Cops “Protect” Town by Kidnapping and Caging 82yo Grandma Over Unpaid $70 Trash Bill

alley, AL — Over the years, the Free Thought Project has reported on many asinine reasons police have used to arrest entirely innocent people who have harmed no one. Frequently, long grass on one’s own property or a burnt-out license plate light can get people killed in the land of the free as officers fail to use their discretion and instead react with brute force and callousness toward their fellow humans.

Martha Menefield, an 82-year-old Black woman in Alabama — who’s never had a run-in with the law in her entire life —learned recently that police can and will arrest and kidnap you, even for the most ridiculous reasons. The two armed state agents who kidnapped Memefield used her unpaid $77 trash bill as their ridiculous reason to take her freedom last week.

“Don’t cry,” the officers told her as they kidnapped the elderly woman. “Don’t cry, Ms. Martha.”

Menefield told WIAT that she had no idea why officers pulled up at her house that day as she has never broken the law. When one of the two officers told her they were there to arrest her over her trash bill, Menefield laughed, thinking the officers were joking.

They were not joking.

“You’re not kidding?” Menefield asked the officers, quickly finding out that they were not. As murders, rapes, thefts, and assaults go unsolved at increasing rates, armed agents of the state were dispatched to the home of an 82-year-old woman to arrest her for a $77.80 trash bill that she thought she had already paid.

As Menefield told her story to WIAT, she teared up, describing how heavy the handcuffs were on her 82-year-old arms.

“They’re so heavy,” she said through tears.