Category Archives: Interesting

Where most traffic tickets are written in Dallas

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Wondering where most traffic ticket are written in Dallas? The below heatmap is from a dataset that includes Dallas (city) tickets 2004-2012 and Dallas County tickets 2006-2012. (Beginning and end years are partial.)

I am assembling this dataset for my in-progress doctorate. (I am a doctoral candidate.)

Heat map of traffic tickets written in Dallas

A couple of notes to help interpretation:

  • This is for all officer-written traffic tickets: speeding, red light running, paperwork violations, equipment violations, etc.
  • Does not include:
    • Tickets unrelated to traffic, like disturbing the peace or drug possession.
    • Parking tickets.
    • A modest % of tickets that I could not geocode due to no address, bad address data, or limitations of my geocoder.
    • Portions of Dallas outside Dallas County.
    • Tickets written by other jursdictions. I left out Texas Department of Public Safety because they have hardly any activity in Dallas County except for NTTA freeways. Dallas heavily patrols the NTTA-owned Mountain Creek Lake Bridge, however!
    • Tickets sent directly to county courts instead of municipal or JP courts, like DUI.
    • Automated ticketing machines like Dallas’s red light cameras.
  • This may modestly understate Dallas County sheriff and constable tickets because I have about 2 more years of Dallas city tickets in here.

I find it surprising that the most significant traffic enforcement activities are generally not along major roadways, but rather are in areas of town commonly perceived as dangerous.

Two huge peaks are at the Five Points area (Park Ln. east of US 75) and Ferguson/Buckner. Other obvious areas of emphasis:

  • Downtown
  • Maple and Wycliff
  • Just north of Bachman Lake
  • Pleasant Grove
  • Oak Cliff
  • Fair Park
  • North Skillman
  • Red Bird area

It’s as if traffic enforcement is largely being used as a pretext for arrests and searches that might otherwise be difficult to pass constitutional muster. That may be interesting as commentary, but it is not a focus for my research. I’m really focucing on the safety effect of enforcement.

There is an apparent focus on intersections, although it’s possible that this is an artifact of officers writing in the nearest intersection for the ticket’s address.

Is Flying Colors Sports’s Great Amazing Race a scam?

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(UPDATE: Flying Colors Sports’s owner Greg Benton posted a response in the comments below.)

Yesterday, my son and I did a family race.

It was called the Great Amazing Race, put on by Flying Color Sports. It’s supposedly a lighter version of the same thing you can see on TV.

It was neither great nor amazing.

It’s presented like a charity:

Here’s a problem: this “charity” has the patina of a loose, for-profit operation:

  • No IRS-recognized charities have names beginning with “flying colors sports” or “active families“. In fact, Flying Colors Sports is an Ohio for-profit LLC that was chartered in 2004. Ohio had no business on record beginning with “active families”. (Search for yourself.)
  • Through Google, I can’t find clear evidence of anything charitable these Active Families 30 or Active Families 60 charities have done, or that they even exist!
  • The event organizer said Akwasi Owusu-Ansah was supposed to attend but couldn’t because he was just traded. Um, no. It was January 15. He had been traded 6 weeks prior, on Dec. 4.
  • Poorly run, disorganized event, especially for something that cost between $30 and $50 per family.
  • No trained medical staff, or if they were there, they were well-hidden.
  • Was run worse than many free Cub or Boy Scout events I’ve been to.
  • Low-quality, sloppy web site with poor poorfreading, like ”Norbuck Par” or “I-365″ (it’s I-635!). In fact, it’s just thrown together with Godaddy’s free Website Tonight tool (see bottom of most pages).
  • The promised race packet was just a green, generic bifold flyer with no useful event details.
  • Credit card data is transmitted with no security and converted to email, which is inherently insecure.
  • No runner identification whatsoever. It’s all on an honor system basis. I could have easily scammed my way into the event.
  • Instead of “8 fun-filled stations“, there were six, and they were silly: 1. blindfolded guide, 2. sponge relay, 3. mummy wrap with toilet paper, 4. golfing a tennis ball into a hula hoop, 5. “hold the football between your legs while you go around some cones” and 6. a bingo game. Yes, the last station is really a game of chance, where you watch slower people get lucky and pass you up! Sure, these were enjoyable, but not $30-$50 per team enjoyable!
  • Purportedly tax-deductible donations are to be sent to the private residence of Donald and Karen S. Helton at 7858 Red Fox Drive, West Chester OH 45069.
  • The company’s headquarters are at the private residence of Gregory L. and Michelle R. Benton at 8270 Miranda Place, West Chester OH 45069.

So what’s the truth? Is there really any charity behind this?

I don’t know.

It could be that this is all legit, and some charity puts on an overpriced, over-promoted, hokey event run by a marketing firm that communicates poorly.

But it’s also possible that this is only a for-profit enterprise. If that’s true, it would be shameful. They would be getting undeserved free labor, and they would pretty much be pocketing money from families’ charity budgets.

Either way, participants deserve the truth, and they deserve something better than a brief, sloppy event for $30-$50, and taxpayers deserve for a charity to be organized properly, with IRS recognition.

birthornot.com: Domain name suggests hoax

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At birthornot.com, Peter and Alisha Arnold, a Apple Valley, MN couple, asks the public whether they should kill their unborn child.

I think it’s a hoax.

Minneapolis/St. Paul’s Star Tribune reports the baby is at 17 weeks.

Today (Nov. 19) is week 46 of the year 2010. 46 minus 17 means the child was conceived no earlier than week 29 of 2010, which starts with July 18.

Here’s the problem: The birthornot.com domain name was purchased on May 17, 2010. That’s week 20 of 2010. They purchased the domain name more than two months before conception!

That doesn’t make sense. I really hope it’s a hoax; the alternative is sick, that they planned a media circus around conception.

I guess there’s a shot of this being just good timing, or someone else just happened to purchase the domain name and donated it, but either fails Occam’s razor.

What do you think?

“Soliciting Sodomy” offenses in Dallas

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For my doctoral research, I asked several cities for their traffic citation data. Some cities gave me all their violations, traffic or otherwise.

Dallas gave me all data. One offense is “6460 -SOLICIT SODOMY”. Um, what? After the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court case that shot down Texas’s sodomy law, why is this enforced?

Was I wrong! Here’s Dallas’s enforcement of that offense:

These are all the sodomy citations in the dataset I have from Dallas. (2009 is an incomplete year–data was requested in mid-2009.)

There’s a chance that “the system” says offense 6460 is “SOLICIT SODOMY”, but in fact it’s a different crime. That wouldn’t surprise me because Dallas courts still use an archaic mainframe system. But who knows?

Why the United Methodist Church withdrew from the Democrat “One Nation” rally

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A family member and I may be much of why the United Methodist Church withdrew from the Oct. 2 Democrat One Nation Rally. I am proud that, per the Weekly Standard, the UMC was “the only major group publicly to withdraw from the rally.”

On Thursday, Sept. 30, 2 days before the rally, a family member tipped me off that the United Methodist Church’s General Board on Church and Society (GBCS) endorsed the rally.

I was skeptical at first, pushing back on the relative. But later that day, I called Wayne Rhodes, the GBCS’s Director of Communications. Wayne played the “what, me?” card, sticking to a ridiculous notion that this is a nonpartisan rally. At one point he even denied that NPR repeatedly characterized this as a left wing political rally. It took many minutes to explain to him that a pig with lipstick is still a pig–even if there is some alleged factual basis for the rally’s nonpartisanship, it is a de facto Democrat rally. Therefore, the United Methodist Church’s name should not be part of it.

Wayne’s bio suggests a good deal of journalistic experience. All I can figure is he is intentionally playing fast and loose with the truth, like a political press secretary whose boss is in hot water. Not like an employee of a church.

I was so frustrated with Wayne’s obfuscation  that I send this email a few hours later. It went to the GBCS’s director Jim Winkler, CCing Wayne and also Mark W. Harrison, the GBCS employee who sought the UMC’s endorsement:

James,

I have a bone to pick with you.

I am a lifelong United Methodist, and I am embarrassed and angry that the General Board on Church and Society, which you direct, recklessly and naively lent the UMC’s name to a left wing, partisan pep rally (per http://www.onenationworkingtogether.org/partners).

Let me deconstruct this statement:

“left wing, partisan pep rally”

It doesn’t take much to read through the event’s marketing. The One Nation Working Together Rally is a national-scope, left wing, Democrat-supporting, partisan pep rally. It is a knee-jerk reaction to the recent Tea Party-aligned, Republican-supporting, conservative, Glenn Beck event.

The media clearly sees this. Here’s a couple of NPR pieces that affirm the pep rally’s partisanship: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130183605 and http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130212964 (just listen to the first 25 seconds). Google News has many other references (link), cementing this obvious purpose.

Guess what? Almost all of the pep rally’s “endorsing organizations” (http://www.onenationworkingtogether.org/partners) are left wing or Democrat groups. Some are even notorious extremists like the Communist Party. Only a small remainder are prima facie politically unaligned.

“naive”

Over the phone yesterday, GBCS communications director Wayne Rhodes argued that this is simply a nonpartisan event about social justice. He said that one of your employees sought GBCS endorsement because he claimed this pep rally is about nonpartisan principles. He passionately denied that the media portrayed this as a Democrat-aligned or even left wing event.

Um, what? Is the GBCS that naive?

Let’s suppose the impossible is true, that this is really nonpartisan? Two important facts:

  1. This pep rally is perceived, portrayed, and organized as a partisan, left wing event.
  2. Endorsing a highly partisan pep rally links one with the rally’s partisan flavor.

These facts matter a lot more than a legalistic, disingenuous appeal to the pep rally’s alleged nonpartisan roots.

“reckless”

Given that the UMC laity has diverse political views and that the denomination is bleeding members, the UMC should be wary of wedges that could alienate members.

The GBCS was reckless to create a wedge over non-church, partisan politics. Supporting a Democrat-aligned, left wing pep rally does not serve Jesus Christ or stop the UMC’s membership losses. It just feeds political machines and drives away members and prospects.

Alienated members may include those who don’t agree with left wing solutions to social ills. It may also include those, from any political stripe, who agree with the spirit of tax law that separates charities from partisan events. (Yes, I know, “on paper” this is not a “Democrat” pep rally, and the tax law has some loopholes, but let’s not get into disingenuous legalism again…)

Conclusion

By now, you may think I want the GBCS to also endorse Republican or conservative events. No, in fact, I don’t. Several of the Republican party’s official stances also counter the UMC’s social principles.

I want the GBCS to stay out of partisan events. I don’t want my own church creating wedges between me and my Christian brothers and sisters of any partisan leaning!

Further, I want the GBCS to be open to the idea that what separates the left and right are often not the goals (fairness, equality, peace, liberty, etc.). The difference is in the methods to achieve these outcomes.

I’m confused why the GBCS didn’t have checks and balances to prevent this error? It makes me question what you guys are doing up there. What other partisan political events are you endorsing? Does the General Conference need to audit the GBCS?

Aren Cambre
Dallas, TX

I also CCed my local minister and Bishop.

By this time, my relative had found emails of United Methodist friends and many Bishops and started sending similar appeals to them.

I got no response, but that was unsurprising. Wayne made it clear they were going to cling to delusional notions about the rally’s partisanship.

The day before, Oct. 1, as I was about to start some of my own email activism, I found that the GBCS rescinded their endorsement! I was relieved, but the news release infuriated me. They still clung to their dishonest claptrap. For example:

  • “The board is disturbed by some of the overtly political and partisan statements issued by organizers of the march.” Um, it was political and partisan from the beginning!? Hello!?
  • “These goals are non-controversial and consistent with scripture and the United Methodist Social Principles.” and other garbage defending the rally. Look, it was a political rally. The non-partisan roots are a farce. Quit it!
  • “the rally was initiated by respected civil rights organizations such as the NAACP …  [but] [t]he list of endorsers, however, grew to include a variety of organizations that created enormous, unnecessary controversy.” Well, yeah, aligning with the Communist Party doesn’t help things, BUT THAT’S STILL NOT THE PROBLEM! Do you really believe that a national-scope, Washington Mall rally, pimped exclusively by Democrat fronts like the NAACP or or radical left groups, could possibly be nonpartisan? Seriously?
  • “…the ‘One Nation Working Together’ rally has been portrayed by opponents as a counter-demonstration to Mr. Beck’s event.” NPR and the mainstream media are opponents of the American left? HAHAHAHA!
  • “GBCS does not support a statement reported in the Sept. 30 issue of The Washington Post made by a key organizer of the event. He said, ‘We aren’t the alternative to the tea party; we are the antidote.’” Another example of insane incompetence–is the GBCS really that blind to the unrelenting media characterization of One Nation, that started way before Sept. 30? It didn’t start the day I called Wayne!
  • “Unfortunately, discourse within the United States has grown increasingly divisive. Perhaps more troubling, discourse within The United Methodist Church has taken on a very un-Christ-like tone. E-mails and phone calls made to the board by clergy and laity have been shocking in their vitriol.” Oh, that’s wonderful, throw stones at fellow United Methodists because they called you out on your incompetence. Yeah, that’s “turning the other cheek”!
  • “The ‘One Nation Working Together’ rally began with a clean, clear message consistent with the social teachings of The United Methodist Church.” NEVER, NEVER, NEVER. This started out as a partisan political pep rally. It was NEVER intended to be some nonpartisan event. Any alleged nonpartisanship is a thin legal fiction necessary to pass through tax law.
  • “We pray that the rally will overcome the misguided controversies surrounding it and deliver hope for the change their presence does endorse.” That was the final statement. Yet another “we don’t get it” statement: the problem, from the beginning, is that the GBCS endorsed a political rally and declined to admit it.

I wrote another email to Jim, et al, also copying the two United Methodist bishops who serve as president and vice president of the GBCS’s board:

Jim,

Thank you for rescinding the GBCS’s endorsement of this partisan pep rally: http://www.umc.org/site/apps/nlnet/content3.aspx?c=lwL4KnN1LtH&b=5723441&ct=8736599&notoc=1.

However, I strongly object to the retraction’s tone. I don’t appreciate that in it, you are defensive, still cling to tired legalisms, and cast stones at concerned United Methodists.

Since when is passionately disagreeing with GBCS’s error the same as “very un-Christ-like tone” or “shocking … vitriol”?

Could you help me understand how any of these are Christ-like?

  1. Your Communications Director adamantly denying that the media portrayed this event as partisan, even though he admitted he listens to the same NPR radio news as me, which repeatedly covered the pep rally’s overt partisanship?
  2. Clinging to tired legalisms, such as how the retraction repeats the alleged nonpartisan basis for this event. (The Gospels say a lot about legalism…)
  3. That your staff tarnished the UMC’s good name because they declined to perform due diligence, failing to observe the terribly obvious: a national-scope rally, set up by left wing and Democrat groups, especially in a season of intense political scrutiny of the American left, will have thick partisan overtones.
  4. That you waited until the 11th hour to withdraw, only after direct media attention of the GBCS endorsement, despite weeks of media coverage of the rally’s partisan purpose.

Again, I appreciate that you did the right thing and rescinded the endorsement. But I am disappointed that your retraction shows hostility, obstinance, and defensiveness instead of humility, acceptance, and straightforwardness. That is disappointing.

Aren Cambre
Dallas, TX

Heads should roll. The GBCS, as a body, was dishonest. It may be incompetent, too.

Furthermore, if the GBCS’s de facto purpose is to shove the United Methodist Church towards a certain partisan alignment, the entire board needs to be shut down. Our resources are too precious to waste on nonsense.

Now one last note: I am also working against excessive church influence in the right wing, too. The Texas Republican Party has adopted divisive religious views, and I’ve documented this in my critique of the Texas Republican Platform.