We came to Doraville after we were
contacted by a resident who had received some outrageous property code tickets
and after we started investigating we realized that Doraville was one of the
most prolific ticket writers in the country, and certainly in the Atlanta
area and that was according to an investigation by the local newspaper here. Hilda Brucker was fined $100 and sentenced to criminal probation because of the condition of this driveway. Hilda was hauled into Doraville Municipal
Court without warning and told she faced three criminal misdemeanor charges for
the condition of her property. I was called into court with no warning, and I was sentenced for having cracks and crumbles in my driveway, which is so ridiculous and ludicrous. No one ever asked me to fix the driveway, this is a neighborhood of very old driveways. Who does that? And you received a criminal citation for the driveway? Yes it was, it was a criminal charge against me. I then met Hilda's neighbor, Jeff Thornton, who was ticketed for a stack of wood which he used for wood working. This is the remains of that wood pile, it's deplenished quite a bit since then because I've used it for woodworking or cooking. I've made a few birdhouses out of this wood because the the roof looks really neat with the rough wood. It ran along the fence, and it was
nice and neatly stacked and actually some of it had a tarp over so you
couldn't see how ugly it looked, apparently. Even before this happened to me, I would be out on my morning walk and I would see code enforcement officers skulking around people's front yards, taking pictures. Jeff I saw you nodding. Yes I've seen that as well, I've been the recipient of it as well. Just to see them taking pictures of my yard and say hey what's going on? Doraville is notorious for its speed traps and other law enforcement activities because it sits on the Atlanta Beltway, the perimeter, which gives its police the opportunity to ticket commuters who are making their
way to the Atlanta area, and this city is heavily reliant on the fines and fees it gets from those tickets. Doraville relies on fines and fees to
generate about a quarter of its general operating budget, that means that city
officials and law enforcement officers have a financial incentive to ticket and
convict both property owners and drivers. A judge can't have a financial interest in a case that comes before them, and a prosecutor can't have a financial interest in prosecuting the cases that come before them, they have to be neutral government officers. You shouldn't feel threatened to the point
where you're almost afraid to drive in certain areas, not because it's dangerous,
but because you might just be a trigger for somebody who's out there patrolling
to make money. If you have a city, you need to be able to fund the city and it shouldn't be something where you have to penalize your citizens, or people who are
visiting the city in order to be able to keep the city up and running. Across the country, we see courts and cities that continue to use their criminal justice systems to generate revenues, this practice is unconstitutional and the Institute for Justice has filed suit here in another leg in its journey to stop it.
