Have you checked your local traffic code lately? It is deeper than Atlantis - covering things you would expect like changing lanes without caution to prohibitions on having items like scent trees hanging from your rear view mirror. As pointed out by the Supreme Court, "total compliance with traffic and safety rules is nearly impossible, a police officer will almost invariably be able to catch any given motorist in a technical violation. This creates the temptation to use traffic stops as a means of investigating other law violations, as to which no probable cause or even articulable suspicion exists." [MORE] The "multitude of applicable traffic and equipment regulations is so large and so difficult to obey perfectly that virtually everyone is guilty of violation, permitting the police to single out almost whomever they wish for a stop." [MORE] 

Since the 1980's police departments have co-opted local traffic codes as a major weapon to be used in the alleged "war on drugs." Making stops whose sole legal justification is traffic regulation in order to seek out drugs when grounds are lacking to detain for a narcotics investigation. [MORE]

We should adjust that. The so-called war on drugs was/is really a war against non-white people. Now that crime has significantly declined and the drug trade is far removed from the open air market, violent, Rayful Edmond money-making days of the late 80's - 90's, you can really see what these traffic codes are really about – fucking with Black people. Thousands of mostly white cops from overbudgeted police departments, armed to the teeth, bored out of their minds with no real crime going on, target Blacks - pulling them over for any insubstantial thing. There are too many overseers wherever Blacks and Latino are and they are policing you. With the "war on drugs" policy justification losing credibility, the racist logic is plain to see; "there is no innocent Black male, just Black male criminals who have not yet been detected, apprehended or convicted." [MORE]

After Michael Brown was murdered by a white Ferguson cop the Justice Department concluded that the mistrust between the police and the community primarily resulted from excessive fining. “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs,” the report read. The use of fines to fund the government undermined “law enforcement legitimacy among African Americans in particular.” 

Ferguson has a population of just over 20,000 that is 67% African American, and it raised over $2 million from fines and fees in 2012. This accounted for around 13% of all government revenue, and a disproportionate amount of this money came from the African American population.

Priceomics asked "Is Ferguson an anomaly?" Answer of course is no, not in a system of white supremacy. No statistics are necessary - your own personal experience will do. But for your reading pleasure they made the following findings;

From [HERE] "Using the U.S. Census’s Survey of Local and State Finances, we investigated the proportion of revenues that cities typically receive from fines, as well as the characteristics of cities that rely on fines the most. What are these cities like? Are they rich or poor? In certain parts of the country? Heavily Black or White?

We found one demographic that was most characteristic of cities that levy large amounts of fines on their citizens: a large African American population. Among the fifty cities with the highest proportion of revenues from fines, the median size of the African American population—on a percentage basis—is more than five times greater than the national median.

Surprisingly, we found that income had very little connection to cities’ reliance on fines as a revenue source. Municipalities that are overwhelming White and non-Hispanic do not exhibit as much excessive fining, even if they are poor.

Our analysis indicates that the use of fines as a source of revenue is not a socioeconomic problem, but a racial one. The cities most likely to exploit residents for fine revenue are those with the most African Americans.