City Ordinances and State Laws
In the spirit of civic duty, I thought I'd inform you, the responsible citizen of Mount Vernon, of some of the important laws that we live by. Combining my copious amounts of free time with my love of the mundane, I dug through our city's ordinance code as well as state law to unearth some rules we all need to know about.
First off, let it be known that many of these crimes come with penalties. State laws can carry heavy prison time while city ordinances come with fines up to $500. Bearing this serious business in mind, let us begin.
We all know not to start fights or provoke violence, but there are other more important things to know about. For instance, never ever harass someone via a telegraph. Don't even think about it. In fact, don't "circulate a report or warning" of an epidemic, either. Imagine the pandemonium that could result if you convinced them that your incessant smoker's cough could spread syphilis. State law prohibits these things.
Public nuisances, usually found in the city code, are my personal favorites. Do not, for goodness sake, keep flammable, "unreasonably" offensively smelling, "noisome," toxic or otherwise objectionable stuff on your lawn. Leaving exploded gas station burritos in your dorm microwave is OK. Furthermore, keeping diseased animals (even if they're tied up) or animal carcasses (even if they just look like they're asleep) is not just a bad idea; it's also against the law.
The city's ordinances go to great lengths to protect our beloved streets and sidewalks and the inhabitants thereof. If you cannot find a safe sidewalk to walk or run on in Mount Vernon, you must stay on the left side of the road. No exceptions. Considering tying your sled to the back of a car and riding it around? Don't even think about it. Sled/car combinations are illegal. Thinking about building some kind of device to launch cantaloupes or other large melons at oncoming traffic? Forget it. Shooting things into the street is prohibited.
In fact, simply obstructing a sidewalk is a serious offense. Leaving something like grass clippings or a car on a sidewalk is illegal. Waiting more than 48 hours to clear the sidewalk of snow or ice is illegal. Leaving an open flame or unspent fuel on a sidewalk is illegal too. If you encounter anyone committing these offenses, call the police immediately and tell them it is a critical emergency.
... discussed within the scope of this paper but can be found in parts 3745-81-80 to 3745-81-90 of the Administrative Code (OEPA, n.d).
On Friday morning, October 2, 2015, Two teens invaded a home in Des Moines around 4:30 am. People living in the home say someone busted down the front door and ransacked the home. One person received minor injuries. The Des Moines police officers took two males into custody, one of them is 17 years old. They’re still looking for one more person in connection with the incident (WHO-HD). This invasion was able to happen due to the lack of curfew law in the city of Des Moines. Although, curfews are applied in several Iowa cities including Bettendorf, Cedar Rapids, Davenport, Iowa City, Sioux City, Waterloo, and Indianola. Likewise, the city of Des Moines should apply the curfew law from 10 pm to 5 am for teenagers who are 17 years old and under.
According to LD Online (2015), Public Law 94-142, also known as Education for all Handicapped Children Act (EHA), was passed in 1975. Since then, the law has taken on many changes in order to improve its effectiveness, and is now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 2004 (IDEA 04). The original Public Law 94-142 guaranteed a free and appropriate public education to each child with a disability from the age 3 to 21 (LD Online, 2015). It is required to make efforts towards improving how children with disabilities are identified and educated, as well as provide evaluations for the success of those efforts. Furthermore, the law provided due process protections
...e of the risk for offenders or reducing the attractiveness of potential targets has the great impact on criminal and disorder activities. According to the authors these approaches are part of the interventions of hot spot because they include things like razing abandoned buildings and cleaning up graffiti. However, the increase of misdemeanor arrests of offenders contribute to the crime control in hot spot but not as much situational efforts does (Braga and bond 2008). Authors stated that situational crime prevention strategies are essential for addressing crime in hot spots rather than the aggressive order maintenance of arrests in high disorder places. In other words, if police officers only make arrest in hot spot this will not effectively reduce crime because they need to develop a more complex approach to deal with high crime areas ( Braga & Weisburd , 2010).
In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx challenges the capitalist society and gives his solution to it. Marx takes a standing on capitalism with his book, The Communist Manifesto and displays his view of the problems of the society and how to fix them. Marx gives his critiques of capitalism and in a plethora of ways. Some of these critiques are the exploitation of the working man due to the greed of the ruling class and the working class becomes like slaves to their bourgeoisie masters. Marx also gives solutions to the problem, he makes the statement that capitalism needs to be worked and run as a whole not worked by the many and run by the few.
"SEX TRAFFICKING OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES." SEX TRAFFICKING OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Mar. 2014. .
http://www.ojip.usdoj.gov/nij. [Internet Website]. "Crime and Place: Plenary Papers of the 1997 Conference on Criminal Justice Research and Evaluation."
“Cops in Kansas gave a fine to a little boy from Topeka because he sang the alphabet on the streets at night.” Some laws are so weird. There are many ridiculous regulations in Kansas. Did you know in Topeka, it is illegal to sing the alphabet on the streets at night? Also according to dumblaws.com, “Rabbits may not be shot from motorboats.”
...th the demanding and powerful confidence coming from his voice, Martin Luther King states that “there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights” (King). Many feel as though his speech was able to “exert such a potent hold on people around the world and cross the generations” (Kakutani). Others believe that “Martin Luther Kings’ worldview negatively affects blacks today”, as stated by Ellis Washington in A Critique of Dr.Martin Luther King. Washington states that the civil rights movement, lead by King, “laid all of black America’s demands (…) at the feet of white America” (Washington). A flaw of King that is believed to have affected the black community today is that rather than pushing the black community to take on roles that made them equal to white America, they instead demanded that equality from them.
The U.S. government and academic researchers are currently working on an up-to-date estimate of the total number of trafficked persons in the United States annually. With 100,000 children estimated to be in the sex trade in the United States each year, it is clear that the total number of human trafficking victims in the U.S. reaches into the hundreds of thousands when estimates of both adults and minors [of] sex trafficking are aggregated ("Slavery map: North," 2013).
Dr.King states several times in his speech how he wants to abolish the segregation and racial discrimination in the nation and how he feels so vividly about how he wants the nation to come together and be one big “beautiful symphony of brotherhood.” Dr.King explains how African Americans shall not “wallow in the valley of despair,” and how the African American race shall rise to end discrimination on their
King serves as an inspiration to countless citizens, including me as he took on a ginormous problem in his life and tackles this dilemma. Today, racial discrimination is it’s known name; Dr. King didn’t admire the unfair inequality some people received even after the Civil War that was fought for no slaves and equality to everyone. “To that end, he traveled the world proclaiming his vision of the "beloved community," and defining racism as a worldwide evil.” (Martin Luther King’s Dream of Racial Equality) Dr. King knew the importance of the matter at hand and with his ever so powerful speeches, he motivates the entire world to do change something about the inequality. Wars today in other countries are often fought for religious freedom or other troubles that are about church. Racism is a worldwide problem that we can start solving little by little if we just choose to glance beyond skin color, religious beliefs, and other attributes that some people judge separate us to choose how we treat them based on their personality and overall how they are as a person. Dr. King’s inspirations also changed what others thought concerning equality, which shows he’s just as easily going to be an inspirational man to several people now and in the future of the
Situational crime prevention reduces the opportunities for criminals to commit crime by making changes to or altering the environment with the assistance of the police, neighbors and other agencies (Worrall, 2008). The main theories of situational crime prevention are: environmental crime prevention, rational offender perspective, and routine activities (Worrall, 2008). Environmental crime prevention basically states that four elements must be present for a crime to occur: a target, a place (opportunity), a law, and an offender. Environmental crime prevention is designed to prevent people from breaking the law by altering street and building designs, or altering the environment to make it safer (Worrall, 2008). An example of this that is used by law enforcement is to place a sign at the public trash dumpsters informing the public that the area is being videotaped. This method is used to alter the publi...
Karl Marx, who wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848, sees capitalism as inherently flawed. According to him, it is simply a stage in a long history of evolving forms of economics and relations between people. He sees it as just the current form, following feudalism, and, eventually, leading to socialism. While he does believe capitalism will eventually stagnate and fail, Marx believes that a revolution is needed in order to completely get rid of capitalism. He does not share the belief that legal social reforms will be sufficient to correct its internal flaws. In his view, capitalism is too focused on profit, which requires exploitation of workers. In order to understand his theories, it is important to know that Marx sees classes as
An anti-trafficking organization defined such business as “a form of modern-day slavery in which traffickers use force, fraud, or coercion to control victims for the purpose of engaging in commercial sex acts or labor services against his/her will” (National Human Trafficking Hotline) The 2016 National Human Trafficking Annual Report shown that of the 7,572 total cases of human trafficking, sex trafficking was specifically involved in 5,551 of the cases; in turn, it is the most frequent type of human trafficking in the United States. More specifically, the total number of victims was 7,572, and of all the victims, the number of female victims was 6,340. Moreover, 2,387 minors were trafficked in the United States, which is one-third of all involved in these cases. If the statistics are compared with last year’s report, human trafficking rose approximately 35% in one year (National Human Trafficking Hotline). Yet, those are just the cases reported to any anti-trafficking organization. There are still many victims and cases that have not been reported. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children claims that although it is difficult to scope this problem’s accuracy, they estimate