Sherman Park parents give thanks that police have curtailed late-night summer cruising and carousing that roiled their calm streets. And police, summoned to public schools thousands of times a year, have stopped fights from escalating into tragedies. Serious questions and unforeseen consequences shadow the program. As many as 800 people a year are having to prove that tickets were erroneously written in their name after people wanted on legitimate warrants gave an alias when stopped by police. Some of the falsely accused get their driver's license suspended or even serve brief jail time before the identity mistake is caught.
All municipal tickets are non-criminal, civil citations.
The same general racial pattern held true for tickets written downtown. The racial imbalance in ticketing, the paper found, can be explained at least in part by the concentration on ticketing in overwhelmingly minority public schools, in higher-crime neighborhoods that are predominantly minority and in the mostly black homeless population downtown. Jail time for failure to pay municipal tickets also appears to be a predominantly black phenomenon, at least among men. About 1,900 men served time on municipal convictions there last year, records show. Half went to people 20 or younger.