Municipal Government

City commissioners in Miami agreed on Thursday to pull the plug on their red light camera program early next year.
The city voted unanimously to cancel its contract with American Traffic Solutions, which operates has 147 cameras placed around the city.
Ninety-eight of them are operational.
Now the company has 60 day to discontinue its lucrative operations in the city.
Citations of $158 per ticket will stop after the program vanishes.
But anyone who receives a ticket before the program ends will be responsible for dealing with it.

The City of Homestead has a torrid reputation and a pattern of willfully refusing to comply with the public records law. Homestead is a little town at the southern end of Miami-Dade County, rarely receiving the scrutiny it deserves as a cesspool of public corruption and maleficence.
I have used the records request process, as a pre-discovery method for investigating my civil rights claims. Homestead has failed to comply with the public records law on the majority of the nearly one hundred requests I have filed.

A Missouri police association filed a lawsuit against the city of Columbia, accusing its police department of violating the state’s public records law by refusing to provide records in a timely manner, then charging an exorbitant amount for the requested records.
Last summer, the Columbia Police Officers’ Association requested two months worth of email correspondence between Columbia Police Chief Ken Burton and Deputy Chief of Police Jill Schlude.

Karen Finley, former CEO of the red light camera company Redflex Traffic Systems, was sentenced to 14 months in prison last week after pleading guilty to federal corruption charges over backroom bribes in Ohio.
Finley offered political campaign contributions to city council members in Cincinnati and Columbus in exchange for municipal contracts with the company.
She faces a separate sentencing in Chicago next month after pleading guilty to charges there.

UPDATE: Wednesday, August 24, 2016, 10:50 p.m.
PINAC reporter Eric McDonough was arrested Wednesday after entering the city council meeting, then being ordered to leave. He was live streaming that part, but they arrested after he had stepped into the parking lot when he had turned his camera off. It appears they are charging him with disorderly conduct, which is a contempt-of-cop charge. He is currently in jail and should be released Thursday.

The City of Miami Beach just asked the Miami Herald for almost $73,000 to hire one of their employees for a year, just to deliver public records documents related to “human-source fecal marker” and water quality.

A video posted to Facebook this week shows New York City sanitation officers playing a dirty trick on  residents in order to generate revenue.
Digging through their trash.
And then citing anyone who wasn’t “recycling properly”.
The video begins with a man video-recording as he approaches a female officer who is digging through a trash bag.
“Ma’am, can you tell me why you’re taking out garbage from people’s houses in order to give tickets?”
He then turns to a male officer.

“This is what White Castle residents have to deal with.”
Chris Nakamoto is a true professional journalist, giving a deadpanned story lede to his videographer as he was being perp-walked by a burly cop for uncovering small town government corruption.
He’d just uncovered an un-legislated pay raise costing each resident in small town White Castle, Lousiana – each man, woman and child – stuck paying an additional $11 per year in tribute to the elected offical.

Stephen Ruth, dubbed the “Red Light Robin Hood,” has made it his mission to rid his New York county of its red light camera program, claiming it has led to several fatal accidents after the duration of the yellow lights were shortened to trick cars into citations.
The Suffolk County man has posted several videos to his Facebook page documenting the timing of the lights throughout the county. His videos seem to offer proof that yellow warning lights are much shorter at intersections where red light cameras are installed.

An Illinois cop was caught on video accusing a disabled man of being a criminal for recording, then denying his attempt to file an internal affairs complaint while trying to hide behind that state’s struck-down, unconstitutional eavesdropping law, which the ACLU had overturned in 2012.