Opinion: California’s Unfair Fines and Fees Can Derail People’s Lives

By Anne Stuhldreher

California Highway Patrol motorcycle officers. Courtesy CHP A few years back I did not come to a complete stop at a stop sign near my house in San Francisco. My stomach dropped when I saw the police officer. I had neighbors who’d been ticketed at the same spot, and I instantly knew what was coming — a citation for hundreds of dollars.

I also knew I was lucky — I could easily pay the fine. But I’d just read a report that showed that if Americans had to come up with a few hundred dollars of quick cash in a bind, about half simply couldn’t do it. As I turned the ticket in my hands, I wondered what happened to people on tight budgets when they got tickets like this?

I got my answer a couple of years later when community groups formed the Debt Free SF coalition to protest what they called city-sanctioned gouging through tickets, fines and fees. They weren’t just mad about overpriced traffic tickets, they were outraged by a whole array of fiscal punishments that were disproportionately doled out to people without the resources to pay. If they didn’t have money to pay a trafficticket? […]

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