By Jon Augelli - LP Dane Member
Everyone knows that police departments rely on revenues from fines to balance their budgets. It makes sense on the surface. The money they take from speeders, or other minor finable offenses, should be put to good use by rewarding the police department for their hard work and public service. However, that is precisely the problem: it is a reward. It gives a monetary incentive to police certain crimes at the expense of policing others. This is wrong.
Allowing law enforcement to keep the proceeds from fines means they are driven by economic factors rather than pure justice. As with all economic decision makers they will attempt to maximize their revenues at the least cost. In private business, if you charge too much, people will refuse to buy your product and you will go under, but if you refuse to pay a fine it will only increase and eventually you will either have to pay the fine, plus late fees, or you will go to jail. You can’t not pay. This leads officers to disproportionately enforce crimes easy to target and fine at the expense of crimes that are harder to police, and have low, or even negative, monetary gain. Sitting for an hour catching speeders may lead to several traffic stops with fines over $100 apiece. Contrast that with trying to solve a robbery for an hour which, even if the perpetrator is caught, yields no money for the department. It is more lucrative to catch speeders than to track down thieves. It is easy to guess which one the department prefers to spend resources on. Consider also the ubiquity of red light cameras, even though the evidence shows they do not increase safety. The monetary incentive for tickets overshadows the entire point of the police department, which is to protect public safety.
The same goes even more for the more recent proliferation of Civil Asset Forfeiture. This grotesque violation of our constitutional protection against search and seizure allows law enforcement to seize assets on mere “suspicion” of relation to a criminal or illegal activity, without having to charge the owner with a crime. Once seized, the owner then must prove the assets were not linked to illegal activity. This is a shocking reversal of the American tradition of innocent until proven guilty. In several recent cases, even after the defendant proved their assets were wrongfully seized, they were told that the department liquidated them and they would receive no compensation. Law enforcement departments love this. One officer referred to the practice as, “pennies from heaven” allowing the department to get toys they could not otherwise afford. Another refers to it as, “a gold mine”. At one law enforcement conference, a speaker explained how to seize an entire house if you catch someone selling a few dollars of marijuana out of it in states where marijuana is legal. Clearly, civil asset forfeiture is more about the money than about justice. This practice grossly misaligns the incentives behind what the officers police.
A properly structured system would balance the policing of crimes proportional to their negative effects on society. The current system does not effectively do this. It drains money from non-violent citizens to support inflated and misallocated police departments. The legal system should not incentivize easily monetizable infractions at the expense of policing real crimes. The solution to this issue is simple: Police Departments (or any government agency) should not be allowed keep the money they collect from fines or seizures. This money should be returned to the taxpayers. The easiest way to do this is a tax rebate. When the Police fine someone for a violation what they are doing is making the individual pay the cost (negative externalities) imposed on those around them by their behavior. For example, speeding increase the risk of an accident to those around the driver who are not speeding. Fining the driver should disincentivize him from that behavior in the future. Thus, it is only natural that the money be returned to the people. They are the ones who bear the negative side effects of the behavior.
Milking the taxpayers to top off department budgets is a perversion of justice. If departments need additional funds they should ask the taxpayers directly via referendum, and of course carefully scrutinize how they use the dollars they do have. At the end of the day, law enforcement should be there to serve us, not the other way around. Our current system would improve immensely if we removed the monetary rewards from policing certain crimes over others and returned the funds the people the law was originally created to protect.
Everyone knows that police departments rely on revenues from fines to balance their budgets. It makes sense on the surface. The money they take from speeders, or other minor finable offenses, should be put to good use by rewarding the police department for their hard work and public service. However, that is precisely the problem: it is a reward. It gives a monetary incentive to police certain crimes at the expense of policing others. This is wrong.
Allowing law enforcement to keep the proceeds from fines means they are driven by economic factors rather than pure justice. As with all economic decision makers they will attempt to maximize their revenues at the least cost. In private business, if you charge too much, people will refuse to buy your product and you will go under, but if you refuse to pay a fine it will only increase and eventually you will either have to pay the fine, plus late fees, or you will go to jail. You can’t not pay. This leads officers to disproportionately enforce crimes easy to target and fine at the expense of crimes that are harder to police, and have low, or even negative, monetary gain. Sitting for an hour catching speeders may lead to several traffic stops with fines over $100 apiece. Contrast that with trying to solve a robbery for an hour which, even if the perpetrator is caught, yields no money for the department. It is more lucrative to catch speeders than to track down thieves. It is easy to guess which one the department prefers to spend resources on. Consider also the ubiquity of red light cameras, even though the evidence shows they do not increase safety. The monetary incentive for tickets overshadows the entire point of the police department, which is to protect public safety.
The same goes even more for the more recent proliferation of Civil Asset Forfeiture. This grotesque violation of our constitutional protection against search and seizure allows law enforcement to seize assets on mere “suspicion” of relation to a criminal or illegal activity, without having to charge the owner with a crime. Once seized, the owner then must prove the assets were not linked to illegal activity. This is a shocking reversal of the American tradition of innocent until proven guilty. In several recent cases, even after the defendant proved their assets were wrongfully seized, they were told that the department liquidated them and they would receive no compensation. Law enforcement departments love this. One officer referred to the practice as, “pennies from heaven” allowing the department to get toys they could not otherwise afford. Another refers to it as, “a gold mine”. At one law enforcement conference, a speaker explained how to seize an entire house if you catch someone selling a few dollars of marijuana out of it in states where marijuana is legal. Clearly, civil asset forfeiture is more about the money than about justice. This practice grossly misaligns the incentives behind what the officers police.
A properly structured system would balance the policing of crimes proportional to their negative effects on society. The current system does not effectively do this. It drains money from non-violent citizens to support inflated and misallocated police departments. The legal system should not incentivize easily monetizable infractions at the expense of policing real crimes. The solution to this issue is simple: Police Departments (or any government agency) should not be allowed keep the money they collect from fines or seizures. This money should be returned to the taxpayers. The easiest way to do this is a tax rebate. When the Police fine someone for a violation what they are doing is making the individual pay the cost (negative externalities) imposed on those around them by their behavior. For example, speeding increase the risk of an accident to those around the driver who are not speeding. Fining the driver should disincentivize him from that behavior in the future. Thus, it is only natural that the money be returned to the people. They are the ones who bear the negative side effects of the behavior.
Milking the taxpayers to top off department budgets is a perversion of justice. If departments need additional funds they should ask the taxpayers directly via referendum, and of course carefully scrutinize how they use the dollars they do have. At the end of the day, law enforcement should be there to serve us, not the other way around. Our current system would improve immensely if we removed the monetary rewards from policing certain crimes over others and returned the funds the people the law was originally created to protect.