Is This the Kind of America We Have Fought Wars For?

From AOL Auto Section:

A New Jersey woman spent the night in jail after a ticket she received way back in 2002 came back to haunt her.

When she was 17, Krystle Garcia was cited by New York police for not having her insurance card. She never paid the fine, but was able to renew her license and commute to New York for the subsequent decade. Everything seemed fine until she was stopped at a checkpoint and had her license randomly scanned. The scan showed that Garcia had an outstanding summons, so she was arrested on the spot.

Even though Garcia had long forgotten about the ticket, the state of New York did not.

"It was horrifying," Garcia told NBC 4 in New York. "I sat in a holding cell for 14 hours with people who had gun charges, who were fighting each other."

"I've received tickets in New York and I've paid them. Couldn't they have just impounded my car instead of taking me, and putting me with other people who commit actual crimes?"

Garcia ended up settling in court and paying a $155 fine, but not until after she suffered through a long and frightening ordeal.

Moral of the story: Pay your fines, folks. The government has a long memory.

Now how would this have gone down in Milwaukee County?

1. If she was stopped in one of the suburbs, ie. Shorewood, WFB, Fox Point, etc., they would have let her make a phone call, someone would have come and paid fine, and she would have been released.

2. If she was stopped in the City of Milwaukee, they would not let her make a phone call. They would have kept her in a city jail for a few hours and then transferred her to the County Jail. 

At the County Jail she would be subject to a cavity search (per the US Supreme Court). 

When allowed to finally use a pay phone, on which she could only make a collect call, she might get out if she has a friend with a landline, you cannot make collect calls to cell phones. It would not be unusual for her to spend a couple nights in the County Jail before getting released.

When I grew up, we were taught in grade school that this kind of thing only happened in countries like the USSR or China or other dictatorships, and that US citizens were treated with a little respect and common sense. 

It cost a lot more money to treat her like a dog in manpower and jailing, then if they just suspended her license and she would have remembered the ticket and paid the fine.

What do you think? Do you agree?