Posts Tagged ‘speed trap’

Texas Speed Trap City Dissolves Police Force

Saturday, September 30th, 2023

Sometimes a ratio is so out of whack that you know something is seriously screwy, such as Hillary Clinton’s 100x return on cattle futures. Such is the case with Coffee City, Texas, which had 50 police officers for a town of 250.

After raking in enough cash from traffic citations to pay a king’s ransom, Coffee City in Henderson County shuttered its police department last week after the mayor criticized the management of the small town’s law enforcement.

Coffee City is a small town on the shores of Lake Palestine on State 155 between Palestine and Tyler. It’s about 110 miles southeast of Dallas.

Mayor Jeff Blackstone published a news release on the city’s website on September 1 explaining the city council’s decision to suspend Chief JohnJay Portillo amid questions about his management of the police force.

“After being informed of the recent allegations against our Chief of Police and the city’s reserve officer programs, the city council and myself felt it necessary for us to place Chief Portillo on a thirty-day suspension,” Blackstone said.

“During this time, we will be investigating this matter internally as well as seeking counsel from an independent investigation firm to validate our findings. Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this issue.”

The investigation did not last long. Allegations of poor hiring practices by Portillo and numerous concerns about misconduct by officers in the Coffee City Police Department meant the council’s simplest option was to shut it down.

The department had 50 officers for a town of only about 250 people, an extraordinary ratio of one officer for every five residents.

CBS affiliate KHOU reported in late August that the city received more than $1 million in a single year from approximately 5,100 traffic citations, more than any other city of that size.

Speaking of KHOU, here’s their roundup report on Coffee City, where they talk about how a lot of Coffee City officers had problems on other police jobs:

  • “More than half of Coffee City officers had been suspended, demoted, terminated or dishonorably discharged from their previous jobs.”
  • “Their prior discipline ranges from excessive force to public drunkenness, untruthfulness, and association with known criminals. Criminal charges include DWI, theft, aggravated assault, family violence and endangering a child.”
  • Many Coffee City officers worked extra jobs…including the police chief. “Portillo was working security for a Southeast Houston apartment complex. Nearly 200 miles away from Coffee City.” And he demanded that Harris County Constables file charges on people. Indeed, Coffee City officers demanding Harris County constables file charges became a drain on resources.
  • When Portillo applied for the Coffee City job, he failed to mention that he had active warrants in Florida for DWI and failure to appear.
  • “Turns out there are a half dozen full time Coffee City police officers who don’t even work in Coffee City, Texas. Instead they work from home more than three hours and nearly 200 miles away in Houston.” There are some police administrative jobs that can be worked from home, but I can’t imagine a town Coffee City’s size having more than one or two. But that’s because it’s for the warrant division from the speed trap operation. And they’re being paid on “performance based” commission revenue of $150 for each warrant cleared.
  • Are speed trap legal in Texas? Yes, but they’re discouraged, as municipalities and counties are required to remit traffic ticket revenues exceeding 30% of the previous year’s total revenue to the state. It’s unclear whether this was done in the case of Coffee City.

    Raising Speed Limits to Make Roads Safer

    Monday, July 17th, 2017

    Here’s a piece on raising speed limits to make roads safer that will sound counterintuitive, at least to those who have never actually driven on an freeway:

    “We all speed, yet months and months usually pass between us seeing a crash,” Lt. Megge tells us when we call to discuss speed limits. “That tells me that most of us are adequate, safe, reasonable drivers. Speeding and traffic safety have a small correlation.”

    Over the past 12 years, Lt. Megge has increased the speed limit on nearly 400 of Michigan’s roadways. Each time, he or one of his officers hears from community groups who complain that people already drive too fast. But as Megge and his colleagues explain, their intent is not to reduce congestion, bow to the reality that everyone drives too fast, or even strike a balance between safety concerns and drivers’ desire to arrive at their destinations faster. Quite the opposite, Lt. Megge advocates for raising speed limits because he believes it makes roads safer.

    Every year, traffic engineers review the speed limit on thousands of stretches of road and highway. Most are reviewed by a member of the state’s Department of Transportation, often along with a member of the state police, as is the case in Michigan. In each case, the “survey team” has a clear approach: they want to set the speed limit so that 15% of drivers exceed it and 85% of drivers drive at or below the speed limit.

    This “nationally recognized method” of setting the speed limit as the 85th percentile speed is essentially traffic engineering 101. It’s also a bit perplexing to those unfamiliar with the concept. Shouldn’t everyone drive at or below the speed limit? And if a driver’s speed is dictated by the speed limit, how can you decide whether or not to change that limit based on the speed of traffic?

    The answer lies in realizing that the speed limit really is just a number on a sign, and it has very little influence on how fast people drive. “Over the years, I’ve done many follow up studies after we raise or lower a speed limit,” Megge tells us. “Almost every time, the 85th percentile speed doesn’t change, or if it does, it’s by about 2 or 3 mph.”

    As most honest drivers would probably concede, this means that if the speed limit on a highway decreases from 65 mph to 55 mph, most drivers will not drive 10 mph slower. But for the majority of drivers, the opposite is also true. If a survey team increases the speed limit by 10 mph, the speed of traffic will not shoot up 10 mph. It will stay around the same. Years of observing traffic has shown engineers that as long as a cop car is not in sight, most people simply drive at whatever speed they like.

    Luckily, there is some logic to the speed people choose other than the need for speed. The speed drivers choose is not based on laws or street signs, but the weather, number of intersections, presence of pedestrians and curves, and all the other information that factors into the principle, as Lt. Megge puts it, that “no one I know who gets into their car wants to crash.”

    So if drivers disregard speed limits, why bother trying to set the “right” speed limit at all?

    One reason is that a minority of drivers do follow the speed limit. “I’ve found that about 10% of drivers truly identify the speed limit sign and drive at or near that limit,” says Megge. Since these are the slowest share of drivers, they don’t affect the 85th percentile speed. But they do impact the average speed — by about 2 or 3 mph when a speed limit is changed, in Lt. Megge’s experience — and, more importantly, the variance in driving speeds.

    This is important because, as noted in a U.S. Department of Transportation report, “the potential for being involved in an accident is highest when traveling at speed much lower or much higher than the majority of motorists.” If every car sets its cruise control at the same speed, the odds of a fender bender happening is low. But when some cars drive 55 mph and others drive 85 mph, the odds of cars colliding increases dramatically. This is why getting slow drivers to stick to the right lane is so important to roadway safety; we generally focus on joyriders’ ability to cause accidents — and rightly so — but a car driving under the speed limit in the left (passing) lane of a highway is almost as dangerous.

    Speed traps and the Arab oil embargo also get mentioned.

    (Hat tip: The Corner.)

    LinkSwarm for May 22, 2015

    Friday, May 22nd, 2015

    Welcome to the beginning of the long Memorial Day weekend! Here in Texas, we’re going to celebrate the long weekend by building arks and gathering up two of every animal.

  • “Islamic State seizes Syria’s last border crossing with Iraq.” (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
  • Obama’s toothless Iran deal is pushing the Saudis to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan.
  • Saudi convicted of keeping a sex slave refuses to attend a mandatory sex offender course, because Islam.
  • “If the Obama Administration loses [the King vs. Burwell ObamaCare case] in the Supreme Court, the political pain will fall almost exclusively on the President and his Party.”
  • Evidently Bill de Blasio has mistaken himself for Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
  • Coming soon: homebrew heroin.
  • Ted Cruz is the only republican arrogant enough to be President. (Though I have some disagreements with Spengler’s subsidiary foreign policy points.)
  • Democratic pollster Pat Caddell: Obama is more corrupt than Nixon. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “How To Spot And Critique Censorship Tropes In The Media’s Coverage Of Free Speech Controversies.”
  • The Stephanopoulos lies: worse than you think.
  • A good many of those Ferguson protestors were paid to protest. And now many say their paymasters refuse to cough up the dough. It’s sleazebags all the way down.
  • Slashdot post: Look at all this STEM sexism! Slashdot comments: Your link is garbage and you should stop talking out of your ass.
  • It’s another one of those New York Times pieces that seem designed to make you hate both rich Manhattanites and the writer equally, about how terribly, terribly isolating it is to be a rich woman on the Upper East Side. (File under: “Three people in New York make a trend.”)
  • By way of partial counterpoint (and, in some ways, almost equally annoying), here’s dating advice for Uptown divorcees from a few years ago. “Our biggest challenge, time and again, is matching up middle-aged divorcées in the ‘pre-realist’ stage, who have not realized that they have a choice of sex, money or companionship —but not necessarily all three in the same package.”
  • Good: List of speed-traps to avoid in Texas. Bad: Slideshow.
  • Police chief in small Texas town get’s drunk and starts hitting on another policeman’s soon-to-be-ex-wife. Beatdown ensues.
  • Dogs are Awesome.
  • Hampton, Florida: New Rome Reborn?

    Tuesday, March 11th, 2014

    You may remember the case of New Rome, Ohio, an infamous speedtrap that existed only to line the pockets of a corrupt family and their friends. The corruption was so bad, Ohio disolved the town on September 9, 2004.

    Now comes word that Hampton, Florida seems to be trying many of the same tricks.

    “A state audit of Hampton’s books, released last month, reads like a primer on municipal malfeasance. It found 31 instances in which local rules or state or federal laws were violated in ways large and small.”

    The big question seems to be where the ticket money went…

    (See also: Maywood, California.)

    Texas Has An 80 MPH Speed Limit?

    Monday, April 11th, 2011

    So the AP is reporting. This is news to me, sine the last time I drove from Austin to Dallas and Austin to Houston, I didn’t see any signs over 70 MPH. According to Wikipedia (the source of all vaguely accurate knowledge), all the ares with 80 MPH limits are in the sparsely populated stretch between San Antonio and El Paso. Evidently the Texas legislature is considering raising it to 85. Great, but it would be nice to have the speed limits on I-35, I-45, and I-30 raised up to the 80 MPH speed people are already driving…

    One Lakeway Man’s War Against Speed Traps

    Sunday, December 26th, 2010

    Meet Lance Mitchell, the man who runs speedtrapahead.org. He not only founded a website to warn people about speed traps, he actually stood up the road from one in his home of speedtrap-crazy Lakeway in his bright orange “Speed Trap Ahead” t-shirt…and got arrested for his troubles. The charge? Among others: illegal signage. For wearing a t-shirt.

    Federal courts have pretty regularly held t-shirts to be a form of free speech (see Boroff v. Van Wert City Board of Education, for example), so it’s no surprise that all the charges were dismissed, and Mitchell has reached a settlement with Lakeway on his own lawsuit.

    (Hat tip: Fark.)