3/8/07

Ticket Town?
Rising cost of traffic fines hotly debated
By Brian Jarvis

BRIAN JARVIS/Manning Times
A Summerton police officer pulls over a motorist for a traffic violation near I-95.

Are traffic tickets too high in Summerton?
For some black residents, the answer to that question is a resounding “Yes!”

Following a recent ordinance that raises traffic ticket fees to as high as $500, a town official is accusing the police department of unfairly targeting its own community.

“I think a lot of ticket revenue is coming from Summerton, and that’s not right,” said councilmember Henry Lawson. “It makes the town almost unlivable, and I’ve lived here all my life. The police are supposed to be protecting and taking care of us, not writing tickets. That revenue should only be a subsidy.”

Lawson, the only councilman to vote against the ordinance and long considered a voice for the black community, said that he’s heard horror stories from his constituents ranging from a $600 fine for “improper lighting” to a jaywalking ticket for crossing a parking lot en route to the post office.

During his tenure as police committee chair, Lawson himself received a $175 traffic ticket, though he claims he wasn’t even operating a vehicle at the time. The fine was later dismissed.

“That was a frivolous ticket. It was just to humiliate me,” Lawson said.

Bishop Arnold Diggs, who successfully fought a ticket for illegal parking, tried to broach the subject at the last council meeting.

“A town of 1,050 people and you’re writing $250 and $500 tickets?” Diggs asked. “Let’s be realistic. That’s more than Manning. We make more money off tickets in this little town than in Manning!”

Mayor Beth Phillips responded by accusing Diggs of having a criminal record, and the conversation quickly became heated. Afterwards, some critics blamed Phillips for taking focus away from the issue.

“They try to make us look like we’re causing trouble whenever we try to fight back,” Lawson said.

There is no doubt that Summerton generates huge sums from traffic tickets. In 2006, police officers wrote nearly $600,000 in fines, up from $500,000 in 2005, an impressive figure even when considering that more than half of those revenues are swallowed up by the state.

Town administrator Rebecca Rhodes, however, defended police ticketing as both a financial necessity and a boon to public safety.

“Revenue that helps run day-to-day service of the town is revenue that doesn’t have to be charged to citizens in taxes, and it helps to make sure that we have cash in the bank at all times,” she said. “The extra money also allows us to hire more police officers, which makes us all safer because at least two people are on duty. I’ve been told that at one point you could buy crack cocaine in front of the Piggly-Wiggly. None of that goes on anymore. We have a higher level of police service than we’d ever be able to afford otherwise.”

Rhodes also said the ordinance mandates that recipients of higher-priced tickets will not have points warranted to their driving records, which she believes most motorists would prefer.

“If we give people the opportunity to avoid having points added, a lot of them want that trade-off and they’ll save money on insurance,” she said. “But at least make them pay for speeding. We’re talking about people going 95, not 75. Once we caught a 16-year old girl going 115. You can’t tell me that slowing those people down doesn’t create a safer interstate. They’re putting people’s lives in danger.”

Still, the question remains: Who is paying for all these tickets?

According to documentation provided by the Summerton police department, the majority of fines are written to out-of-towners. Of nearly 5,000 tickets written last year, 2,559 violators were white while 1,740 were black.

But in Summerton, with a black population of almost 60 percent, Lawson believes that such statistics are misleading.

“If you come to court, sometimes there’s a line of blacks standing out the door,” he said.

Chief Joe Addison, who is black, claims that most black residents in Summerton aren’t even capable of paying such high fees.

“They have no money. It takes more than revenue from local citizens to accomplish what we’ve accomplished,” Addison said. “I don’t know if people want us to turn a blind eye to crimes if they happen to be committed by residents of Summerton, but I don’t think you should be able to go out and break the law and not be held accountable for your actions. They pay us to do our job and follow local and state ordinances.”

“If they have so much information on the wrongdoings of the Summerton police department, why not bring them to us?” Addison wondered. “I have an open-door policy. If you have something to say, then bring it to our attention with supporting proof and documentation. Come to us to talk about what’s going on and quit getting secondhand information. If you’ve got issues, you need to come see me.”

“We wouldn’t stop anyone if they weren’t committing crimes,” added Detective Steve Phillips, who frequently does traffic stops on I-95. “If we did, we’d have the state guys coming after us. It doesn’t make any sense. We’d love all people to be angels, but they’re not.”

For some residents, that explanation may not be good enough. Having a black police chief as well as several black officers, they claim, merely makes it easier for the department to deny racial profiling.

Lawson and Diggs, to their credit, both said they want to work with the town to resolve the issue, but what that resolution might be remains unknown.

“I’m of the opinion that, for job creation, if we want to bring in industry, we have to do things differently,” Lawson said, noting that Summerton is listed on the Internet as one of the worst speed traps in the area. “Revenue should be used for the town, not to run the town. We need to bring in a grocery store and other businesses to draw in people going to Sumter and Santee. People who want to come here are afraid because they hear about the police.”

“It takes everybody in town to make it work,” Lawson added. “It’s never going to work as long as we’re separate.”