Watch this Texan pay a parking ticket with 21,000 pennies
In a YouTube video entitled, "How to pay a speeding ticket. #ResistTheft," Texan Brett Sanders walks viewers (1.5 million of them, as of this writing) through the process.
First, call around to local banks to find one willing to sell you 25-packs of penny rolls. Then, unbox and smash the rolls with an anarchy logo in view. Third, spray-paint some buckets to read, "policing for profit" and "extortion money." And finally, take your buckets to the municipal courthouse to pay your bill using more than 21,000 pieces of loose change.
Sanders told The Washington Post that after he failed to get his speeding ticket dismissed in court, he decided to make a statement when he paid it. "I wanted to not only clog the system, but to send a message, too," he said, noting that police discretion and the sheer quantity of laws give cops wide leeway to engage in "policing for profit," a tactic for municipalities to pad their pockets which was put in the spotlight by the federal investigation into Ferguson, Missouri.
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After his act of protest, Sanders received a call from the courthouse saying he'd overpaid by $7.81 and should come pick up his change.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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