As with many other government enterprises, policing has become an elaborate ritual, intended to bless the participants with rewards of tax dollars.
If it were an ordinary business, policing would be in a deep contraction, due to the steady drop in violent crime rates in the last two decades. Fewer people would have jobs as cops, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, bailiffs, and prison guards.
Instead of either laying off unneeded personnel, stopping new hires to let the numbers drop by attrition, merging municipal police departments or turning them into sheriff subsidiaries, or giving police employees the same benefits and pension plan cuts as all other municipal workers, municipalities just send their superfluous officers out to drum up more revenue.
That started out as selective enforcement. Certain crimes, if prosecuted vigorously, have enough statutory fines attached to make them actually profitable. Say hello to speeding and parking tickets. Certain towns turned themselves into speed traps to tax those passing through too quickly. More.
Then governments started expanding their malum prohibitum crimes. Crimes that didn't have fines attached got minimum sentences, and the courts and prisons became machines to turn tax money into guaranteed jobs in criminal justice. After all, you can't just let those violent criminals go. You would never get reelected if you did that. More!
Now, the cops just take your stuff on a civil forfeiture claim or as "evidence", and never return it (cash, vehicles), or they throw it to the ground and/or stomp on it (recording devices). Now, the courts tack on a bunch of extra fees for anyone issued a civil citation. Now, the prisons are run by for-profit corporations, with minimum occupancy agreements with the government authorities. If they want more, what could happen next?
I would think that cities like Chicago would be itching to reduce their future unsustainable pension obligations by investigating every complaint vigorously, and firing the highest-paid police officers for cause if there is even a whiff of official misconduct. Wouldn't that be better than going bankrupt?
It might, if there were even one uncorrupted public official left in that town able to do the job.
It's long past time for the law-and-order budgets to be brought back under control. The only places in the U.S. that should be hiring more cops are the oil and gas boom towns.
But it isn't about the rational course of action. It's all about the money that can't stop flowing through the system that is now too big to fail.