chaseingersoll

10 years ago I met an electrician.  Along with a wife and three boys, he had a story to tell.  He was looking for work.

Over a couple of weeks and several different jobs, I came to hear a number of stories, about his family, his wifes family, work and all.   But the important fact that sticks in my mind was that his truck title was being held by a Title Loan Company and he was living job to job in a cheap rental house and for a guy with the level of skill that I saw him perform at, it just didn’t add up.

But something about the situation and some things he did, decisions that he was making, just didn’t seem quite right.

It was a couple months after, he landed steady work at a job outside of Peoria, his landlord told me what his deal was - “China White”.  Heroin.

This guy was white, church going, a bit redneck, and skilled.  It was not what I was expecting.  But it made sense.  And, it explained the job to job and the hole that he had dug with the Title Loan Company.

Since that experience, I never came across a person that used a Payday Loan Company where there was not a drug, alcohol or criminal issue in their household.   And where there are those issues, the people that know the person and family best, have stopped being that persons lender of last resort because they have drawn the line, or the person has simply taken all that they have.

I think it is also worth observing that if a person has a job, and a paycheck coming, the employer, landlord, family member, car dealer or other debtor, will wait until the following week to receive a payment and even if they are charging interest it is nothing compared to the payday loan fees.

You can look at the map provided by CJ Summers in Peoriaand if you know anything about Peoria, all but one of the locations on the map, is surrounded by crack houses in 4 directions.    And there is no “which came first the chicken or the egg conundrum here”  first come the crack houses, then come the payday loans.

Really, the following might be the first question on any “…you know you are addicted to alcohol or drugs when…”:   1.  which payday loan stores have you used ?

My view of the facts is different from some who believe that people are naive and are taken advantage of.  My view is that they are not naive, they are addicted and desperate.  I agree that an advantage is being taken of them.

But even if you don’t think that the patrons are victims, there are casualties of war.  Every business district that watches a   legitimate business close, and then replaced by a Payday Loan with their can’t miss, gaudy, but fully complying with all zoning ordinance signage suffers from the subtle stigma of an indicator of a business district on the decline.  It may be subconscious, but many people can just feel the connection to the criminal activity on the surrounding streets and are uncomfortable getting out of their cars and patronizing the surrounding businesses.   It is like the Mark of Cain.

Solutions: 

It is the unknown, unknowns that are troubling.   Anything thoughts I have are but one path factoring some knows, some known unknowns, and carrying the liabilities of the unknown, unknowns.  That being said, I would think that a reasonable goal is to not further stigmatize business districts that are struggling.    I think there are some solutions for this problem, which involves raising the cost of doing business in those areas and at least getting the loan offices to relocate to standard office buildings.

Raising the cost of doing business:

1. The States Attorney could stop enforcing any criminal actions against the borrowers of payday loans.  The big stick that the payday loan offices have is that they take a post dated check, KNOWING THAT THERE IS NOT THE MONEY IN THE ACCOUNT TO COVER IT WHEN IT IS WRITTEN, yet if the client does not deposit the money into the account by the date of the check, the client can then be prosecuted for writing a bad check.     I just don’t think that this is how the legislature that wrote this statute intended for it to be used.    If you accept a post dated check, knowing that the funds are not in the bank, BECAUSE IF THE PERSON HAD THE MONEY IN THEIR CHECKING ACCOUNT THEY WOULD NOT BE IN YOUR LOAN OFFICE, then you have a civil remedy and can file a small claims case, which is going to cost you filing fees, attorneys fees, and service of process fees, but you can’t just run the check through the bank and turn it over to the States Attorney for an Indictment, Warrant and Criminal Prosecution.

I have not researched the bounce check law.  And I am not an attorney.  But all it would take is one decision by one judge in your local court, to rule that the statute does not apply in this case, or is unconscionable, or violates the Constitutional prohibition against Debtors Prison and that would be enough for the State’s Attorney to then refuse to criminal prosecute these type of cases.

Yes, the Loan Company could appeal, but then they risk losing across the entire state.

Fallout:

Drug users will not be able to pay their dealers and someone may get hurt.   That is already happening.  Most Payday Loan customers are probably owing more than one drug dealer anyway.

Organized crime could fill the void.  But at least it is not stigmatizing the legitimate businesses on the street.  And at least the government is not using our tax payer resources to assist the lenders in collecting.

 Misc:  Pawn Shops

Why are the items in a pawn shop priced higher than you can get them on sale at “legitimate” retailers?  Is it just me, or does it seem like the same stuff is in the windows, month after month?    I know that drug addicts use them.    And where we find drug addicts doing business, we usually find drug dealers doing business.   If pawn shops in general are not used for money laundering, I really can’t think up a better business for that purpose.

Before you waste $35 million, why don’t you take a look at how the libraries in Peoria are being used and how they are going to be used in the future.   I can only comment on libraries in Peoria, Ann Arbor Michigan and San Diego California, but what I have observed at each is that there is a line when the library opens in the morning……….from young to old…waiting to use…………the internet.

Yes, in downtown Peoria, there are a few in that line who are there to use the bathrooms, but on each and every day, there will be too many people to use too few computers with high speed access.

The other areas in the library that are being used are the periodical area, conference rooms and children’s section.

If you honestly examine the demographics of the library committee, you cannot deny that NOSTALGIA is a primary factor in what they are designing and where they want to put it.

In the 21st century, all of those rows of books are nothing more than rows of horse drawn carriages, Victrolas, adding machines, typewriters and 8 tracks.   Rows of books are even worse, because they are a 5th century BC way of organizing, storing and distributing information.

Here in Ann Arbor, Google and the U of M are scanning away, every book in the library.  This is going on elsewhere.  Storage capacity is still growing exponentially and we are less than a generation away from being able  to store all of the information in all the libraries in the world in a device the size of a wallet.

For a fraction of $35 million dollars every child in Peoria could be provided with a wireless laptop access to a wifi hub in their neighborhood church, club or organization, where they could access far more information than the books in any library, old or new.

In short, the OLD, NOSTALGIC 20th century voters are going to saddle the 21st century kids with another multi-million dollar relic, that if used at all, will not be used in the fashion that was intended.

I got to know Joe Johnson and his family members personally. Joe would not be doing this if the kid were a thug. Joe knows the difference. I’m giving him and by extension the kid, the benefit of the doubt. Here is the scenario that I suspect…good kid knows kid with gun. Good kid finds out about gun. Good kid can’t “rat” on the kid with a gun, or otherwise he will be a targeted snitch and in that neighborhood he will no longer be safe. But good kid is able to talk kid with gun into giving it to him. Good kid will ditch the weapon later. Nobody gets hurt. Good kid doesn’t have to snitch.

But someone else snitches and good kid gets caught up in it. A lot of us have at one point or another possessed something illegal that we took from the person who had it, so that we could get rid of it: cigarettes, alcohol, pot, porn, and yes, weapons.

I once had no less than 3 DOZEN guns (and no FOID card) in my trunk. Here is story…I was helping James Kelsteadt, former Peoria County States Attorney with an appeal. In doing that work, I came to know his wife and daughter. Kelsteadt had a lot of health problems and when he would drink, it didn’t help. I got the call from his wife and daughter one night, to please come and get these guns out of the house as he was “talking crazy” and they didn’t know what else to do. I was a licensed attorney. But do I call the Peoria Heights Police and put the family through that? No. I go over, thinking there is a gun maybe two. Instead there are more than 30.

So there I am with a trunk full of guns, taking them to the office of someone I know who has an FOID card and will get them to a gun dealer. And that is what happened the next day. But what if I had been pulled over and had my trunk searched? There I am…no FOID and a literal arsenal of stolen weapons, the ARDC is investigating me, States Attorney Kevin Lyons would like nothing better than to toss me in jail.

Yes, I said stolen weapons……Former States Attorney James Kelsteadt had stolen them from the Peoria County evidence room 30/40 years earlier.

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