Sometimes a ratio is so out of whack that you know something is seriously screwy, such as Hillary Clinton’s 100x return on cattle futures. Such is the case with Coffee City, Texas, which had 50 police officers for a town of 250.
After raking in enough cash from traffic citations to pay a king’s ransom, Coffee City in Henderson County shuttered its police department last week after the mayor criticized the management of the small town’s law enforcement.
Coffee City is a small town on the shores of Lake Palestine on State 155 between Palestine and Tyler. It’s about 110 miles southeast of Dallas.
Mayor Jeff Blackstone published a news release on the city’s website on September 1 explaining the city council’s decision to suspend Chief JohnJay Portillo amid questions about his management of the police force.
“After being informed of the recent allegations against our Chief of Police and the city’s reserve officer programs, the city council and myself felt it necessary for us to place Chief Portillo on a thirty-day suspension,” Blackstone said.
“During this time, we will be investigating this matter internally as well as seeking counsel from an independent investigation firm to validate our findings. Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this issue.”
The investigation did not last long. Allegations of poor hiring practices by Portillo and numerous concerns about misconduct by officers in the Coffee City Police Department meant the council’s simplest option was to shut it down.
The department had 50 officers for a town of only about 250 people, an extraordinary ratio of one officer for every five residents.
CBS affiliate KHOU reported in late August that the city received more than $1 million in a single year from approximately 5,100 traffic citations, more than any other city of that size.
Speaking of KHOU, here’s their roundup report on Coffee City, where they talk about how a lot of Coffee City officers had problems on other police jobs:
Are speed trap legal in Texas? Yes, but they’re discouraged, as municipalities and counties are required to remit traffic ticket revenues exceeding 30% of the previous year’s total revenue to the state. It’s unclear whether this was done in the case of Coffee City.
Tags: Coffee City, Crime, DWI, Harris County, Henderson County, Jeff Blackstone, Jeremy Rogalski, JohnJay Portillo, KHOU, speed trap, Texas, video
Just like civil forfeiture, this kind of “for-profit policing” is inimical to any sort of civic legitimacy.
It’s not much more than legalized looting of the public, and when you allow small towns and other communities to do this BS, you’re destroying the fabric of civilization, whether you recognize it or not.
Used to live near a town in Illinois that did this same sort of crap, and the towns outside Fort Polk were just about the same… It got so bad down there that at one point, the post commander started refusing to initiate action against any soldier caught by those communities for DUI or any other offense. One of my company commanders got popped by them, back in the day, when he was still a junior lieutenant. The circumstances were so shady that not only was he not prosecuted by the military, they moved him out of the state in order to prevent the local clowns from harassing him after he won his court case against them.
Some parts of this country are seriously FUBAR when it comes to this crap, and then they wonder why nobody respects the police or any other civic authority. Dumbass in Texas thinks he’s just making a buck, off traffic tickets, but the guy who eventually pays the bill is somewhere else entirely, when the people the first guy conditions to hate cops are doing bad things to other cops…
It’s like I used to tell friends on the Seattle PD: If you don’t police your own ranks, it’ll come back on you. And, indeed, it sure as hell has.
We used to joke about such officers as being REOs (Revenue Enhancement Officers.) It’s bad enough that they write all sorts of shady tickets but what’s worse is that they seldom know what to do when the feces hits the old rotary oscillator.
They got nothing compared to Brookside, AL:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alabama-towns-traffic-ticketing-scandal-leads-police-chiefs-resignatio-rcna13801
The politicians behind this crap are the ones who ought to be paying the price, but they never do.
You would be horrified at how many of these things start as schemes by elected officials, and how often the elections themselves are set up by them. After all, why incorporate a tiny little town in the first place? The scams often start with that crap, when they set everything up in the first place.
Government is basically coercion and fraud; that’s why you want as little of it as possible.
Ah, memories.
I lived in Palestine, TX from 1994-2002. Coffee City was one of several small towns around there which employed (as Jay Dee puts it) “REOs” (As I recall, Mabank, heading to Dallas was another one.) Having been warned when we moved to Palestine, we would go through those towns with the cruise control set a couple of MPH *below* the speed limit, just in case their radar was off a skootch. (And yes, you could get ticketed for 2mph over the limit.)
Life in East Texas behind the Pine Curtain.
I grew up in a town of 300 and we had no police force. But we weren’t near a major highway, either.
Anyway, in a town of 250 people you’re very lucky to have a Mayor and city council who are one of either reasonably smart or reasonably observant. What they want is for citizens to be not too unhappy and things not to be too bad. Getting ‘good’ people elected is difficult because they’re frequently busy with other things (like family, business, etc). So a lot of them are written for election. You can’t really expect them to lean real hard into the job.
I’m sure most of them don’t want any crooked business going on, but they’re generally not lawyers nor police officers so they don’t always know what is legal.
Certainly this city council should have noticed the problem, but honestly I can’t find it in my heart to blame them much.
The local citizens COULD have made their unhappiness known in several ways, but evidently chose not to for a long time.
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Rome, Ohio had a similar rep. Their charter was revoked about 20 years ago. Almost the entirety of the village revenue was from speeding fines. People got tired of it and the General Assembly listened, finally.