Like I Said

Like I said before (and Zach Wendling was kind enough to notice), “one should never speed through a municipality with no obvious source of income.”

This appears to be especially true in Jericho, Arkansas. This is the small town where the police shot the fire chief in a court room while the chief was contesting some traffic tickets.

“You can’t even get them to answer a call because normally they’re writing tickets,” said Thomas Martin, chief investigator for the Crittenden County Sheriff’s Department. “They’re not providing a service to the citizens.”

Now the police chief has disbanded his force “until things calm down,” a judge has voided all outstanding police-issued citations and sheriff’s deputies are asking where all the money from the tickets went. With 174 residents, the city can keep seven police officers on its rolls but missed payments on police and fire department vehicles and saw its last business close its doors a few weeks ago.
. . .
“You can’t even buy a loaf of bread, but we’ve got seven police officers,” said former resident Larry Harris, who left town because he said the police harassment became unbearable.

Sheriff’s deputies patrolled Jericho until the 1990s, when the city received grant money to start its own police force, Martin said.

Police often camped out in the department’s two cruisers along the highway that runs through town, waiting for drivers who failed to slow down when they reached the 45 mph zone ringing Jericho. Residents say the ticketing got out of hand.

“When I first moved out here, they wrote me a ticket for going 58 mph in my driveway,” 75-year-old retiree Albert Beebe said.

The Sheriff’s Department is trying to figure out where the money went, the Prosecutor has declined to press charges against the officer who shot the fire chief, city hall is closed. I’m getting flashes of Boss Hogg and Roscoe P. Coltrane.