The other happened more than a decade ago in Missouri, and it landed a woman in jail.

One occurred last Sunday night in Cambridge, where a ticket was tucked under the windshield wiper of a Lamborghini Huracán parked in a handicapped space on Hampshire Street.

Taken together, they define the vast distance between the haves and have-nots in a country where the gap between rich and poor grows ever wider.

First, the Lambo:

Andrew Kubitschek was riding his bicycle home when he spotted the gleaming white slab of sleek sports car parked outside the Cambridge Department of Public Works building near his home. Kubitschek, a bit of a car buff, admired the vehicle — but he also noticed it was in a handicapped spot. Then the police pulled up.


Police wrote a $120 ticket and called for a tow truck. But when the flatbed arrived, nothing happened. The tow truck driver and the police talked for a while, but didn’t tow the car.

Jeremy Warnick, a spokesman for the Cambridge Police Department, said vehicles that are very low to the ground can be difficult to tow without damage to the car. And damage, Warnick said in an e-mail, “could result in a protracted and costly insurance issue for a towing company.” That could make for a big bill: Starting price on a Lamborghini Huracán is $200,000, and various options can quickly increase the price tag from there.

But a typical car? It would have been towed without a second thought.

“The cops did everything they could,” Kubitschek said. “The cops were upset, the truck driver . . . it is what it is. It’s a classic example of some rich [expletive] being an [expletive].” He offered several other descriptive adjectives, all of which are accurate and none of which are printable.


When the driver finally returned a couple hours later, the police were gone but Kubitschek was still waiting. He went up to the man — maybe mid-30s, he guessed — and asked what he thought he was doing.

“The guy just cuts me off. He knew he was above the law,” Kubitschek said. The man got in the car without taking the ticket, then flicked on his wipers, brushing it off onto the ground before driving away. Attempts to locate the driver via public records, databases, and Lamborghini enthusiast groups were unsuccessful. Warnick said the car had no other violations in Cambridge, and a MassDOT spokeswoman said the department could not run license plates without a driver’s name and other information.

“This won’t even affect him one bit,” said Kubitschek, who posted about the incident on Facebook. He’s probably right. The driver’s still on the hook for the ticket — it can be paid online — but what’s $120 to someone with a car that costs more than a college education?

All over America, the poor enjoy no such immunity.

When the Department of Justice descended on Ferguson, Mo., in the wake of the death of Michael Brown, investigators spoke to a woman who had been ticketed for a parking violation in 2007 — two tickets, totaling $151 plus fees.

The woman’s financial difficulties left her homeless, and the tickets and fees escalated. She missed court dates, and was hit with “failure to appear” offenses. Between 2007 and 2014, she’d been arrested twice, spent six days in jail, and, despite her financial troubles, had twice tried to make partial payments.


Those payments were refused by the court. Only payment in full would be acceptable.

“Over seven years later, she still owed Ferguson $541 — after already paying $550 in fines and fees, having multiple arrest warrants issued against her, and being arrested and jailed on several occasions,” all stemming from the initial parking violation, investigators wrote in the 2015 report.

These horror stories are hardly uncommon.

A 2014 National Public Radio investigation found that people routinely end up in jail for minor offenses when they are unable to pay the associated fees, like a Michigan man who went to jail for catching a fish out of season, or a Georgia man who ended up sentenced to a year behind bars for stealing a $2 can of beer.

The burden of these kinds of fines and fees is often borne by those who can’t afford them, and they are arranged, predictably, along racial lines.

“Municipalities target poor citizens and communities of color for fines and fees,” a 2017 United States Commission on Civil Rights report found, a practice that doesn’t just frustrate, impoverish, and incarcerate citizens. It erodes confidence in the justice system.

That kind of justice system might work fine for the Lambor-ghini driver, for whom a $120 fine is exactly as annoying as a drop of rain on the windshield.


But it’s not exactly just.

Nestor Ramos can be reached at nestor.ramos@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @NestorARamos.