On June 21, 2016, Chicago police pulled Spencer Byrd over for a broken turn signal. Byrd says his signal wasn't broken, but that detail would soon be the least of his worries.
We noticed your turn signal was broken. It started flickering before you made that turn.
Ever since, Byrd has been trapped in one of the city's most confusing bureaucratic mazes, deprived of his car and his ability to work. He now owes the city thousands of dollars for the pleasure.
Soon to be a major motion picture, once we finish re-making every single existing movie.
Byrd, 50, lives in Harvey, Illinois, a corrupt, crime-ridden town south of Chicago where more than 35 percent of the populace lives below the poverty line.
Something tells my the Harvey tourism and development board did not sponsor this article.
He's a carpenter by trade, but until the traffic stop, he had a side gig as an auto mechanic.
This mechanical work? Just a little side hustle I do on the side before my YouTube channel of me eating and drinking anything and everything takes off.
Byrd says he's been fixing cars "ever since I was 16 years old and blew my first motor." Sometimes he did service calls and would give clients rides when he couldn't repair their cars on the spot.
He's basically the second best carpenter to ever live, in case it wasn't clear enough.
On this early summer night, Byrd was giving a client, a man he says he had never met before, a ride in his Cadillac DeVille.
It's pretty common practice for off-the-books fake mechanics, ask anyone.
Police pulled both of them out of the car and searched them. Byrd was clean, but in his passenger's pocket was a bag of heroin the size of a tennis ball.
Maybe that's why the car was impounded and not the broken turn signal? I know, it's a wild thought, but please consider it, "Reason."
The two were hauled off to the precinct house.
They got pitched in the jug, man.
Byrd had run afoul of Chicago's aggressive vehicle impound program, which seizes cars and fines owners thousands of dollars for dozens of different offenses.
All you have to do is get caught with a significant amount of heroin and this insane program runs wild. Stop the madness!
It impounds cars even when the owner isn't even driving, like when a child is borrowing a parent's car.
I'm not driving, I'm traveling. Under the Articles of Confederation you have no authority here. Traffic laws aren't really laws. Am I being detained? Am I free to go?
In total, Chicago fined motorists more than $17 million between March 2017 and March of this year for 31 different types of offenses, ranging from DUI to having illegal fireworks in a car to playing music too loud, according to data from the Chicago Administrative Hearings Department.
Yes, fines for minor things like drunk driving. Your outrage is totally justified.
About $10 million of those fines were for driving on a suspended license, and more than $3 million were for drug offenses like the one that resulted in the impoundment of Byrd's car.
In a Libertarian Society this wouldn't have happened. Mainly because everything would collapse into a chaotic and violent state of nature, but still, it wouldn't happen.
The city says it is simply enforcing nuisance laws and cracking down on scofflaws. But community activists and civil liberties groups say the laws are predatory, burying guilty and innocent owners alike in debt, regardless of their ability to pay or the effect losing a vehicle will have on their lives.
The city made an argument based on six millennia of jurisprudence, but a guy that yells things at people in front of a Taco Bell doesn't agree.
"There's plenty of reason to be concerned that there's injustice being done to people who are mostly poor, people who aren't in a position to fight back," says Ben Ruddell, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Illinois.
You must earn a certain minimum income before you can be arrested for something.
I should be allowed to blow through red lights because I'm poor.
"The city has been perpetuating an exploitative system, charging exorbitant fees in a way that it knows is likely to make it so folks never get their cars out of impoundment."
Another injustice against the folks on God's green Earth.
Byrd calls his car his "livelihood," and he has been fighting for close to two years now to recover it.
"I need that car to live!" Two years pass, is still alive.
The battle between Byrd and the governments of Cook County and the municipality of Chicago over his 1996 Cadillac Fleetwood DeVille, valued at $1,600, is a tangled story involving the drug war, the controversial practice of civil asset forfeiture, ailing city budgets, and the rapacious use of fines and fees to generate city revenue. It's a story of how bureaucracy is used to grind down people by distributing their misery among as many public offices as possible.
No, really, we're impartial arbiters of true wisdom and the best solutions for society.
Komment Korner
'No nothing' is the same as 'something'... Gotcha!
The sole purpose of government is to rob its citizens.
I'm pretty sure the battery is dead now to boot.
I doubt the Chicago unemployment rate is 4500%.
Now that is how you Kafka!
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