they don't bother to run for election because no one else in the village wants the job. With just nine or 10 homes, they say there are few volunteers for council. They say the police are simply enforcing the laws and that as a result, New Rome is a very safe place to live. (Possibly a little less so after 11 p.m., when the police quit for the night.) Council members are paid $50 for the monthly meeting and qualify for retirement and health insurance after long service.

But the village has a history of sticky fingers going back to its inception in 1941. Five clerks handling the citation money-much of it cash-have been convicted of theft. In 1989 mayor's court clerk Patricia Kinder admitted stealing $7000 of the ticket money. Then a police chief, Darwin Pelphrey, resigned after being accused of theft (including stealing a shotgun he used to go duck hunting). Not much later, a mayor and another police chief resigned after someone leaked documents showing they'd both used village credit cards to fill the tanks of their personal cars. Both were ordered to repay $2500.

As ticket revenue grew in the '90s, so did the boldness of the thieves. A state audit for 1993 discovered $56,563 missing. The mayor's court clerk, widow of the previously discredited police chief, pled guilty to one count of theft in office but didn't do jail time. Then a state audit of fiscal '95 to '96-for some reason not released until 1998-showed another $56,456 unaccounted for. No one was ever charged, although two administrative staffers resigned. New Rome's history has prompted the perturbed state auditor, Jim Petro, to call it "the per-capita corruption capital of Ohio."

Somehow, Mayor Charles Chapman, now 59, escaped culpability both times, although he and his court clerks are, by law, responsible. But with that second big theft, it got sticky-the mayor's court clerk was Tammy Van Scyoc, who at the time was living with her boyfriend, Larry Cunningham, who was, and still is, the chief of police of New Rome.

Cunningham says he started the police force in 1974, quit in 1980, and was "called back" by the council in 1990. On his return, it was Cunningham who would finger the police chief that year for boosting the shotgun. As chief of police, he is viewed by many as the kingpin behind the ruling clan. To critics, he simply responds: "If you're not violating the law, you're not going to get a ticket."

Cunningham, now 56, says he didn't investigate the most recent $56K theft because of his involvement with Van Scyoc. The Franklin County prosecutor's office said the theft "probably" should have been referred to the sheriff to avoid the perceived conflict of interest, but it wasn't. Nothing happened.

"If I could have proved she took any of that money, I would have arrested her in a minute," Cunningham says of his girlfriend. "Now, would I have been the first one down to bond her out? Probably. But I would have done my job. No one's exempt-I have even arrested my own son." Cunningham says something did happen: "We approached two employees on that issue, and both immediately resigned." His girlfriend also resigned.

Cunningham is the chief part time-in a deposition he said he works four to eight hours a week as chief-and is paid $20,000 a year. In addition to having two or three full-time officers, he has sworn in large numbers of "auxiliary" police, who are either paid minimum wage or nothing at all, mostly cops keeping their commissions active. This makes for humorous statistics: At one time there was one cop for every four residents, and 66 citations were written per village resident in a single year.

Cunningham's full-time job appears to be 75 miles away in Fairfield County, where he has purchased 65 acres, owns a main house and a children's residence, and three years ago opened a "juvenile boot camp" for teenage offenders, as many as 30 of them. Public agencies pay the chief for his services.

For his part, Chapman simply says he doesn't know what happened to the $120,000 that has gone missing over the years. Before a computer system was set in place in 2001, "it [citation money] was handled 99 percent by hand." Cunningham says at one time there were 26 hands in that revenue pot, although now just two staff members handle it.

All this might have blown over had not some of these public-spirited officials sought to expand New Rome's borders.

As the '90s came to a close, traffic-ticket revenue had almost quadrupled during the decade, and some in New Rome looked to widen the police's playing field.

New Rome is encircled by 52 square miles of Prairie Township, population 20,000. With the backing of his council and mayor, Cunningham wanted to annex a chunk of the township covering some 70 businesses, including a mall and a hospital. He told Columbus Monthly magazine that the expansion would permit New Rome "to use our police force to its full potential, to deal with the armed robberies and homicides and thefts, to be real policemen, if you know what I mean. Our men are sick and tired of being traffic cops, even though we get some pretty good pinches out of them."

This did not sit well with Jeff Nourse, one of three commissioners of the township and a man who is appalled by the shenanigans of New Rome.

Nourse says, "That village exists for one reason. It's a money-making venture for the Chapman clan and Cunningham, period. They're a bunch of yahoos." Nourse grew up in the area and has been involved in local politics for decades and remembers that in the old days the police chief was said to have gotten a six-percent cut of the ticket revenue. He also tells the story of a large corporation sending some executives to assess Prairie Township as the location for a new plant. Driving through New Rome, a carload of executives were rousted by cops. No tickets were issued, but the township didn't get the plant.

Cunningham sought an audience with Nourse in the summer of 2001. Nourse wanted a record of what he was to hear and invited a reporter from the Columbus Dispatch. When they walked into Cunningham's office, the New Rome chief reportedly launched into a long presentation, with the reporter never being introduced. The resulting newspaper stories, including a remark attributed to the chief about how he tells the council what to do or else, got a lot of peoples' backs up. Nourse recalls: "After that meeting, I walked out and said, 'It's time to get rid of New Rome.'"

About this time, another New Rome clerk was caught stealing ticket money. Joyce Johnson, 45, would eventually plead guilty to stealing $5600, and this time, the guilty person got a two-year jail sentence.

So businessmen and politicos in the region fed up with New Rome were looking for a white knight. They found one in the person of Jamie Mueller, now 49, a dapper bachelor who drives a red Corvette. An Ohio native, he had gone east years ago but returned in the mid-'90s to purchase an old motel off Broad Street near New Rome, which he has turned into a handsome senior-living facility. An ambitious man who describes himself as a "wannabe developer," Mueller said stories of New Rome would inevitably be told at every business and social meeting he attended. The ticket trap, he said, was infecting the business atmosphere throughout the area.

And he got some first-hand experience. He approached the New Rome council some years back looking for support for a Fourth of July parade and was told the businessmen's group he represented would have to pay for police protection if the parade passed through the village. An irony was that the parade marshal was the sheriff of Franklin County.

It seemed inevitable that sooner or later Mueller would bump into Jeff Nourse, who was looking for a way to erase New Rome from the map, and in the summer of 2001 he did. Together, a plan was devised to bring down New Rome.

Records showed the council had not bothered in 22 years to file for election, thereby avoiding $30 annual filing fees. Chapman had been elected mayor in '95, and it was a good bet he wouldn't bother filing a petition to have his name on the ballot and instead would simply be reappointed. (After each election, the sitting council members who were on unexpired terms would simply reappoint members, or appoint new ones. At the last election, only eight persons voted in New Rome.)

Chapman says, "You had to go downtown, register, get a petition going-it cost you money. There wasn't nobody willing to serve, so what're you worried about?"

Mueller agreed to run for mayor in the fall election. This was not a matter to take lightly-there was no telling how the powers of New Rome would react. "It was never my intention to seek office, but I had the least to lose," says Mueller. "I was single, no wife, no kids, but I'll tell you, I wasn't looking forward to it." There was talk of reforming the council, but it looked like the ultimate goal was to "dissolve" New Rome and merge the three blocks into Prairie Township.

To qualify for the November 2001 ballot, Mueller needed 10 voters registered in New Rome to sign his petition, which had to be submitted by August 26. But it had to be done clandestinely, so as not to tip off the mayor, the council, or the police chief.

Possibly for the first time in history, the success of a candidate's running for public office depended on no one's finding out about it.

Nourse and Mueller collected 15 signatures in a day and submitted the petition on the eve of the deadline. And then it got weird again. Six of those signatures belonged to persons living outside New Rome, but somehow the Franklin County Board of Elections subtracted 6 from 15 and came up with 10, and certified Mueller's petition.

And it got weirder. The mayor and the council, who quickly learned of Mueller's candidacy, had 30 days to protest the validity of the petition (and Mueller's claim to be a New Rome resident) but did not. They then had until September 26 to file themselves as write-in candidates, but again, they did not. (They would file a court challenge in October, but too late.)

In November, with Mueller unopposed on the ballot, voters swept him into office on a landslide-eight to nothing. And then it got tied up in knots. That election day, Chapman retired as mayor, citing poor health. The clan appointed the clerk's son-in-law, Councilman Christopher Gamble, as mayor. Gamble, in turn, appointed Richard Plants, the Chapmans' nephew, to the council. When Mueller showed up in January for his first meeting as mayor, the council derided his election as a sham on grounds he wasn't a resident (Mueller rents an apartment there) and angrily refused to turn over the gavel. Then, just as Mueller headed for court, Gamble resigned.

The stage was set for a volatile second meeting in February. As one reporter noted, it turned out to look and sound very much like a Jerry Springer show-physical confrontation and shouted outbursts and insults, culminating with Councilwoman McCormick "hissing" at reporters and TV crew as she left the double-wide village offices, "You're all assholes!"

The whole mess was dumped into the lap of the Franklin County Prosecutor, Ron O'Brien, to sort out. He certified Mueller as mayor and then decided that Plants was the only legitimate council member, and if the other members would resign-they did-Plants could reappoint them. He did. Gamble had neglected to appoint someone to his seat when he briefly became mayor, so Mueller got just one appointment. He picked Ed Anthony, 44, a barber who had been doing a slow burn over the police department and clan for 20 years.

Anthony made it clear to Columbus Monthly where he stood: "It's a little mafia-two families running everything, with a police chief as mastermind who pushes out crumbs to the rest of them. There's one voice-their voice-and that's the way they want to keep it."

When one of the clan's appointees declined a seat, Mueller was able to appoint a second council member, and he chose Jeanne Frazier, a young woman whose father had years before come up one vote short of being elected mayor. (Although Nancy Chapman denies it, she was accused soon after of walking across the street to where Frazier sat in a car in front of her house, and after a few harsh words, Frazier said Chapman slapped her. New Rome police were nowhere in sight.)

With Mueller in the mayor's seat, the long-standing fear of New Rome's police seemed to lighten up, enough so that in March about 95 people staged a protest demonstration, pickets and all, along Broad Street. The only incident came when a 70-year-old man, according to the Dispatch, "was briefly detained by officers after he asked why their cruiser was partly blocking the sidewalk."

The demonstration had been organized by James Bussey II, a computer analyst from nearby Dublin. He'd gotten a speeding ticket-42 mph in a 35 on Broad Street-that so incensed him he built a Web site, www.newromesucks.com, which rapidly filled up with angry accounts of being stung by New Rome police.

Many of these stories contend that New Rome cops have roughed up drivers. Columbus attorney Kinsley Nyce, a former policeman of 15 years' experience, has brought civil-rights lawsuits in federal court on behalf of six complainants against the New Rome police, and settled for three of them for what he calls "the largest settlements we've ever seen in central Ohio."

"I've never sued cops, I've always served them," Nyce says. "But these guys deserve it. And this has been going on for the 20 years I've been here." Nyce has vowed to "litigate the [police] force out of existence."

At the ensuing combative council meetings, Mueller couldn't get the council to sign on for a ballot proposal asking voters in a special election if New Rome should be dissolved. So he circulated another petition-he only needed the signatures of three voters registered in New Rome. He got seven, all certified. He also got stuck with a $1500 lawyer's bill, the price of requiring New Rome officials to comply with filing procedures. An election was set for February 4, 2003.

It would all come down to this:

"Shall the Village of New Rome surrender its corporate powers and cause the municipality to become part of the township organization within the territorial limits of which it is situated?"

But the story would not have a happy ending for the forces of change. Facing New Rome's political extinction, the voters could not pull the plug. In what amounted to a huge turnout-32 voters-the proposition to dissolve the village of New Rome failed, 21 to 11. Almost immediately there were accusations that nonresidents had voted. But for now, it would be business as usual for Ohio's most notorious ticket trap.

 

Edited January 24, 2022 by Francisco 2.0

[Macanudo 12989]

19 hours ago, Gil Bang said:

My late uncle was a small-town police chief out here, until his retirement.   Same department his entire career, from rookie to chief. 

 

Once I was in his office shooting the shit, and he had some police chief magazine of some sort, and he showed me a full-page ad from some company that sold police motorcycles and trained cops to ride them.  It straight up showed how "profitable" the investment would be.  The price of the Kawasaki 1000 and their training was peanuts compared to how much revenue the motorcycle cop would generate in the form of tickets.

 

And, a csb:

I'm 18 or so.  My Uncle's right hand at the PD was a cop named "John" that I knew well from BBQ's, going to the races out at RIverside and Ontario, etc.   My uncle calls me and says hey, I need your help.  We've got a big problem with stores selling beer and booze to minors.  I'm like, OK, well, what does this have to do with me? 

He says, I want you to come out this Friday night.  I will reimburse you for your gas.  John will give you some money, and a list of stores, and he will follow you.  You go into the store, and try to buy beer.  If you come out with beer, just get in your car and wait while John goes in and cites the store.  Then go to the next store. 

I'm like, uhh, what do I get out of this?   Uncle says, oh, at the end of the night, you, me, and John go back to my house and drink whatever beer you were able to buy.  

And that's what we did. 

Narc.

[4doorsMoreWhores 107]

3 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Long time ago, I used to subscribe to Car & Driver.  They had an article about New Rome, Ohio that sounds similar to this.  The town had 1000 feet of street, and in 2001 handed out $377,000 in traffic violations.  They gave tickets for driving too slowly.  60 residents, but 14 policemen.  It was so bad, the town was legally disolved in 2004. 

There was even a website about the city's police that still exists today

And here's the wiki page

Here's the article from April 2003 from the magazine:

  Reveal hidden contents

In the past decade, the village of New Rome, Ohio, suffered a severe case of urban flight—46 percent of its residents packed up and moved away, according to the latest U.S. Census numbers. Folks familiar with New Rome and not fond of it may sanitize their explanations for this exodus, but in simple English it usually comes down to this: New Rome is a chickenshit town, a little police state.

Well, it's not really a town. It's a "village." In 1990, the population was 111, and 10 years later it had dropped to 60. The village consists of nine or 10 hardscrabble little houses, average value $42,000 or so; three apartment buildings, 18 units in all; and a string of businesses. The village is just three blocks long and three wide, and through the middle of it runs a bleak stretch of about 1000 feet of Broad Street, old U.S. 40, once the main road west from the state capital of Columbus seven miles to the east.

New Rome is scruffy and empty-lotted and raggedy-looking in spots. Big shopping centers can be found just outside the village borders at both ends, so New Rome's bureaucrats don't get much in the way of property taxes, about $15,000 in 2001. Then again, the village doesn't spend anything on its residents. It has no fire department, no library, no parks or playgrounds, no nothing, really, not even sidewalks.

But the village does have one big asset—1000 feet of Broad Street. The revenue from traffic citations on that little stretch of four-lane roadway has gone from $101,223 in 1990 to $377,651 in 2001, enough to pay for its notorious police department, a handful of municipal workers, and the village council.

The speed limit all along Broad Street is 45 mph—except inside the 1000-foot gauntlet of New Rome, where it is 35. The typical speeder here is cited for going 42 mph in a 35 (the fine: $90). The Ohio Department of Transportation has gone so far as to say the reduced limit "may not be legal" but hasn't done anything about it. Still, speeding accounts for a small portion, perhaps 12 percent, of the citations.

The real money comes from violations that elsewhere would likely merit a warning at most—no front license plate ($55), driving a commercial vehicle without a commercial plate ($105), driving with headsets ($90), with a cracked windshield ($55), with a chipped taillight ($55), without a rearview mirror ($55), with tinted windows ($105), with dirt or anything obscuring a license plate ($55), without a seatbelt ($60), with loud mufflers ($55), driving too slowly ($90), backing up improperly ($90), making an "unsafe" lane change ($90), stopping past the stop line ($90), no backup lights ($55), a dim bulb over the license plate ($55), making a U-turn ($90), tailgating ($90), and on and on. Pity the unsuspecting kid who hitchhikes ($135). And many pulled-over drivers wind up with multiple citations (no seatbelts on passengers and kids without safety chairs are typical ones). "Court costs" can be tacked on, and there's a $13 charge for paying with a credit card.

The state of Ohio abets in this revenue-raising scheme through New Rome's use of its LEADS computer system. Cops simply park near the village's only stoplight, call in a stopped car's license-plate number, and before the light turns green, they have the owner's current driving status and the car's.

From June 2001 to June 2002, New Rome cops wrote 3390 tickets along that 1000 feet of Broad Street, 352 for speeding. There are a lot of citations for driving without a license, for failure to provide proof of car insurance, and for expired tags. Often these are issued to drivers who have come on hard times, who have failed to make their car-insurance payments and after their insurers report these lapses to the state, the state invalidates their licenses, as the law forbids a person to drive without insurance. Judging by a dozen or so that turned up recently for court, they are in large part young people with financial and employment problems, people without clout, the poor, minorities.

New Rome cops are persistent, and they have a lot of time to make sure a cited driver doesn't just drive off and toss the ticket. Once stopped, drivers are routinely asked where they work. Fail to pay the fine on time, and a New Rome cop or two may appear at your work place the day after, handcuff you in front of the boss, and haul you off for payment discussions. The police station, the village offices, and a courtroom are housed in a dingy double-wide trailer-the old village building was condemned years ago-and if you look like a flight risk, there's an old wooden bench with ankle cuffs to ensure you stick around.

So, New Rome would be just one more traffic-ticket trap to steer clear of were it not for the fact that a lot of this ticket money has a long history of disappearing.

Don't try selling this story to Hollywood. It has major believability problems.

For one, who's going to believe that in this day and age a family clan can still run a town? The makeup of the village council begins with Nancy Chapman, the wife of Charles Chapman, who had been mayor during the 1990s and ran the traffic court. The Chapmans' son and daughter, Charles Jr. and Alisa Gibbs, have been on the council. Councilwoman Patricia McCormick is Nancy Chapman's sister, and councilman David Tisler, who works for a towing service on Broad Street, is McCormick's live-in boyfriend. Councilman Richard Plants is Nancy Chapman's nephew. Christopher and Valerie Gamble have been on the council; Valerie is the daughter of Connie Tucker. Who is Connie Tucker? She's the clerk/treasurer of New Rome.

Second, none of these council members was ever elected-they were all appointed, by one another. The last time a council member was elected by voters was in 1979, and even that involved a pair of write-in candidates. The clan's position is that they don't bother to run for election because no one else in the village wants the job. With just nine or 10 homes, they say there are few volunteers for council. They say the police are simply enforcing the laws and that as a result, New Rome is a very safe place to live. (Possibly a little less so after 11 p.m., when the police quit for the night.) Council members are paid $50 for the monthly meeting and qualify for retirement and health insurance after long service.

But the village has a history of sticky fingers going back to its inception in 1941. Five clerks handling the citation money-much of it cash-have been convicted of theft. In 1989 mayor's court clerk Patricia Kinder admitted stealing $7000 of the ticket money. Then a police chief, Darwin Pelphrey, resigned after being accused of theft (including stealing a shotgun he used to go duck hunting). Not much later, a mayor and another police chief resigned after someone leaked documents showing they'd both used village credit cards to fill the tanks of their personal cars. Both were ordered to repay $2500.

As ticket revenue grew in the '90s, so did the boldness of the thieves. A state audit for 1993 discovered $56,563 missing. The mayor's court clerk, widow of the previously discredited police chief, pled guilty to one count of theft in office but didn't do jail time. Then a state audit of fiscal '95 to '96-for some reason not released until 1998-showed another $56,456 unaccounted for. No one was ever charged, although two administrative staffers resigned. New Rome's history has prompted the perturbed state auditor, Jim Petro, to call it "the per-capita corruption capital of Ohio."

Somehow, Mayor Charles Chapman, now 59, escaped culpability both times, although he and his court clerks are, by law, responsible. But with that second big theft, it got sticky-the mayor's court clerk was Tammy Van Scyoc, who at the time was living with her boyfriend, Larry Cunningham, who was, and still is, the chief of police of New Rome.

Cunningham says he started the police force in 1974, quit in 1980, and was "called back" by the council in 1990. On his return, it was Cunningham who would finger the police chief that year for boosting the shotgun. As chief of police, he is viewed by many as the kingpin behind the ruling clan. To critics, he simply responds: "If you're not violating the law, you're not going to get a ticket."

Cunningham, now 56, says he didn't investigate the most recent $56K theft because of his involvement with Van Scyoc. The Franklin County prosecutor's office said the theft "probably" should have been referred to the sheriff to avoid the perceived conflict of interest, but it wasn't. Nothing happened.

"If I could have proved she took any of that money, I would have arrested her in a minute," Cunningham says of his girlfriend. "Now, would I have been the first one down to bond her out? Probably. But I would have done my job. No one's exempt-I have even arrested my own son." Cunningham says something did happen: "We approached two employees on that issue, and both immediately resigned." His girlfriend also resigned.

Cunningham is the chief part time-in a deposition he said he works four to eight hours a week as chief-and is paid $20,000 a year. In addition to having two or three full-time officers, he has sworn in large numbers of "auxiliary" police, who are either paid minimum wage or nothing at all, mostly cops keeping their commissions active. This makes for humorous statistics: At one time there was one cop for every four residents, and 66 citations were written per village resident in a single year.

Cunningham's full-time job appears to be 75 miles away in Fairfield County, where he has purchased 65 acres, owns a main house and a children's residence, and three years ago opened a "juvenile boot camp" for teenage offenders, as many as 30 of them. Public agencies pay the chief for his services.

For his part, Chapman simply says he doesn't know what happened to the $120,000 that has gone missing over the years. Before a computer system was set in place in 2001, "it [citation money] was handled 99 percent by hand." Cunningham says at one time there were 26 hands in that revenue pot, although now just two staff members handle it.

All this might have blown over had not some of these public-spirited officials sought to expand New Rome's borders.

As the '90s came to a close, traffic-ticket revenue had almost quadrupled during the decade, and some in New Rome looked to widen the police's playing field.

New Rome is encircled by 52 square miles of Prairie Township, population 20,000. With the backing of his council and mayor, Cunningham wanted to annex a chunk of the township covering some 70 businesses, including a mall and a hospital. He told Columbus Monthly magazine that the expansion would permit New Rome "to use our police force to its full potential, to deal with the armed robberies and homicides and thefts, to be real policemen, if you know what I mean. Our men are sick and tired of being traffic cops, even though we get some pretty good pinches out of them."

This did not sit well with Jeff Nourse, one of three commissioners of the township and a man who is appalled by the shenanigans of New Rome.

Nourse says, "That village exists for one reason. It's a money-making venture for the Chapman clan and Cunningham, period. They're a bunch of yahoos." Nourse grew up in the area and has been involved in local politics for decades and remembers that in the old days the police chief was said to have gotten a six-percent cut of the ticket revenue. He also tells the story of a large corporation sending some executives to assess Prairie Township as the location for a new plant. Driving through New Rome, a carload of executives were rousted by cops. No tickets were issued, but the township didn't get the plant.

Cunningham sought an audience with Nourse in the summer of 2001. Nourse wanted a record of what he was to hear and invited a reporter from the Columbus Dispatch. When they walked into Cunningham's office, the New Rome chief reportedly launched into a long presentation, with the reporter never being introduced. The resulting newspaper stories, including a remark attributed to the chief about how he tells the council what to do or else, got a lot of peoples' backs up. Nourse recalls: "After that meeting, I walked out and said, 'It's time to get rid of New Rome.'"

About this time, another New Rome clerk was caught stealing ticket money. Joyce Johnson, 45, would eventually plead guilty to stealing $5600, and this time, the guilty person got a two-year jail sentence.

So businessmen and politicos in the region fed up with New Rome were looking for a white knight. They found one in the person of Jamie Mueller, now 49, a dapper bachelor who drives a red Corvette. An Ohio native, he had gone east years ago but returned in the mid-'90s to purchase an old motel off Broad Street near New Rome, which he has turned into a handsome senior-living facility. An ambitious man who describes himself as a "wannabe developer," Mueller said stories of New Rome would inevitably be told at every business and social meeting he attended. The ticket trap, he said, was infecting the business atmosphere throughout the area.

And he got some first-hand experience. He approached the New Rome council some years back looking for support for a Fourth of July parade and was told the businessmen's group he represented would have to pay for police protection if the parade passed through the village. An irony was that the parade marshal was the sheriff of Franklin County.

It seemed inevitable that sooner or later Mueller would bump into Jeff Nourse, who was looking for a way to erase New Rome from the map, and in the summer of 2001 he did. Together, a plan was devised to bring down New Rome.

Records showed the council had not bothered in 22 years to file for election, thereby avoiding $30 annual filing fees. Chapman had been elected mayor in '95, and it was a good bet he wouldn't bother filing a petition to have his name on the ballot and instead would simply be reappointed. (After each election, the sitting council members who were on unexpired terms would simply reappoint members, or appoint new ones. At the last election, only eight persons voted in New Rome.)

Chapman says, "You had to go downtown, register, get a petition going-it cost you money. There wasn't nobody willing to serve, so what're you worried about?"

Mueller agreed to run for mayor in the fall election. This was not a matter to take lightly-there was no telling how the powers of New Rome would react. "It was never my intention to seek office, but I had the least to lose," says Mueller. "I was single, no wife, no kids, but I'll tell you, I wasn't looking forward to it." There was talk of reforming the council, but it looked like the ultimate goal was to "dissolve" New Rome and merge the three blocks into Prairie Township.

To qualify for the November 2001 ballot, Mueller needed 10 voters registered in New Rome to sign his petition, which had to be submitted by August 26. But it had to be done clandestinely, so as not to tip off the mayor, the council, or the police chief.

Possibly for the first time in history, the success of a candidate's running for public office depended on no one's finding out about it.

Nourse and Mueller collected 15 signatures in a day and submitted the petition on the eve of the deadline. And then it got weird again. Six of those signatures belonged to persons living outside New Rome, but somehow the Franklin County Board of Elections subtracted 6 from 15 and came up with 10, and certified Mueller's petition.

And it got weirder. The mayor and the council, who quickly learned of Mueller's candidacy, had 30 days to protest the validity of the petition (and Mueller's claim to be a New Rome resident) but did not. They then had until September 26 to file themselves as write-in candidates, but again, they did not. (They would file a court challenge in October, but too late.)

In November, with Mueller unopposed on the ballot, voters swept him into office on a landslide-eight to nothing. And then it got tied up in knots. That election day, Chapman retired as mayor, citing poor health. The clan appointed the clerk's son-in-law, Councilman Christopher Gamble, as mayor. Gamble, in turn, appointed Richard Plants, the Chapmans' nephew, to the council. When Mueller showed up in January for his first meeting as mayor, the council derided his election as a sham on grounds he wasn't a resident (Mueller rents an apartment there) and angrily refused to turn over the gavel. Then, just as Mueller headed for court, Gamble resigned.

The stage was set for a volatile second meeting in February. As one reporter noted, it turned out to look and sound very much like a Jerry Springer show-physical confrontation and shouted outbursts and insults, culminating with Councilwoman McCormick "hissing" at reporters and TV crew as she left the double-wide village offices, "You're all assholes!"

The whole mess was dumped into the lap of the Franklin County Prosecutor, Ron O'Brien, to sort out. He certified Mueller as mayor and then decided that Plants was the only legitimate council member, and if the other members would resign-they did-Plants could reappoint them. He did. Gamble had neglected to appoint someone to his seat when he briefly became mayor, so Mueller got just one appointment. He picked Ed Anthony, 44, a barber who had been doing a slow burn over the police department and clan for 20 years.

Anthony made it clear to Columbus Monthly where he stood: "It's a little mafia-two families running everything, with a police chief as mastermind who pushes out crumbs to the rest of them. There's one voice-their voice-and that's the way they want to keep it."

When one of the clan's appointees declined a seat, Mueller was able to appoint a second council member, and he chose Jeanne Frazier, a young woman whose father had years before come up one vote short of being elected mayor. (Although Nancy Chapman denies it, she was accused soon after of walking across the street to where Frazier sat in a car in front of her house, and after a few harsh words, Frazier said Chapman slapped her. New Rome police were nowhere in sight.)

With Mueller in the mayor's seat, the long-standing fear of New Rome's police seemed to lighten up, enough so that in March about 95 people staged a protest demonstration, pickets and all, along Broad Street. The only incident came when a 70-year-old man, according to the Dispatch, "was briefly detained by officers after he asked why their cruiser was partly blocking the sidewalk."

The demonstration had been organized by James Bussey II, a computer analyst from nearby Dublin. He'd gotten a speeding ticket-42 mph in a 35 on Broad Street-that so incensed him he built a Web site, www.newromesucks.com, which rapidly filled up with angry accounts of being stung by New Rome police.

Many of these stories contend that New Rome cops have roughed up drivers. Columbus attorney Kinsley Nyce, a former policeman of 15 years' experience, has brought civil-rights lawsuits in federal court on behalf of six complainants against the New Rome police, and settled for three of them for what he calls "the largest settlements we've ever seen in central Ohio."

"I've never sued cops, I've always served them," Nyce says. "But these guys deserve it. And this has been going on for the 20 years I've been here." Nyce has vowed to "litigate the [police] force out of existence."

At the ensuing combative council meetings, Mueller couldn't get the council to sign on for a ballot proposal asking voters in a special election if New Rome should be dissolved. So he circulated another petition-he only needed the signatures of three voters registered in New Rome. He got seven, all certified. He also got stuck with a $1500 lawyer's bill, the price of requiring New Rome officials to comply with filing procedures. An election was set for February 4, 2003.

It would all come down to this:

"Shall the Village of New Rome surrender its corporate powers and cause the municipality to become part of the township organization within the territorial limits of which it is situated?"

But the story would not have a happy ending for the forces of change. Facing New Rome's political extinction, the voters could not pull the plug. In what amounted to a huge turnout-32 voters-the proposition to dissolve the village of New Rome failed, 21 to 11. Almost immediately there were accusations that nonresidents had voted. But for now, it would be business as usual for Ohio's most notorious ticket trap.

 

Only 1000 ft? Shit, my driveway is longer than that

[Cheeseweasel 26438]

12 minutes ago, 4doorsMoreWhores said:

Only 1000 ft? Shit, my driveway is longer than that

You should post cops there and collect revenue.

[4th and 5 4914]

On 1/22/2022 at 3:07 PM, CooterBrown said:

Martindale used to do this back in the day. Off duty cops from other cities would work the highway strip and would get a $25 cut for every ticket they wrote.

Martindale fucked with the wrong guy, who, after getting cited, pointed out that state law requires the city to give traffic fine money in excess of some percentage to the state, which cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars to be repaid to the state. That ended the speed trap in Martindale. 

[SHOOTER12 8810]

On 1/20/2022 at 8:17 AM, Cheeseweasel said:

Old dick nose!!!

[RPM 26322]

On 1/23/2022 at 6:48 PM, Gil Bang said:

My late uncle was a small-town police chief out here, until his retirement.   Same department his entire career, from rookie to chief. 

 

Once I was in his office shooting the shit, and he had some police chief magazine of some sort, and he showed me a full-page ad from some company that sold police motorcycles and trained cops to ride them.  It straight up showed how "profitable" the investment would be.  The price of the Kawasaki 1000 and their training was peanuts compared to how much revenue the motorcycle cop would generate in the form of tickets.

 

And, a csb:

I'm 18 or so.  My Uncle's right hand at the PD was a cop named "John" that I knew well from BBQ's, going to the races out at RIverside and Ontario, etc.   My uncle calls me and says hey, I need your help.  We've got a big problem with stores selling beer and booze to minors.  I'm like, OK, well, what does this have to do with me? 

He says, I want you to come out this Friday night.  I will reimburse you for your gas.  John will give you some money, and a list of stores, and he will follow you.  You go into the store, and try to buy beer.  If you come out with beer, just get in your car and wait while John goes in and cites the store.  Then go to the next store. 

I'm like, uhh, what do I get out of this?   Uncle says, oh, at the end of the night, you, me, and John go back to my house and drink whatever beer you were able to buy.  

And that's what we did. 

Whenever they tried that shit when I worked, I'd call all the other stores and give them a heads up.

[retsevlys 408]

https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/brookside-police-chief-mike-jones-resigns-after-alcom-report-on-traffic-trap.html

[RDCanecutter 26452]

40 minutes ago, retsevlys said:

https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/brookside-police-chief-mike-jones-resigns-after-alcom-report-on-traffic-trap.html

Before Jones quit, he bowed up on the FB page of State Senate candidate Lisa Ward for sharing and commenting on the story.

I looked up her address, it's in Abernant, a similar small mining town one county over. Presumably not a speed trap.

The hill-folk are feuding. It still has potential to go Buford Pusser up in here.

[RDCanecutter 26452]

Developments.

Turns out that Brookside was funding the police overtime to run their scam using State and Federal money.

(They probably aren't the only ones, it'll be fun to see whatever this turns up once state officials can check into it after they deal with CRT and yoga.)

https://www.al.com/news/2022/02/state-feds-paid-overtime-that-fueled-brookside-traffic-trap.html

In more satisfying persecution-of-the-persecutors style, there's a RICO lawsuit against a scad of the bastard rent-a-cops and the bastard tow company. Be nice if they perp-walked the town officials too.

https://www.al.com/news/2022/03/brookside-23-officers-and-towing-company-sued-for-conspiracy-over-traffic-stops-high-fines.html

[Brisketexan 105155]

2 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

Developments.

Turns out that Brookside was funding the police overtime to run their scam using State and Federal money.

(They probably aren't the only ones, it'll be fun to see whatever this turns up once state officials can check into it after they deal with CRT and yoga.)

https://www.al.com/news/2022/02/state-feds-paid-overtime-that-fueled-brookside-traffic-trap.html

In more satisfying persecution-of-the-persecutors style, there's a RICO lawsuit against a scad of the bastard rent-a-cops and the bastard tow company. Be nice if they perp-walked the town officials too.

https://www.al.com/news/2022/03/brookside-23-officers-and-towing-company-sued-for-conspiracy-over-traffic-stops-high-fines.html

blah blah blah.....all I know is that future governors and senators of the Great State of Alabama will almost certainly have "former decorated Brookside hero police officer" on their resume.  Holler at me when that happens, suspect it won't take long.

[RDCanecutter 26452]

2 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

blah blah blah.....all I know is that future governors and senators of the Great State of Alabama will almost certainly have "former decorated Brookside hero police officer" on their resume.  Holler at me when that happens, suspect it won't take long.

Cops are the wrong social caste in Alabama to become Governors or Senators. Unless they become coaches. 

Closest I can think of was Mayor Emory Folmar in Montgomery. He was a Marine. How do I know he was a Marine? Because like a vegan Cross-Fit pilot, that's the first thing he'd ever talk about. My druggy friends from Montgomery feared and hated him, but old Emory did tell a bunch of heat-stroked rallying Klansmen that they couldn't check in to any hospitals in his town, so they had to get carted half-dead 50 miles to the medical center in Selma.

Trust me, Selma didn't want their asses either, but our Mayor-for-Life at the time was an Anglo-Saxon version of a benevolent PRI alcalde and they no doubt had nekkid pictures of him.

[Beau Vine 54254]

On 1/24/2022 at 2:55 PM, 4th and 5 said:

Martindale fucked with the wrong guy, who, after getting cited, pointed out that state law requires the city to give traffic fine money in excess of some percentage to the state, which cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars to be repaid to the state. That ended the speed trap in Martindale. 

Yet the speed limit still drops to 50 on a 4-lane road with nothing but fields on each side.  

[JMFP 1120]

On 1/23/2022 at 4:14 PM, Godzillatron said:

I grew up north of the Red River, and there were a handful of small towns that were notorious speed traps. About 20 years ago, in a rare example of the Oklahoma Legislature doing something smart, they passed a law that stated:

1. If more than 30% of a town's revenue came from ticket fees, or
2. More than 50% of speeding tickets were less than 10 mph over the speed limit

Then the town forfeited all of their ticket revenue.

Big Cabin, OK isn't much more than a truck stop. Before this law they were so bad that guy that owned the truck stop parked a semi trailer in a field with a big banner on it that said "SPEED TRAP AHEAD."

After this law passed the Big Cabin PD got hammered and wasn't allowed to write any traffic tickets for a year. They would sit in their normal place in the median and just watch people speed by.

 

My town is the extreme opposite it seems, I wish they'd pull over more people.

 

 

 

 

[RDCanecutter 26452]

Bwah Ha, Bwah Ha, Bwah ha ha Ha: Former Brookside Police getting some payback thanks to their own assholery:

1. Former Brookside Chief/Possible Future Elvis Impersonator arrested down in South Alabama

https://www.al.com/news/2022/05/former-brookside-police-chief-mike-jones-arrested-for-impersonating-an-officer.html

 

2. Some other Brookside Henchman/Deer in Headlights gets caught being rapey

https://www.al.com/news/2022/05/former-brookside-officer-charged-with-rape-in-jefferson-county.html