"On June 21, 2016, Chicago police pulled Spencer Byrd over for a broken turn signal.
Byrd says his signal wasn't broken, but that detail would soon be the least of his worries.
Ever since, Byrd has been trapped in one of the city's most confusing bureaucratic mazes, deprived of his car and his ability to work.
He now owes the city thousands of dollars for the pleasure.
Byrd, 50, lives in Harvey, Illinois, a corrupt, crime-ridden town south of Chicago where more than 35 percent of the populace lives below the poverty line.
...Byrd had run afoul of Chicago's aggressive vehicle impound program, which seizes cars and fines owners thousands of dollars for dozens of different offenses.
The program impounds cars when the owner beats a criminal case or isn't charged with a crime in the first place.
...In total, Chicago fined motorists more than $17 million between March 2017 and March of this year for 31 different types of offenses, ranging from DUI to having illegal fireworks in a car to playing music too loud, according to data from the Chicago Administrative Hearings Department.
About $10 million of those fines were for driving on a suspended license, and more than $3 million were for drug offenses like the one that resulted in the impoundment of Byrd's car.
(See and download the data here.)
Chicago Vehicle Impound Fines in Dollars, March 2017—March 2018
Read on!
No comments:
Post a Comment