‘Don’t California My Carolina’

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California is one of the most beautiful places on Earth, and is home to some of the smartest and most industrious individuals in the United States. The state’s uniquely abundant natural resources drew some of the nation’s most adventurous individuals to try to find success in the state’s early years, and thereafter created culture of innovation which we can thank for many of the most important technological advances of the last century.

Despite the Golden State’s many incredible attributes, poor government policy recently drove the first reduction in the state’s population since officials stated measuring the metric.

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California’s totalitarian 2020 lockdowns, governmental tolerance of criminal antisocial behavior, and extortionist tax policies have almost singlehandedly driven the recent population boom in Austin, Texas and a number of other red-state cities which have welcomed those looking to live and work in a freer environment.

South Carolina was one of the beneficiaries of an influx of “freedom refugees” fleeing the policies of the petty tyrant contemporaries of California governor Gavin Newson during the 2020 pandemic. Talk to most of these folks and they’ll tell you they don’t want South Carolina to become the state they fled.

Talk to the folks that have lived here their whole lives and they’ll tell you they don’t like the new people, but that they don’t want the Palmetto State to become California either.

News flash for those of you new to the Palmetto State – Although we have a “GOP supermajority” in our General Assembly, some of our Republican politicians pursue policies that would bring us closer to the drug-addled nanny-states we pride ourselves on not being.

Just this morning, New Jersey native Tom Davis – a state senator who resides in Beaufort S.C. – took to X to republish a Post and Courier article highlighting potential legislative priorities in the upcoming session of the General Assembly.

Davis argued in favor of implementing a statute which would legalize automated traffic enforcement cameras in the Palmetto State.

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Davis claimed the 2011 statute currently prohibiting the use of these cameras arose from “privacy concerns.”

An examination of the statue, however, revealed the purpose behind the legislation had little to do with privacy and everything to do with due process.

The bill protects the rights of South Carolinians by ensuring motorists are “directly” given traffic citations “by the law enforcement officer issuing the citation at the time of the traffic stop.”

Take it from this author, this particular protection of due process is very important.

I learned this when I was (rightfully) issued a speeding ticket in Yemassee, S.C. recently – and was instructed by the patrol deputy to contact the clerk of court to pay the ticket.

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While I appreciated the clerk’s offer to reduce the number of points applied to my license, I didn’t know that they would accomplish this by creating a “new ticket” of a reduced severity in his computer system.

I followed his instructions and paid the ticket, figuring I’d learned my lesson and could put the incident behind me.

Unfortunately, the Yemassee clerk of court’s office failed to mark both tickets as being paid – which resulted in the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles (SCDMV) being notified that I failed to appear in court.

Imagine my surprise to discover I had been tried in absentia and found guilty for not paying a ticket I had a receipt showing I had paid months prior.

I called the clerk’s office and explained the situation – which is how I learned of the existence of the second (statutorily prohibited) ticket. At this point, I was told the clerk of court’s office would notify the DMV of the error and resolve the issue.

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Imagine my further surprise when, several months later, I received a letter from the SCDMV notifying me my license would be suspended for my failure to pay the ticket.

As the days until my suspension ticked away, I began to panic – I’d paid the ticket and been assured by the clerk’s office the situation had been resolved months prior, but I couldn’t get a definitive answer on how I could prove to the SCDMV that I’d paid the second “administrative” ticket that was created without my knowledge.

To make matters worse, the clerk couldn’t find the second ticket because I only had the citation number associated with the legitimate ticket issued to me at the scene by the officer.

Fortunately, being a journalist puts me in contact with many skilled attorneys – some of whom were kind enough to assist me in getting the attention of officials capable of handling the situation before the DMV revoked my driving privileges.

I wholeheartedly believe (after having conversations with attorneys who tell me I’m far from the first person to face this issue) that many South Carolinians are victims of the same administrative failing – yet have no way of successfully navigating South Carolina’s idiotic bureaucracy prior to their licenses being wrongfully suspended.

If the 2011 legislation is followed, it stands as a bulwark against this injustice. If bureaucrats are incapable of correctly administering old-school tickets, it’s fair to assume they won’t magically become competent when they are issuing citations to citizens who are never even notified of their alleged infractions at the time.

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But don’t take it from this speeder: The statute Davis mentioned empaneled a “South Carolina Traffic Camera Enforcement Commission” to report to the General Assembly their findings on the use of automated traffic cameras.

The commission included then-S.C. Supreme Court chief justice Jean Toal, as well as the then-speaker of the house Robert Harrell, current S.C. Department of Corrections (SCDC) director Bryan Stirling, as well as designees from the state Department of Public Safety (DPS), State Law Enforcement Officer’s association and the South Carolina Sheriff’s association as well as designees from legal community.

This commission found “that traffic enforcement cameras are not in the best interest of South Carolinians.”

Why? Because these private companies have “financial incentives” which “may” lead them to “be overly aggressive in enforcing these laws.”

“The commission has concerns about the public policy implications of a private company reimbursing state or local government for the use of their law enforcement personnel,” the report noted, adding that one of the “most serious concerns is the potential for financial improprieties.”

“Traffic enforcement could become driven by the desire to fill government coffers — and those of the private vendor — rather than driven by public safety,” it added.

But the commission had concerns beyond the likelihood of financial improprieties. The commission felt that officers viewing the crime in real time was “crucial” to the administration of justice, not only because radar camera systems aren’t always accurate, but because they sometimes fail to identify who is driving the vehicle.

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(S.C. State House)

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“If traffic enforcement camera systems are used to enforce uniform traffic laws, the Commission believes it is crucial to have a law enforcement officer actually view the driver violating a speed limit in order to confirm, with a visual estimation of speed, what the radar indicates,” the panel added. “The visual estimation should be contemporaneous with the radar reading and photo record.”

The commission noted that the use of cameras to issue tickets is a constitutional nightmare.

“No matter who was driving the car at the time, the owner of the car is assumed to be guilty. This violates a major tenet of our legal system: innocent until proven guilty,” the commission noted. “There is no ability to preserve evidence such as a GPS record of your speed at the time because the driver is unaware he or she has been ticketed. Furthermore, the Sixth Amendment ensures the right to face your accuser. With a camera violation, there is no accuser to confront or question.”

The commission also addressed the danger to due process posed by delivery of citations via mail.

“Delivery by mail does not ensure that the accused will receive the citation,” the commission continued. “However, because there is an assumption on the part of the court that a citation has been received, if a ticket is left unpaid, the court presumes the driver purposefully refused to pay. A warrant then may be issued for the accused person’s arrest.”

Do you really want to be one DMV screw up away from being pulled out of your car at gunpoint and taken to jail?

Traffic safety advocates point to South Carolina’s elevated motor vehicle death rate as evidence that we need automated ticketing systems, but there’s scant evidence that the funds that will be allocated to purchase these cameras, and hire the army of extra judges the commission determined would be needed to process the resulting cases, wouldn’t be better spent on South Carolina’s roads, which currently resemble the surface of the moon.

Ultimately, South Carolina is not California because our legislators have taken seriously the due process implications of policies like automated ticketing systems. We’d be fools to move toward a nanny state system that drives talented freedom-loving people to move elsewhere. We’d also be fools to implement the societally cancerous pro drug-use policies that’ve been tried, and have failed, in liberal California and elsewhere.

Just this week British Columbia, Canada removed drug injection needle vending machines after public backlash to them drawing dangerous individuals to areas near children.

Conservative Party candidate Gwen O’Mahony shot a video demonstrating how easy it was to get a taxpayer-funded crack pipe in an area where children can be heard playing nearby.

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Free crack pipes & cocaine snorting kits Vending Machine located directly outside the Nanaimo Hospital ER
The sound of children playing in background as I shoot this video
Yet another example of enabling addiction instead of offering treatment#bcpoli pic.twitter.com/hLvx17jay6

— Gwen O'Mahony (@gwenomahony) August 27, 2024

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It’s one thing for a conservative politician to criticize a the policy of the opposition party, and another thing altogether for someone with personal experience to speak out against these Orwellian “harm reduction” policies. This is why the personal testimony of drug addict turned author Jared Klickstein, published in Newsweek, is especially compelling.

Klickstein begins his column by qualifying just how serious his addiction got.

He survived “ten years of hardcore drug addiction and intermittent chronic homelessness on the streets of Los Angeles — and by hardcore, I mean sleeping with a metal pipe between my legs on Skid Row — I lived out nearly every consequence of my heroin habit aside from death.”

Klickstein points to the state-facilitation of drug addiction as a transition from “viewing addiction as a treatable disease to effectively promoting and abetting it” and noted that there’s a lot of money to be made in aiding addiction.

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“Radical policies in the realm of homelessness and addiction have only exacerbated both issues,” he wrote. “The only visible ‘achievement’ of places like San Francisco where the problem is most acute has been keeping both epidemics on life support.”

Klickstein noted “billions of dollars have been laundered through the homeless-industrial complex, and many thousands of lives have been sacrificed. The local government has almost entirely outsourced the maintenance of homelessness and addiction to radically progressive nonprofits — to the tune of 1.1 billion dollars in 2021 alone.”

The results of this expenditure have been nothing short of societal devastation.

“Drug overdose deaths in San Francisco rose by 24.5 percent, to a whopping 806 last year, despite the city having the largest per-capita budget for “Harm-Reduction” in the country. The city also has the highest rate of overdose deaths, at 80 per 100,000 residents.”

Who looks at outcomes like this and see’s a policy worth replicating in the Palmetto State? Senator Davis.

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Davis’ “Safer Syringe Program” – S.854 – which languished and died in the Senate medical affairs committee last legislative session, sought to establish “a comprehensive program engaged in the distribution, furnishing, and collection of hypodermic needles, syringes, or other supplies to participants.”

The program aimed to enable the Department of Public Health (DPH) to provide the syringes “at no cost.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of South Carolina praised Davis, noting that in other states similar programs have led to “increases in drug users entering treatment for substance use disorder.”

Has the ALCU considered that the numbers may have gone up because drug users gravitate to the places where their addiction is subsidized by taxpayers?

Evidently not. Davis’ bill would statutorily enable “outreach strategies such as vending machines” to distribute the drug use paraphernalia.

Would Senator Davis want one of these vending machines near to his Beaufort residence? Would you want one near yours?

California is wonderful in many ways, and South Carolina is also wonderful in many ways… but the backwards social policies that drive residents to leave the Golden State aren’t what make California wonderful, and are what could make the Palmetto State significantly less wonderful if adopted here.

Senator Davis has championed a number of policies that doubtlessly will enable South Carolina’s long-term growth over his years in office. For more than a decade, Davis has pushed members of the General Assembly to make South Carolina economically competitive with our Southeastern neighbors through the reduction of income taxes. Davis has also demanded greater accountability for how lawmakers spend our tax dollars.

But social policy can be just as consequential as economic policy, and there are no outcomes worth sacrificing due process over.

Count on FITSNews to monitor the upcoming push to turn South Carolina into an “automated speed trap state,” as well as efforts by so called conservatives to advance demonstrably ruinous social policies.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …

(Via: Travis Bell)

Dylan Nolan is the director of special projects at FITSNews. He graduated from the Darla Moore school of business in 2021 with an accounting degree. Got a tip or story idea for Dylan? Email him here. You can also engage him socially @DNolan2000.

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