00:00:00
Speaker 1: Would you bear with me while I indulge in fantasy granforced concrete.
00:00:04
Speaker 2: Here we go.
00:00:05
Speaker 3: It's an incredible thing.
00:00:06
Speaker 1: From one oh seven point nine fl avt Charlotte's FM News.
00:00:10
Speaker 3: Talk compelling and.
00:00:14
Speaker 4: Enough of it.
00:00:16
Speaker 3: This is Good Morning BT with Botompson at bed trout back.
00:00:21
Speaker 5: You get a fast I want to to get to anywhere. Maybe we maybe do Maybe together we can get somewhere. Penny places, but uh, starting from zoo, got nothing to lose, Maybe we'll make something.
00:00:36
Speaker 3: Be careful, starting from zero nothing to.
00:00:40
Speaker 2: Mark Garrison, WBT news director joins us right now talking all things MacB Macbe.
00:00:47
Speaker 3: That's right.
00:00:47
Speaker 1: Some people say make Bee, but the folks who live there say Macbe.
00:00:51
Speaker 2: I got a plan. Well, and most people who pass through there aren't there for very long.
00:00:56
Speaker 4: Unless you're going to McCloud's.
00:00:57
Speaker 1: That's right, because on the other you're exactly right on the other side of Macbey as McCloud's peaches. It's this fabulous hundreds of acres of peaches, and they have a store there.
00:01:10
Speaker 3: They make peach ice cream, they make peach enchiladas, peach enchiladas.
00:01:15
Speaker 2: Yes see, all of these places want you to be traveling at a speed where you notice and partaken all of these.
00:01:22
Speaker 4: Things, or they want you to get there fast.
00:01:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it's interesting.
00:01:26
Speaker 1: For years and years, if you've gone to Myrtle Beach for more than thirty years, when you would just before you get to Macbee, there was a sign that had a big finger on it pointing at you and saying slow down. This town is a speed trap. Now, for years, nobody exactly knew who put that sign there. It was thought maybe the mcclouds had something to do with it, but Macbee has been a speed trap forever. Oh yeah, Well, now it's a case of a dirty mayor and dirty cops who were behind much of it. In the past few years, they have been arrested and charged with my feasance in office, the mayor and two former police chiefs for demanding that officers meet a ticket quota that included well this officer, former officer blew the whistle, talked to Queen City News and said how many they were supposed to write every day?
00:02:16
Speaker 6: Ten a day is what they want, ten tickets per day. They told me, you consider this corner and right a few. You can go with this corner, right a few and he say, you can go at each channel, make being rite a few and you can get ten today. That's what we want.
00:02:30
Speaker 1: You can sit here, you can sit there ten today, that's what we want. And a lot of officers were pushed to write even more than ten. And as we've pointed out in the newscast, it's thirty five through there, I think, unless they may have recently raised it, but if you went thirty six, you were getting a ticket.
00:02:47
Speaker 4: Which I mean, that's hard to keep right at thirty five unless you're setting your cruise control, which you're not going to do in a town because of their stop signs and stop lights and you know, all of that stuff.
00:02:59
Speaker 3: But I had.
00:02:59
Speaker 4: Always heard and maybe this was not the right thing to teach people and driver's ed, but they said things like if you're nine, you're fine, if you're ten, you're mine, meaning you could go nine miles an hour over the speed limit and be considered in the it's okay zone. But one mile an hour over, I mean, who doesn't do that by accident going downhill or something.
00:03:24
Speaker 3: You're exactly right.
00:03:26
Speaker 1: In fact, when I go through Macbee for years, whether going to the beach or doing a story down that way if it was thirty five, I'd drive twenty through there.
00:03:35
Speaker 3: I mean, I just was not.
00:03:36
Speaker 1: I knew they were crooked, and I just didn't want to take a chance. Mayor Glenn Odom is the one who set the ticket quotas specifically so the town could make money. What's interesting about this is the document trail. I mean, these are not the sharpest knives in the drawer that we're dealing with here. Apparently there are all these text messages that sled Now has where the mayor would say, all right, we need to make this much money to buy a new squad car. That translates into this many tickets. So that's that's how he came up with ten tickets a day. And then when the town owed payments on a federal loan, he sent out another batch of text messages going okay, here's how many tickets we need every day in order to meet the monthly payment.
00:04:18
Speaker 2: Now this is interesting to think about because the idea that they would have a quota and that they would you make money for the town based on the tourists that fly through there. I think that's a fault we've all had about various small towns. You drive through on the way to the beach in South Carolina. But here you have a case where someone's actually crunching the numbers, and as you say, there's not very well hidden trail of correspondence that reinforces this in one way or the other.
00:04:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, I mean this apparently.
00:04:48
Speaker 1: I mean the case has been under investigation for quite some time, but I think based on everything I'm seeing here was a pretty easy case to make, especially when you now had former cops blowing the whistle. And they also told some of the officers, hey, look, you don't have to put your name on every ticket.
00:05:03
Speaker 3: You can.
00:05:04
Speaker 1: You can put your sergeant's name on there, or you can put another officer's name on there. If you feel like your name showing up too much, you can write it in the name of another office.
00:05:12
Speaker 3: You can make up a name.
00:05:15
Speaker 4: You know, we're getting a lot of texts from people who have driven through these places.
00:05:19
Speaker 3: I bet they've been zipped zipped with a ticket.
00:05:22
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, well, Jack says, I have to drive through MacB frequently because my family is from Florence. In my entire life, my dad and mom's families have always thought that this was a scam. And then Jack went on to say, it's also twenty five miles per hour in the middle of town, so that's even that's even worse.
00:05:37
Speaker 3: Rower.
00:05:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, and if you get a ticket, I'm like, maybe maybe things have technologically advanced by now, but I remember thinking back in the day that if you got stopped in one of those small towns, then you had to go back and show up in court in those small towns.
00:05:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think a lot of the small towns you can mail it in, or you can, you know, send them a money order and just be done with it that way. I got to ticket in a small town in Ohio several years ago. In the cop just said you can pay this before you leave town. I got, I got a question mark. Yeah, with I mean, if you get pulled over going one or two over the speed limit, any decent lawyer can get that drop for improper equipment. Like how many of these tickets actually turn into money for the town or how many people actually hire lawyers to fight the ticket?
00:06:20
Speaker 3: Well, I think that's probably it.
00:06:22
Speaker 1: I mean, you if you get somebody from New York or or somewhere who's going to Myrtle Beach, if they can just pay it off and be done with it. That's easier and cheaper than a lawyer, And so I suspect that's what's happened with most of those, but I'm sure some got a lawyer to fight it.
00:06:38
Speaker 4: I kind of always thought that in towns everywhere. I kind of always thought that there were quotas. I always, you know, like at the end of the month. I've always thought like.
00:06:48
Speaker 2: Oh, they're trying to mean they're hiding behind a tree right right.
00:06:53
Speaker 4: When you see a lot of like a lot of cops always. And maybe maybe I'm completely wrong, and maybe a play pice officer could call in and tell us this, because I feel like, like toward the end of the month, I always see more cops out there pulling people over for speeding, and so I've always wondered, like, is it their end of the month quota and do they always have quotas? And maybe I've been wrong in thinking that the whole time.
00:07:14
Speaker 3: Well, right in this area, it's interesting.
00:07:16
Speaker 1: I mean, if you go through Harrisburg, let me tell you, oh, yeah, we down because Cabarras County Deputies work that. I saw four people four pulled by four Cameras deputies Saturday afternoon in the space of less than a mile.
00:07:30
Speaker 3: I mean they work it over near the speedway is bad.
00:07:32
Speaker 4: They've been up to the books twenty nine and forty nine, highways twenty nine and forty nine.
00:07:37
Speaker 3: I've had the quota question there.
00:07:39
Speaker 1: But then on the flip side, you've got Charlotte Mecklenburg police who a few years ago said we're de emphasizing traffic enforcement because we've got better things to do, you know, we got more serious crime. Well now they're coming back and they're ordering some new radar, and Charlotte cops at some point are going to start writing tickets again. So it's very interesting, but it does seem to be more of a small town, small county phenomena.
00:08:03
Speaker 2: Well, and there's also an alternate study I'm sure that could be done about how many bypasses have you know, put a lot of these towns in dire straits because they can't write those tickets anymore because.
00:08:13
Speaker 3: People aren't coming through and aren't doing it.
00:08:15
Speaker 2: You know, that's an excellent point things to think of when you're headed to the beach.
00:08:20
Speaker 1: But if you go into macbe just slow down anyway, even if the mayor's locked up.
00:08:24
Speaker 4: You know what, slow down, get some peach ice cream and just let that just eat that cone while you're driving twenty five through downtown.
00:08:30
Speaker 2: That's exactly right then, facts, that's your information, all right, Thank you Mark, sir,
Speaker 1: Would you bear with me while I indulge in fantasy granforced concrete.
00:00:04
Speaker 2: Here we go.
00:00:05
Speaker 3: It's an incredible thing.
00:00:06
Speaker 1: From one oh seven point nine fl avt Charlotte's FM News.
00:00:10
Speaker 3: Talk compelling and.
00:00:14
Speaker 4: Enough of it.
00:00:16
Speaker 3: This is Good Morning BT with Botompson at bed trout back.
00:00:21
Speaker 5: You get a fast I want to to get to anywhere. Maybe we maybe do Maybe together we can get somewhere. Penny places, but uh, starting from zoo, got nothing to lose, Maybe we'll make something.
00:00:36
Speaker 3: Be careful, starting from zero nothing to.
00:00:40
Speaker 2: Mark Garrison, WBT news director joins us right now talking all things MacB Macbe.
00:00:47
Speaker 3: That's right.
00:00:47
Speaker 1: Some people say make Bee, but the folks who live there say Macbe.
00:00:51
Speaker 2: I got a plan. Well, and most people who pass through there aren't there for very long.
00:00:56
Speaker 4: Unless you're going to McCloud's.
00:00:57
Speaker 1: That's right, because on the other you're exactly right on the other side of Macbey as McCloud's peaches. It's this fabulous hundreds of acres of peaches, and they have a store there.
00:01:10
Speaker 3: They make peach ice cream, they make peach enchiladas, peach enchiladas.
00:01:15
Speaker 2: Yes see, all of these places want you to be traveling at a speed where you notice and partaken all of these.
00:01:22
Speaker 4: Things, or they want you to get there fast.
00:01:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it's interesting.
00:01:26
Speaker 1: For years and years, if you've gone to Myrtle Beach for more than thirty years, when you would just before you get to Macbee, there was a sign that had a big finger on it pointing at you and saying slow down. This town is a speed trap. Now, for years, nobody exactly knew who put that sign there. It was thought maybe the mcclouds had something to do with it, but Macbee has been a speed trap forever. Oh yeah, Well, now it's a case of a dirty mayor and dirty cops who were behind much of it. In the past few years, they have been arrested and charged with my feasance in office, the mayor and two former police chiefs for demanding that officers meet a ticket quota that included well this officer, former officer blew the whistle, talked to Queen City News and said how many they were supposed to write every day?
00:02:16
Speaker 6: Ten a day is what they want, ten tickets per day. They told me, you consider this corner and right a few. You can go with this corner, right a few and he say, you can go at each channel, make being rite a few and you can get ten today. That's what we want.
00:02:30
Speaker 1: You can sit here, you can sit there ten today, that's what we want. And a lot of officers were pushed to write even more than ten. And as we've pointed out in the newscast, it's thirty five through there, I think, unless they may have recently raised it, but if you went thirty six, you were getting a ticket.
00:02:47
Speaker 4: Which I mean, that's hard to keep right at thirty five unless you're setting your cruise control, which you're not going to do in a town because of their stop signs and stop lights and you know, all of that stuff.
00:02:59
Speaker 3: But I had.
00:02:59
Speaker 4: Always heard and maybe this was not the right thing to teach people and driver's ed, but they said things like if you're nine, you're fine, if you're ten, you're mine, meaning you could go nine miles an hour over the speed limit and be considered in the it's okay zone. But one mile an hour over, I mean, who doesn't do that by accident going downhill or something.
00:03:24
Speaker 3: You're exactly right.
00:03:26
Speaker 1: In fact, when I go through Macbee for years, whether going to the beach or doing a story down that way if it was thirty five, I'd drive twenty through there.
00:03:35
Speaker 3: I mean, I just was not.
00:03:36
Speaker 1: I knew they were crooked, and I just didn't want to take a chance. Mayor Glenn Odom is the one who set the ticket quotas specifically so the town could make money. What's interesting about this is the document trail. I mean, these are not the sharpest knives in the drawer that we're dealing with here. Apparently there are all these text messages that sled Now has where the mayor would say, all right, we need to make this much money to buy a new squad car. That translates into this many tickets. So that's that's how he came up with ten tickets a day. And then when the town owed payments on a federal loan, he sent out another batch of text messages going okay, here's how many tickets we need every day in order to meet the monthly payment.
00:04:18
Speaker 2: Now this is interesting to think about because the idea that they would have a quota and that they would you make money for the town based on the tourists that fly through there. I think that's a fault we've all had about various small towns. You drive through on the way to the beach in South Carolina. But here you have a case where someone's actually crunching the numbers, and as you say, there's not very well hidden trail of correspondence that reinforces this in one way or the other.
00:04:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, I mean this apparently.
00:04:48
Speaker 1: I mean the case has been under investigation for quite some time, but I think based on everything I'm seeing here was a pretty easy case to make, especially when you now had former cops blowing the whistle. And they also told some of the officers, hey, look, you don't have to put your name on every ticket.
00:05:03
Speaker 3: You can.
00:05:04
Speaker 1: You can put your sergeant's name on there, or you can put another officer's name on there. If you feel like your name showing up too much, you can write it in the name of another office.
00:05:12
Speaker 3: You can make up a name.
00:05:15
Speaker 4: You know, we're getting a lot of texts from people who have driven through these places.
00:05:19
Speaker 3: I bet they've been zipped zipped with a ticket.
00:05:22
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, well, Jack says, I have to drive through MacB frequently because my family is from Florence. In my entire life, my dad and mom's families have always thought that this was a scam. And then Jack went on to say, it's also twenty five miles per hour in the middle of town, so that's even that's even worse.
00:05:37
Speaker 3: Rower.
00:05:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, and if you get a ticket, I'm like, maybe maybe things have technologically advanced by now, but I remember thinking back in the day that if you got stopped in one of those small towns, then you had to go back and show up in court in those small towns.
00:05:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think a lot of the small towns you can mail it in, or you can, you know, send them a money order and just be done with it that way. I got to ticket in a small town in Ohio several years ago. In the cop just said you can pay this before you leave town. I got, I got a question mark. Yeah, with I mean, if you get pulled over going one or two over the speed limit, any decent lawyer can get that drop for improper equipment. Like how many of these tickets actually turn into money for the town or how many people actually hire lawyers to fight the ticket?
00:06:20
Speaker 3: Well, I think that's probably it.
00:06:22
Speaker 1: I mean, you if you get somebody from New York or or somewhere who's going to Myrtle Beach, if they can just pay it off and be done with it. That's easier and cheaper than a lawyer, And so I suspect that's what's happened with most of those, but I'm sure some got a lawyer to fight it.
00:06:38
Speaker 4: I kind of always thought that in towns everywhere. I kind of always thought that there were quotas. I always, you know, like at the end of the month. I've always thought like.
00:06:48
Speaker 2: Oh, they're trying to mean they're hiding behind a tree right right.
00:06:53
Speaker 4: When you see a lot of like a lot of cops always. And maybe maybe I'm completely wrong, and maybe a play pice officer could call in and tell us this, because I feel like, like toward the end of the month, I always see more cops out there pulling people over for speeding, and so I've always wondered, like, is it their end of the month quota and do they always have quotas? And maybe I've been wrong in thinking that the whole time.
00:07:14
Speaker 3: Well, right in this area, it's interesting.
00:07:16
Speaker 1: I mean, if you go through Harrisburg, let me tell you, oh, yeah, we down because Cabarras County Deputies work that. I saw four people four pulled by four Cameras deputies Saturday afternoon in the space of less than a mile.
00:07:30
Speaker 3: I mean they work it over near the speedway is bad.
00:07:32
Speaker 4: They've been up to the books twenty nine and forty nine, highways twenty nine and forty nine.
00:07:37
Speaker 3: I've had the quota question there.
00:07:39
Speaker 1: But then on the flip side, you've got Charlotte Mecklenburg police who a few years ago said we're de emphasizing traffic enforcement because we've got better things to do, you know, we got more serious crime. Well now they're coming back and they're ordering some new radar, and Charlotte cops at some point are going to start writing tickets again. So it's very interesting, but it does seem to be more of a small town, small county phenomena.
00:08:03
Speaker 2: Well, and there's also an alternate study I'm sure that could be done about how many bypasses have you know, put a lot of these towns in dire straits because they can't write those tickets anymore because.
00:08:13
Speaker 3: People aren't coming through and aren't doing it.
00:08:15
Speaker 2: You know, that's an excellent point things to think of when you're headed to the beach.
00:08:20
Speaker 1: But if you go into macbe just slow down anyway, even if the mayor's locked up.
00:08:24
Speaker 4: You know what, slow down, get some peach ice cream and just let that just eat that cone while you're driving twenty five through downtown.
00:08:30
Speaker 2: That's exactly right then, facts, that's your information, all right, Thank you Mark, sir,
