“Against such there is no law?”
Donald Pirone, a man in Atlanta, GA, rides the subway. He saw that another passenger was having trouble with the machine that dispenses subway tokens, and so he gave him one. In response, the other rider gave him the $1.75 that a subway token costs, even though Pirone did not ask him for the money.
And for this act of kindess, he was handcuffed and cited with a misdemeanor.
Instead of giving Pirone a warning, the officer decided to handcuff him and give him the misdemeanor citation under a 1992 state law that bars passengers from selling Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority tokens, [Transit Authority spokeswoman Jocelyn Baker] said.
“What you’ve got to keep in mind is that fare abuse is a chronic problem,” Baker said. “It costs MARTA millions of dollars every year.”
Baker acknowledged that Pirone sold the token at face value and did not make a profit. But the law is the law, she said.
“There are customer service phones for people who are having trouble getting tokens out of the machine,” Baker said. “The fact is, our officer acted within the law.”
Yeah, but that doesn’t mean he did the right thing. Don’t the police have better things to do than arrest people for doing good? Maybe incidents like this reveal why Atlanta has a worse crime rate than either New York City or Los Angeles and more rapes and robberies per capita than Washington, DC.
(via Brainwagon)