A rare moment when a Linndale cop car is not parked on I-71.

  • A rare moment when a Linndale cop car is not parked on I-71.

You could walk Linndale’s stretch of I-71 in about 30 seconds. Small as it may be, that patch of pavement has been extremely lucrative, and extremely controversial, for just about five decades.

The Linndale speed trap is notorious, not only in Cleveland, but statewide, for the sheer numbers raked in by cops who treat their small highway fiefdom like a toll road.As a 2008 Scene story noted: “Thanks to a legal quirk that Ohio shares with only one other state, mayor’s courts — traditionally presided over by the mayors of cities too small to have their own judiciary — are allowed to keep nearly all of the revenue from the thousands of $90 fines they levy each year. That’s how a 117-person village like Linndale can afford a police force with as many cars as blocks they patrol. Last year [2007] alone, the city raked in almost $1 million.”

There have been countless attempts at ridding Northeast Ohio of the pesky and well-known trap (many of which are detailed in the article above), but being like most pests, it has survived every assault, like a cockroach that just won’t friggin’ die. Yet another recent move to squelch Linndale’s domain failed recently.

This article appears in Jun 15-21, 2011.

Vince Grzegorek has been with Scene since 2007 and editor-in-chief since 2012. He previously worked at Discount Drug Mart and Texas Roadhouse.

5 replies on “Linndale (and its Speed Trap) Survive Another Challenge”

  1. And they pinch their cops too…Only hire them as part time so as not to pay health, dental, vision and a REALLY crappy wage…

  2. Gosh; if only the motoring public could think of some way to make that tiny little bit of parkable berm ‘environmentally unfriendly’? Say, a repository for roadkill, or….?

  3. The great people of NE Ohio and the rest of Ohio know about this so called “speed trap”… there is a solution… slow down

  4. Hey Shifty, or is it shitty? You either do not drive that area or you are some how connected with them, either way, shaaduupp ya putz.

  5. Hey cbrbart you think that’s bad, they were busted a while back for giving a private citizen(the son of the owner of the towing service they use) a gun, badge and a car to fill in when they were short on their part-timers. They would have gotten away with it to had the goofy kid not pulled over someone who recognized him as a tow truck driver in full cop costume. And you Shitty here trying to defend that rats nest of a ghetto village.

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