Among many of life's seemingly minor petty annoyances is the disparate treatment meted out by the City of Ann Arbor's garbage collection unit. Whether they enforce the rules depends on trashiness of the residents, and their willingness to comply with the rules.

Now, you might assume that they would be harder on the trashier and less rule-abiding people, but this is not the case.

In my neighborhood, homeowners who live in their own homes are expected to follow the rules. A violation (typically having too much trash so the lid won't close or not putting the refuse cart in the street so it can be picked up by the trucks automatic grabbing arm) will earn a refusal of service with a sticker placed on the cart spelling out the "violation." Ditto recycling violations. Homeowners quickly learn that if they are not neat and rule-following, their trash will not get picked up.

However, where it comes to tenants occupying rentals, the situation is very different. Typically, these are students (often five or more males sharing a rented house), and they could care less about neatness, recycling, or complying with rules. They routinely put their carts in the wrong place and they are often overflowing to the point that the top won't close at all. But if the place has that trashy, non-law-abiding look, then noncompliance with the rules is no problem. The refuse takers will get out of the truck, move the cart to where it belongs (on the curb in the street with three feet of space around it), and they completely ignore it if the cart is so overflowing that the top won't close. It's as if they have an intuitive sense for which households can be expected to follow the rules and for which households following rules is a complete joke and a lost cause. In a way, I can understand this, because if they enforced the rules against trashy student renters the way they do against neater homeowners, the trash would just stay there because the students don't care. More would be thrown on the pile or on the ground, and I guess someone would eventually have to issue a citation to the landlord. Obviously, that's a lot of hassle, so the unwritten rule is that if the tenants are slobs, they get cut plenty of slack.

This is such a minor annoyance that it wouldn't be worth a post except that it touches on a larger issue, which is that laws are not only for the law-abiding, but they increasingly tend to be enforced only against the law abiding. If a homeless man takes a leak in the park, he will not be cited, but if a guy wearing a suit took a leak in the park and the cops saw it, they'd nail him. I can understand why; the latter is more likely to have ID, to show up in court, to pay the fine, and much less likely to give lice and bedbugs to the arresting officer. I have to say that if I were the officer, I would feel the same way. And who is more likely to have Child Protective Services called on her for, say, whacking her disobedient brat? A trashy welfare mom or a nice middle class working woman? I think the answer is obvious. And of course, the most frequent violators of the recycling laws are the homeless types who make a living basically stealing from the City the cans and bottles for their ten cent deposits, which are of course loaded into their stolen supermarket shopping carts. Not once have I seen one of them cited. (If an annoyed citizen complained to a cop about this, he would do nothing except maybe roll his eyes over the citizen's cluelessness while giving him a lecture about "police priorities.")

Need I mention littering? The few trashy people who litter (I mean the true littering classes who routinely throw garbage and diapers wherever they want and create 90% of the litter) are the very last who would get cited. That's because littering is what they do, so the laws aren't meant for them.

The worst offenders have become an exempt class.

Philosophically though, why should the laws (which are supposed to be the same laws for everyone) have more of a tendency to be enforced against people who are more law abiding? Aren't they in less need of the laws?

So instead of singling out the generally law-abiding classes, wouldn't it be better in the long run to treat everyone the same way?

MORE: To illustrate, I just photographed the carts placed in front of a typical student rental around the corner from me for collection.

Carts are supposed to be at the curb three feet apart, with lids closed all the way. If my trash looked like the above picture, it would not have been collected.

Hell, I might have even been cited for obstructing the sidewalk.

These kids make me feel like an old chump!