Oh Florida! Hampton, FL Most Corrupt Town; Threatened with Extinction

The town of Hampton Florida has under 500 residents. They have enough cops to provide a 1:25 ratio of cops to residents. But they operate the nation’s most notorious speed trap. Over 600K in traffic violation cash is missing from the town and the mayor is in jail for selling oxycodone. Tallahassee wants to erase the name of the town from the map and return them to unincorporated status in the county.

From CNN here:

How off-the-charts corrupt do you have to be to capture somebody’s attention in the Sunshine State?

You can lay claim to a 1,260-foot stretch of busy highway a mile outside of town and set up one of the nation’s most notorious speed traps. You can use the ticket money to build up a mighty police force — an officer for every 25 people in town — and, residents say, let drugs run rampant while your cops sit out by the highway on lawn chairs, pointing radar guns at everybody who passes by.

Of course, none of those things are illegal. But when you lose track of the money and the mayor gets caught up in an oxy-dealing sting, that’s when the politicians at the state Capitol in Tallahassee take notice.

Now they want this city gone, and the sooner the better.

A state audit of Hampton’s books, released last month, reads like a primer on municipal malfeasance. It found 31 instances in which local rules or state or federal laws were violated in ways large and small.

On Friday, Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigators and the Bradford County Sheriff’s detectives searched Hampton City Hall. The door of the police chief’s office was removed from its hinges as investigators combed the tin-roofed building for documents and other evidence.
How did things get so bad that lawmakers now think the the dirtiest little town in America has forfeited its right to govern itself?

Whom did the pipeline of easy money corrupt in this postage stamp-size town with fewer than 500 people? And if money is missing, how much are we talking about, anyway: $200,000, $600,000? One lawmaker has suggested it’s as much as $1 million.

Here is the speed trap in operation. Remember, the city claimed a long bottle neck out to the highway just so they could setup and operate this speed trap in the quarter-mile of their city.

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