• A 82-year-old woman in the US state of Alabama has been arrested because she didn’t pay her trash bill.
• Martha Louis Menefield said she didn’t understand why she was being arrested on Sunday.
• She was arrested because she was caught with $77.80 (£63.28).

A 82-year-old woman in the US state of Alabama has been arrested because she didn’t pay her trash bill.

Martha Louis Menefield said she didn’t understand why she was being arrested on Sunday.

She was arrested because she was caught with $77.80 (£63.28).

In a Facebook post, the City of Valley police said that they treated Ms. Menefield with respect and that they had told her more than once that she hadn’t paid her bill in three months.

“Ms. Menefield was treated with respect by our officers while they were doing their jobs, and she was released on a bond as required by the violation,” said Mike Reynolds, the police chief of the Alabama city of Valley, in a statement that has gotten a lot of backlash online.

In the comments section, people from Alabama and all over the country said bad things about the police department.

Former Alabama attorney Donald Watkins wrote, “Everyone who helped arrest this 82-year-old man from Valley, Alabama, must be held responsible for their actions.”

In an interview with reporter, Ms. Menefield said that when two police officers showed up at her door on November 25, the first thing she did was laugh.

She asked the officer, “You’re not joking, are you?” But when the police told her that he was there to arrest her for not paying her trash bill, Ms. Menefield said, “I was upset because I didn’t know why they would come and arrest me.”

Once she was in handcuffs, she said, one of the officers “kind of whispered to me, ‘Don’t cry.'” She remembered telling an officer, “How would you feel if they came and arrested your grandmama?”

After she was arrested, she was taken to the Valley police station and held there until she could pay a bond.

Ms. Menefield told said , “I was in a small cage-like thing at the police station.” “”You put me in this cage?” I asked. You should feel bad about what you did.”

In his Facebook post, Mr. Reynolds said that city officials had tried to talk to Ms. Menefield more than once about her trash bill.

He said that she got a ticket in August for not paying her bills, and that the city’s code enforcement department “tried to call Ms. Menefield several times and went to her house to talk to her in person.”

Mr. Reynolds said that someone from the government put a note on her door with her contact information and a reminder that she had to go to court in September.

“When she didn’t show up in court, a warrant for Failure to Pay Trash was issued,” Mr. Reynolds said. He also said that Ms. Menefield’s trash service had been cut off three times in the past two years.

Ms. Menefield told that she didn’t know the bill in question hadn’t been paid and that she had never been told to go to court.

Also Read

Indonesia: Punishment for sex before marriage

A politician who worked on the draft, Bambang Wuryanto, said that the...