Hmmmm I might have spoken too fast.

Yesterday, I was going on about the Princeton University Professor who got herself picked up on a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket dating back 2 years.

Last night I go to thinking about the idea of arresting people for parking ticket infractions.  I thought perhaps it is a little extreme.  Then  I got to thinking that surely there must be a better approach to how these things are handled.

I have been in Municipal Courts in NJ perhaps a thousand times over the years and one thing that I always see is that simple traffic violation such as un paid parking tickets spiral out of control.  So what is clear is that she did not pay her ticket, got a warrant for her arrest for failure to respond to the Court.

So I thought why do we not have a system where Warrants for Arrest can be Graded---sy for instance  A, B,C,D.
We could escort the offender to the hoosegow and they could post their recognizance with a credit card and be on their way until their court day.  It avoids the detention and more efficiently alerts police officers as to the type of offender they are dealing with.  A would be your hard core offender, B a lesser but still nasty, C would be your repeat non violent such as a drug offender or shop lifter and D would be your basic sad sack parking , speeding offender.
So if her warrant shows up in the computer as a D warrant, the cop who stopped her can have her run her credit card through the reader post bail and be gone without detention and she would return on another day to tell the Judge her sorry tale.  An A warrant would mean that the offender goes immediately to jail and does not pass go for any reason until there is some judicial oversight.  But we really don't need to be dragging D warrant offenders off to jail even though they are annoying enough to slam dunk.

It is just another way of think about how governmental services are delivered and we surely need to be doing that.   We surely must think about how our government responds to social issues such as law enforcement.  We have a lousy record on that score. 

The problem is that everyone associated with government is satisfied to do the same thing , the same way  as it has always been done.  There is no vision.

If the young professor had been out on a D warrant or some similar warrant, she could have posted bail on an I phone and have avoided detention altogether, she would have gone on her way and we would have been spared her hubris.  She who would have us believe that her traffic stop was the moral equivalent of Nelson Mandela spending 27 years in prison is an example of her ego.

Or, we can continue to do things the same old way , which in her case, suspended license , 67 in a 45 residential area  is not such a bad thing.



What caused me to reflect on this further was the suggestion by my wife that I might be wrong.  She rarely tells me I am wrong, if we consider four or five times per week to be rare.  But when she does it causes me to search, as she has an uncommon ability to assess situations involving the nature of people.  So when she talks about the motivations of people I start to listen and rarely , if we consider four or five times per week rare , I reconsider my view.

So while my view of the malefactor is unchanged, my view of how government needs to address this type of thing calls for a definite change.