“It’s become an extortion racket of the worst kind,” he added.
Sanders resisted paying the citation. But faced with arrest after a jury failed to dismiss his ticket, he finally relented last month.
He would pay the $212 ticket, he grumbled, but he was going to do it on his terms — in pennies.
“I wanted to not only clog the system, but to send a message, too,” he told The Post this week, noting that paying with pennies has been a longstanding protest against speeding tickets. “I wanted to insert words like ‘extortion’ and ‘criminal’ into a conversation about the injustice that is traffic laws.”
Sanders — who works as an IT consultant and is known for filming confrontations with government employees — started out by requesting thousands of pennies from a bank. Next, he smashed the coins out of their rolls and poured them into buckets labeled “Extortion Money” and “Policing For Profit.”
He captured the entire effort on a video that has racked up more than 1 million views on YouTube.
Next stop: The municipal courthouse, where Sanders can be seen on video walking to a clerk’s counter with the heavy buckets in his hands.
“You’re in luck,” he tells the woman behind the glass. “I found exact change.”
“Well, don’t dump it right here” she protests before her voice is drowned out by the sound of thousands of pennies splashing onto the counter and spilling onto the floor.
“Y’all can mail me the receipt, too,” Sanders says, walking away in a mic drop moment. “You got my address.”
The video concludes with a recorded phone call from a municipal court employee letting Sanders know he overpaid by $7.81 and that the city has his change waiting for him.
Sanders has no plans to reclaim the money, he told The Post.
A spokeswoman for the City of Frisco told The Post that employees counted the pennies using two Coinstar locations, a process that took about three hours to complete. The spokeswoman said city staff recalls at least one other instance of someone paying in pennies.
A video posted to YouTube in 2013 shows John Gately paying a fine to the city of Frisco, Tex., using 12,700 pennies and four quarters. The $127 ticket, according to the video’s description, was issued because his wife was not wearing her seat belt correctly. Gately is filmed arguing with court employees, who initially refused to accept his coins and demand that he count the money on the spot.
Although Sanders’s latest video places the spotlight on himself, he told The Post that he made it to highlight a problem that disproportionately affects low-income people. During a recent stint behind bars for refusing to show an officer his pistol permit, he said he was both angered and inspired by a senior citizen he met in jail. The man was was serving a week behind bars for unpaid traffic tickets that led to his arrest and imprisonment.
Sanders called the encounter “a powerful meeting.”
“None of his tickets were for a crash or a hit and run,” Sanders told The Post. “They were just traffic tickets, but his license had been suspended and he’d lost his job and couldn’t pay and ended up sitting in jail. It’s a perpetual system and it disproportionately affects the poor.”
It’s a common practice for states to suspend people’s driver’s licenses when they haven’t paid court fines, even for minor offenses, according to an NPR investigation in 2014. The network found that the practice disproportionately affects low-income people.
Jim Gramling, a former municipal court judge in Milwaukee, told NPR that while people with means avoid court by paying their fines, people with limited funds can quickly become weighed down by expensive tickets that begin to snowball.
“Often they’re living lives where they can’t afford to leave a job early, or at all, to go to court,” he said. “They can’t hire a lawyer, can’t afford a lawyer. So they often let the cases go by default and don’t challenge tickets that maybe should be challenged. It’s tough.”
It’s exactly that system that Sanders said he was protesting by paying in pennies.
Does he feel sorry for the court employees who have to count his coins? Not even slightly, he said, accusing them of being complicit with a system that takes advantage of hard-working citizens and the poor.
“Some people say, ‘Why don’t you just accept the theft and extortion like a good boy?'” Sanders said. “Well, because it’s wrong. I don’t believe anyone has a right to make a claim to my property if I haven’t hurt or victimized anybody.”
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