Call It What, In My Opinion, It Is: RACKETEERING

From the WSJ’s Opinion Page:
Congratulations to state Sen. Eric Schmitt from Missouri for ”Taxation by Citation’ Undermines Trust Between Cops and Citizens’ (Cross Country, Aug. 8) on the despicable practice of targeting ‘speeders’ and other vehicular ‘felons’ as funding sources. I am also a citizen of St. Louis and have seen this practice institutionalized in our communities. This has been an unspoken secret that we all knew, feared and detested and that even law enforcement lovers hated with a passion.
The policy forces professional law enforcers to pimp themselves for the cowardly politicians and bureaucrats too weak to take a simple budgeting stand, a main reason for their election. The results have been devastating to police integrity and the public’s perception of an unfair, arbitrary and discriminatory application of the law.
Forces?
I don’t recall politicians stuffing guns up the noses of the so-called honorable law enforcement professionals and “forcing” them to do anything at all.
Rather this sort of policy is one that is born out of collusion between the politicians and law enforcement personnel and, as it is predicated on a lie (it is not about safety but rather about revenue) and the funds are extracted from the citizens through the threat of use of armed force it quite-easily meets the definition of racketeering.
Then there’s this report — which, given what police departments have turned into, is hardly surprising:

This post was published at Market-Ticker on 2015-08-23.