Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Lost ticket revenue in Arlington, TX

The Court here in Arlington offers a (5671 page) PDF with all the arrest warrants in the city for unpaid tickets. It turns out our city is currently missing $56,594,788.04 in revenue for tickets not paid.

If you download the PDF, you can add up the totals yourself. Convert it to HTML using pdftohtml and run:

k=0;for i in `cat outstanding_warrantss.html | egrep -o '[0-9]{1,6}\.[0-9]{2,}'`; do k=`echo "$k+$i" | bc`; done; echo $k


All in all:

bperry@bperry-desktop:~/Downloads$ k=0;for i in `cat outstanding_warrantss.html | egrep -o '[0-9]{1,6}\.[0-9]{2,}'`; do k=`echo "$k+$i" | bc`; done; echo $k
56594788.04
bperry@bperry-desktop:~/Downloads$ time $(k=0;for i in `cat outstanding_warrantss.html | egrep -o '[0-9]{1,6}\.[0-9]{2,}'`; do k=`echo "$k+$i" | bc`; done; echo $k)
56594788.04: command not found

real 10m45.130s
user 0m8.470s
sys 1m43.170s
bperry@bperry-desktop:~/Downloads$


We need a Dog the Bounty Hunter. That is quite a bit of monies.

3 comments:

  1. Suggestion:
    This "line noise" could allow more fine-grained data mining: gnumeric <(perl -nE 'chomp; next unless s/
    //; next if /<[bi]>/; s/.nbsp;//g; print "$_\t"; print "\n" if /^(AW|CP)$/;' outstanding_warrantss.html)

    (This messes up the 768 rows with multi-line cells, so I truncated with egrep -o '([^ ]* ){7}$', losing some data.)

    So you could answer questions like "how many fines are owed from the past year" or "how many fines were from Arlington"...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Do you understand the danger of looking at punitive fines as municipal _revenue_? If your local government counts on millions of dollars in fines in order to pay for services then the government has an unconscious bias towards making sure enough laws are broken by enough people for the target revenue to be acquired via punitive fines...regardless of the interests of public safety. Law enforcement should not be used to backfill budget deficits.

    -jef

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sure, I agree. The unpaid tickets are still lost revenue though, even if it is *passive*. I just found the numbers interesting.

    ReplyDelete