The Bounty Corps

This past weekend, I stopped at Costco to pick up some milk and other items. The parking lot is littered with handicap parking spaces and most of them were occupied. I was lucky to find an open space adjacent to an open handicap parking space which put me closer to the entrance and saved a little wear and tear on my already sore right knee. (I’m eighty-one and entitled to a sore knee now and then.) But it was the sheer volume of handicapped parking spaces that amazed me. My initial thought was that Costco had provided a handicapped parking space to every person so afflicted in the city. But the rational part of my brain realized that the number of handicapped parking spaces was not Costco’s idea but rather the mandate of the state and local governments and probably based on the total number of parking spaces or the square footage of the store or some combination of the two. (Hang in there now for a minute – it gets worse.)

At any rate, I no sooner turned my car off and started to open my door when one of those extended cab behemoth pickup trucks pulled into the handicapped parking space next to me. You know the type that you need a step ladder to get in and out. The type that they have to back into the space because they cannot turn in sharply enough. The type that sticks out into traffic by a foot or two. But I digress. About that time the door to the pickup opened and a woman popped out and strided with purpose to the entrance to Costco with no visible impediments or handicaps. I checked her license plate and her mirror and there was no handicapped plate or “hanger.” Obviously she and her time were more important than were mine, or for that matter anyone else’s.

It hit a nerve. My wife and I had a nephew that was a quadriplegic. He needed access to those handicapped spaces and often times found himself circling a parking lot waiting for a space because the allotted spaces were filled more often than not by perfectly healthy people with and without handicapped stickers. There ought to be a law, right?

Well there is a law. In fact there has been a law for decades. The fines for violation were pretty nominal in the beginning because the politicians reasoned that healthy people would not deny access to those suffering a handicap. They were wrong. The fines were the only enforcement method and they were so low that they did not deter offenders. No provision was made for additional law enforcement action to police these handicapped parking spaces. And because all the handicapped spaces were being taken by those without handicaps, their advocates demanded the designation of more spaces and to increase enforcement – albeit by raising the fines with no additional enforcement activity. Those legislators walked away each session full of virtue signaling and devoid of any recognition that a law that isn’t enforced is no law at all. So over time the fine has been raised, the number of allocated handicapped spaces has increased and people in all sorts of vehicles from Prius to monster trucks continue to occupy those spaces with no actual handicaps.

The same is true for littering and the use of smart phones – particularly for texting purposes. The legislature continues to increase the fines and drivers continue to ignore the problem because there is no enforcement and they know it.

But wait – there is an enforcement mechanism that will cost nothing to implement and will put an end to the massive abuses. It is a mechanism that it as old as America and has proven regularly to be effective. That’s right. It’s called bounties and I have urged this to no avail previously.

Rather than calling it a “bounty” call it the Full Employment Act. It’s pretty simple and it recognizes the evolution of technology such that virtually every person has in their hands a movie camera equipped with date and time stamps – a smart phone.

The legislature should authorize a new, independent, self-funded corps of misdemeanor bounty hunters. By simply amending the existing laws to allow “bounty hunters” to recover one-half of the fines levied, Oregon and other states could create a cadre of good citizens willing to enforce the very laws that the policy makers have said are important for the safety of our handicapped and to ensure access to public activities by the handicapped. Of course, the fines for handicap parking violations probably ought to be increased to the same level as littering (up from $1000 to $6250) to recognize that people are at least as important as candy wrappers and Big Gulp containers.

Just think of the opportunities. You’re sitting in the parking lot at Target thinking about dinner and a movie but knowing that your budget is too tight. Bingo, there goes a guy in Gold’s Gym T-shirt, muscles bulging, and making the high-climb alone into an SUV parked in a handicap spot –sure he has a handicap sticker but so does everybody else and there isn’t anyone with a handicap in the vehicle. Grab the smart phone, start the video showing the offenders face, license plate, and a cab empty but for him. Then click/click an email to the State Police and you are $3,125 richer. (For those of you forced to endure a teachers union led education in the Portland public schools, $3,125 is one-half of the $6,250 fine proposed above.) In fact, some enterprising fourteen-year old can probably cobble together an app that lets you do all of this and order the pizza and the movie tickets right from the same app.

This is a liberal’s dream solution. First and most important, the increased revenues give government more opportunity to waste money. Second, it does not require any active law enforcement participation (we don’t want to put more officers on the street for fear of offending some special interest group). Third, it encourages busybodies to tell others what to do. Fourth, it encourages citizens to “spy” on each other – we could even call these volunteers something like “the Red Brigade.”And fifth, it creates the kind of jobs liberals love – show up when you want, quit when you want, and drink and smoke when you want without fear of supervisors. It would be like a progressive’s utopia – well, like in Portland. It will work equally well for littering and using your cellphone for texting or talking in hand-held mode. And as it works, there will be other areas to which it can be applied. (Mic drop.)

Or, you could simply enforce the laws you have already passed and clear the decks of the cheaters, malingerers, and free-ride remoras. But that would alienate a goodly portion of the progressives’ voting base.

The post The Bounty Corps first appeared on Oregon Catalyst.