I think that you may be scratching the surface. It is a good deep scratch, but there are other areas to look that would not normally be thought of. I am a retired police officer, having been an officer of Detroit for three years, and another department for twenty seven years. I have two illegal parking tickets from Detroit. One was from the parking structure at St. John Hospital on Moross, and the other was from a street near downtown, where the nearest posting prohibiting parking was about a hundred feet further down the street than where my car was parked.
I attempted to get the message thru to the Parking Violation Bureau, by writing to them, twice to Mr. James Canty--Manager, explaining that the tickets were illegal, and how, and the first response was that my complaint was investigated, and found that I was wrong and I must pay, the second response was that my letters were turned over to traffic court where there was a default judgement issued against me. I have also been sent letters threatening that my car would be booted, impounded, and my license suspended, and the fines are going up. However, there is nothing they can do to my car or license until I have 6 outstanding parking violations. (Legal ones that is)
My point being that, maybe you should park some plain cars in areas such as where mine were at the time of violation issue, which are legal areas where parking tickets are issued, then investigate as to how many illegal tickets are issued and paid per year, and how much money has been derived from the illegal fines and threats, and where that money went. If there has been per year 100,000 tickets issued, (easily done since I wrote about 3000 legal tickets myself per month my last three years before retirement), and each ticket was paid at an average cost of $100, then there could easily be illegal money taken in on this route of $10,000,000 per year. (Times how many years)
I recently spoke with an attorney who now works outside of Detroit, who used to work for the 36th district court, and asked him to take my tickets to court to get them dismissed, and he stated that since they are all bad there, he would not step into that court for even such as a parking ticket without my paying him $1500 to do so. He suggested that I consider forgetting the tickets, and stay away from the court, and even from Detroit.
Now if all this is about crooked parking tickets, then how about other crooked tickets? How far does this really go? How many tickets need to be pulled from the files and reexamined, with refunds going to the victims that had to pay under penalty of the threats sent out. How many fat fingers are in this lucrative pie, starting with the ticket writers, and then the violations bureau management, and even to judges, and maybe even police officers, and police administration, and mayor?
Another twist, may be that there is some knowledge of this nonsense that the prosecutors have that have the mayors case, which could be more reason for not wanting any Detroit judge to be on the case.