Oh those Wisconsin Traffic Police

When my parents were in college they shared one car that they parked on the street. The streets near their (Frank Lloydy Wright designed, woo woo) apartment building had free all night parking but during the day became, like, 4 hour parking. So one of them would have to stay home until the traffic cop came by at 8 am to put some chalk on all the tires of the cars (thats how he marked which cars were parked at the start of 4 hour parking so he would know when he came back at 12 to ticket). Then my mom (seriously, no matter how this story gets told, we all know that it was my mom who did the heavy lifting) would back the car up just enough so that the chalk was under the tire. Then she would go to class.

There were many days when the cop was late and my mom had to go to class (or maybe she just left it up to my dad to take care of the car) and they got a parking ticket. They were students and planning on moving to Texas, so they didn't pay many of those, calculating the risks. After they moved away some law changed retroactively or something, and all those tickets were pardoned. I believe that this experience concretely shaped my father's views of parking tickets in Wisconsin.

I believe this because some thirty years later he was back in Wisconsin visiting family and one of his Texas brothers (he has four brothers, it doesn't really matter which one) got a parking ticket in Green Bay for not observing parking laws put in place for the snowmobiles. My father, being the oldest, and therefore the bossiest brother, snatched the ticket from his brother and tore it up. While doing this he announced that you don't have to follow the snowplow rules in the summer (which it was) and that since the brother lived in Texas, and it was a rental car that was ticketed, they would never track him down to collect.

Well they didn't find my uncle, put they did nail my grandfather when he moved back to Wisconsin and tried to get a driver's license. You can imagine how my grandfather reacted to being force to pay an outstanding parking ticket for his adult son. Also, my grandfather was there when the ticket was shredded and he strongly disagreed with this plan of action. And by strongly, I mean loudly. So my uncle who had always wanted to pay the nominal ticket but couldn't (because it was shredded) now looks like a bum.

And how did the state of Wisconsin come to charge my grandfather? They tracked down the info of the rental car to the agency, who narced out my uncle, who at the time was living with my grandparents, and boom, the same last name and the same address. Do Wisconsin police have so much time because there are too many of them, or is there so little serious crime as a result of so many police?

So why this story now? Because today I found this story about a Wisconsin parking ticket given to a Texan. It does make you wonder what the story behind that is.