Police that collect more in fees and fines are less effective at solving crime | Hacker News Reader

Police that collect more in fees and fines are less effective at solving crime

washingtonpost.com

235 pointspart99783 comments

It makes no sense that money police collects goes directly towards funding any government department. It should go into a tax refund pool.

I was trying to think of a place to stick the money that wouldn't incentivize over-policing and couldn't think of one. But your option is perfect. There's obviously no incentive for government employees to return money to tax payers, so if anything, this would incentivize under-enforcement of fines and fees.

Aren't government employees also taxpayers? The incentive is much weaker, but still there.

So weak as to make the point totally moot

Well at least then everyone would benefit rather than just the police/government.

I thought long and hard about that one and decided that fines should be remitted to the social security administration and booked against the perps account as a contribution.

As far as I can tell this is extremely easy to implement. And utterly removes any mal-incentives.

It means the fine could have less of a deterrant effect on anyone who can afford it as they can frame it as money they'll get back in the long run. Why not speed if your ticket counts towards your retirement.

Having a inbuilt social good for breaking the law might make people more willing to do so as they can justify their illegal action as a contribution to public good.

Fines also need to be proportional to income, or you're (potentially) doing far more harm than intended or neccessary to the poorest violators, and failing to deter the wealthier ones.

You already have the problem that small fines aren't much of a deterrent effect on wealthy people. Though one might be surprised how butthurt well to do people can be over trivial amounts of money.

A mitigating thing is monthly SS insurance benefits max out.

Speed until you max out your social security benefit is a crazy incentive.

You can also max out the points on your license and your insurance companies patience.

That happens either way, the discussion is about having an effective fine to discourage people and crediting the person's social security account clearly doesn't do that.

That way if I want to contribute more than the maximum to my 401k I can use this as a workaround. And drive super fast too!

Use it to fund Internal Affairs...

Have the defendant bring the fine in cash, and ritually burn it with witnesses present. This is equivalent to collecting the money, because it allows the government to print slightly more money without inflation, but verifiably prevents anyone directly involved from pocketing it.

It makes no sense if your goal is to avoid corruption and ensure justice. That’s a really big “if.”

Totally agree. All this should go into a central/state coffers and redustributed to policing based on need.

There are rural areas greatly underserved by law enforcement due to low pop densities, so there has to be something which accounts fir that.

Its hard for some people to believe just how low budget some rural areas are for policing. I used to live in a west coast county that was about 6,000 sq miles. It had one city with a population over 25k. (about 66,000 total in the county) At nights, there was 2 county deputies, and 2 state police officers on duty. (the city had its own force with 2 officers on duty at night) Also, their costs were pretty high, since they had so many miles to drive (more fuel/maintenance, more replacing).

There was a small village (300-500 people) surrounded by my home town growing up.

They had a part-time mayor/police officer. When he wasn't running the town, he was bringing in revenue by sitting in his car outside the courthouse waiting for a "speeder" to "blow through" his 15 mph zone and pay him the $75 ticket.

Since I didn't live there, I'm not sure if calling 9-1-1 called this cop/mayor directly, or if it went to my town's dispatch.

There are governments in rural areas funded by speed traps.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when autonomous cars that stick to the speed limit become the majority of traffic.

The speed limits will go up to reflect reality by then so it won't matter who/what is driving the car.

I think the point is that the revenue from these fines would drop if compliance was perfect.

Well I imagine step one will be to keep raising the penalties for speeding on the remaining manual drivers. After all it will be like 20 years before autonomous cars are a significant minority.

Some people will refuse to buy them for years. People will be buying cheap used cards for years, and those will be normal cars for quite a long time. Dollars to doughnuts the sensors and cameras and whatnot on a lot of autonomous cars will fail before the car itself does, rendering them back to manual. And again the used car market isn't going away.

There might be plenty of manual drivers in fifty years.

> rendering them back to manual.

I don't think self driving cars will even have a steering wheel. It would probably be cheaper to buy a new car than to convert a self driving car back to manual operation.

That's one of the near-future threats to government funding that is going to cause some very interesting public arguments that don't match the private fears.

- Autonomous cars will massively reduce income from speeding fines

- Electric cars will reduce the incoming tax revenue from buying fuel (in Australia this is a large component that also goes into funding the maintenance of the roads)

- Solar power reducing overall household spend on power, which is potentially another large source of tax revenue

The last two things keeps more money in the pockets of consumers, which will therefore probably get spent on other things, so could be closer to a zero-sum game than it looks.

Until some kind of rule change comes in to create new government revenue streams, it's the early adopters getting the benefits so far (for example, Australia is considering additional taxes on electric cars to make up for the 'road maintenance' component the government won't be getting due to their not buying fuel. No word on incentives for "clean air" or "reduced emissions" benefits though...).

Not to worry. I'm sure there will be a new autonomous vehicle registration fee to implemented to help offset any losses. This registration will of course be on top of any existing registration fees.

They could also use some sort of algorithm that looks at each driver's record. If you have a history of speeding, they can just go ahead and asses extra fees for you since the algorithm extrapolated you would have had more tickets anyways. If you have a clean record, then the algo will go ahead and decide you're "due" for a ticket, and charge you accordingly. Why not, insurance companies do it.

BLKNSLVR's road maintenance tax seems like a legitimate tax, fwiw.

i really dislike speed traps. i'd even support a proposition to convert all speed limits to suggested speeds (thereby abolishing fines for speeding). you could and should still punish dangerous driving, but speed by itself wouldn't serve as the threshold for unsafe driving.

Problem with that is that for the most part speed is a pretty objective measure —whereas “dangerous driving” isn’t, so will result in uneven interpretation/application.

agreed. i considered that for a second, but i figure the real policy makers would spend a little more time thinking that part through. =)

Choosing to enforce a speeding law is still subjective though, so this wouldn't change much. We speed all over California, police choose to go after the most dangerous (or least conforming to community standards, or... some other even less good measure, like race).

Most policing is subjective.

I understand that but at least you know what to expect: “I’m going 42mph in a 35 zone, I might get pulled over and issued a ticket”, vs. “hmmm I wonder if going 35mph is dangerous driving, does passing a bike mean it’s dangerous? Does it being dusk mean it’s dangerous? Huh, I don’t really know”.

As someone who was ticketed for going the speed limit on a bright sunny day on a rural highway with no other cars around, where the cop wrote down two different speeds and it just happened to be the last day of the month... I assure you it is not always objective. Cost me 5x to fight it what the ticket would have been, but it's the principle of the matter.

I'm not discounting this issue. I'm sure it happens but: 1. having a speed limit allows you to know the cop was objectively wrong (barring broken speedometer). 2. Imagine the leeway cops would have if they had the discretion in determining "dangerous driving". The abuse would be even worse.

After the US national speed limit was repealed in the 90s, Montana had no posted daytime limit. The law stated you had to drive "reasonable and prudent for conditions". The law got tossed by the state supreme court because there is no objective standard for reasonable and prudent.

>> "...convert all speed limits to suggested speeds (thereby abolishing fines for speeding)"

The State of Montana had this until the late 1990's, when the Fed's finally forced Montana into having a speed limit again by threatening to pull all Federal highway funding.

Other fun facts are that you could get a driving license at 14 years old (or a "ranch driving license" at 12 in some semi-rare cases), there was no seatbelt law, no motorcycle helmet law, and no law against drinking and driving[0].

[0] There was a law against being drunk while driving, but not a law against drinking while driving. This lead to the classic canard: "How far is it from Butte to Helena?" "Oh about four beers."

I agree, and same with punitive damage awards.

In Canada, you get a 20-25% surcharge on your fines called the "Victim Fine Surcharge". It goes directly into a fund that pays out to victims of crime.

Aside from that, the fines go to the jurisdiction that charged you, which can then be used for whatever the jurisdiction wants; road repairs, school improvements, landscaping, administration, etc. etc. So if you were charged with a provincial fine, the money would go to the province, if you were charged with a regional fine, the money would go to the region.

In a way, that's a "tax-refund" pool, isn't it? We don't need to spend as much tax money on these things because the fines partially fund them.

The more progressive places in the US usually have a laundry list of surcharges like that they've built up over the years (the less progressive places simply haven't built up these kinds of practices over the years).

A $50 5-over ticket comes with a $100 surcharge that goes to the anti-DUI education fund, $100 toward the brain injury fund, $100 toward the reckless drivers victims fund, etc etc. All these fines get directed at various nonprofits that do things like run the mandatory classes people have to to take after getting a DUI or your 3rd speeding ticket or whatever. Of course those classes cost hundreds of dollars to attend. I don't think anyone is quite sure where the money goes. Of course this is all done with good intentions but the practical effect is that it just increases the fraction of the population who's one traffic offense away from sliding into poverty.

Awhile ago there was an article posted here about the breakdown of fines for a simple speeding ticket in CA and it was pretty disgusting the amount of fines that one has to pay in addition to the ticket itself and it all goes toward stuff that should probably be funded via the general budget or not at all. Maybe someone can find the article.

If you take a formal ethics class, you will study conflicts of interest. This sort of thing is brought up as a toy example that's too blatant to exist in the real world... except where government is concerned, apparently

that's a good policy change that mitigates the moral hazard of fines in general. i know it'd never happen, but i'd love to see something similar with fines from all sorts of companies, to reduce their use all over the economy as a way of hiding the true cost of products (particularly internet and phones).

however, i'd challenge the idea that solving more crimes is necessarily a better use of our tax dollars.

cars are the number one killer of people in america that police can directly affect. so why wouldn't we want more enforcement of traffic rules (which is where most of those fines come from), to reduce traffic fatalities? (we need to know which rules best reduce fatalities of course, but that's a given)

suicides are also high on that list. community policing techniques can help there.

and don't get me wrong, homicide investigations are important, for both prevention and justice, but homicides shouldn't dictate spending on, and the attention of, our police force.

at the bottom of the list are mass shootings (basically a rounding error of yearly gun deaths), yet police forces spend disproportionate amounts of money on (reacting to) mass shootings (assault weapons, active shooter gear, tanks, etc.).

cars are the number one killer of people in america that police can directly affect. so why wouldn't we want more enforcement of traffic rules

I think automotive industry innovation can do more to bring the fatalities down than any practical amount of policing. Also, I'm tired of the low standards for actual driving ability in America, combined with the lazy speed enforcement approach by cops. My life has very, very rarely been threatened by a speeder, but it has regularly been threatened (particularly when I'm cycling or walking) by negligent or outright incompetent drivers.

the automotive industry has done a good job improving auto safety already, and i'm sure will continue to work on it, but i imagine the improvements are marginal at this point. auto makers would have to rip out all screens and install sensors to detect eating, drinking, phone use, newspaper reading, makeup application, etc. to make a large dent in the problem.

but i'm with you about distracted and incompetent driving. let's better enforce unsafe driving laws, like blowing through stop signs or careening across 4 lanes to exit the freeway at the last minute (both of which i see all the time). and let's incorporate simulators in driving tests that put people in a variety of potential accident scenarios that they must successfully maneuver. or something even better. but something real, not this safety theater we have now.

>let's better enforce unsafe driving laws, like blowing through stop signs or careening across 4 lanes to exit the freeway at the last minute (both of which i see all the time).

>something real, not this safety theater we have now.

Exactly.

I don't really care if you eat a hamburger while driving an overloaded truck with a manual transmission and manual steering so long as it doesn't result in you blowing stop signs or cutting me off trying to make your exit.

but i imagine the improvements are marginal at this point

Existing improvements have barely entered the market. Consider what is probably the single greatest innovation since ABS: automatic emergency braking. Having watched quite a number of dashcam videos on YouTube, it is amazing how many people just plough into others, either not braking at all, or not braking at anywhere near the limit of their car.

Here's a great example of automotive innovation saving the day: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9X-5fKzmy38

Incidentally, this is the same reason I find those clickbait articles about "what would a self-driving car do if faced with hitting a school bus or running off a cliff". The correct answer is "brake to the full potential of the car and aim straight", since reducing kinetic energy should be the primary focus!

Hmm, Asian based car companies have some interesting features in their topline models. Once on cruise control, the vehicle warns the driver when they are about to move out of their lane, the vehicles will automatically slow and stop if the traffic requires it (in some case even turns the engine off when stationary) and as the traffic starts moving again, will start the engine and as it is able brings you back up to speed set.

You responsibility is to direct where the vehicle goes.

I would love to see this as standard on all vehicles.

It should be the same for govt asset sales. It should go into some common pool and have delayed release so you dont get politicians financing their budget via community owned assets.

Our local police department (Oviedo florida) takes a police car 200 ft from the station and sits it by a 25mph zone that feeds into a 50 mph zone [1]. Now that my wife and I have both been ticketed (30mph) we go the speed limit -- what is even more weird --- going 25mph near a freeway is really dangerous as cars honk and freak out behind you swerving to get around you.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/28%C2%B038'57.5%22N+81%C2%...

This is actually the kind of thing your congressperson can sometimes be helpful with. Worth a call.

Amen. Cruel and unusual is what this is.

This is one of the few areas where Michigan leads with strong quality legislation.

Michigan Public Act 85 of 2006 requires speed limits to be set to reasonable speeds for traffic (generally based on the 85th Percentile rule), so as not to artificially incriminate the general population. It overrides local laws, so it also prevents corrupt municipalities and/or corrupt police departments from lowering the speed limits for financial gains (speed traps).

https://www.wzzm13.com/article/news/investigations/13-on-you...

https://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2011/10/po...

I don't know if Florida has a similar law. But if not, they should consider it.

>Michigan Public Act 85 of 2006 requires speed limits to be set to reasonable speeds for traffic (generally based on the 85th Percentile rule), so as not to artificially incriminate the general population.

While I applaud the intention behind this law, I hope you're overstating Michigan's reliance on the 85th percentile rule. For the uninitiated, "The 85th percentile speed refers to the speed at or below which 85% of vehicles are traveling" [1] as measured by a speed survey of current conditions.

The problem with the 85th percentile rule is that it completely ignores the safety of other road users and the surrounding community, taking drivers perception of safety as fact. I think drivers tend to underestimate the risk that increased speed poses to pedestrians and bicyclists, especially in urban and suburban areas.

Problems exist even on roads that only allow drivers: 'Raising the speed limit to match the 85th percentile speed may lead to higher operating speeds, and hence a higher 85th percentile speed. This generates an undesirable cycle of speed escalation and reduced safety. As a 2016 Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) report stated, “The 85th percentile speed is not a stationary point. It is, rather, a moving target that increases when speed limits are raised” (Farmer 2016).'

Rather than relying primarily on the 85th percentile rule, I hope Michigan gives full weight to the additional factors the MUTCD manual mentions, like “(A) road characteristics, shoulder condition, grade, alignment, and sight distance; (B) the pace; (C) roadside development and environment; (D) parking practices and pedestrian activity; and (E) reported crash experience for at least a 12-month period” [1].

If after considering these factors the road is still a speed trap, then the road should be redesigned to align drivers expectations with the posted speed [2], not the other way around.

[1] https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-studies/Documents/SS1701.... [2] methods include narrowing lane width, eliminating or reducing shoulders, reducing the number of lanes, increasing road curvature with pedestrian islands, speed bumps, etc

Everyone's got an excuse for why they were in the right when they got a speeding ticket.

And you now admit you drive according to the speed limit having been ticketed? So it seems like what the police force are doing is effective.

Surely you don't think there is a larger motivation behind this kind of behavior than predatory fundraising for the local department?

Most people dont get ticketed until they are around 15 over.

Thats the “unspoken” general expectation. Even some fine schedules, have 1-10 over as a $0 fine. See pennsylvania:

https://www.penndot.gov/TravelInPA/Safety/TrafficSafetyAndDr...

However, some draconian towns like Collegedale, TN which advertise no crime statistic in 20-30 years feed off the college kids and give them 5mph over tickets all day long.

Its not necessarily about changing behavior, but there is a balance to be striken between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.

5mph over can be the difference between life and death in a crash with a pedestrian. I don’t understand why people trivialise it or act like it’s draconian to expect people to drive under a speed limit.

>If Middletown’s police department collected only about 1 percent of its revenue from fees and fines, our model predicts it would solve 53 percent of its violent crimes and 32 percent of its property crimes. But if Middletown’s police department instead collected 3 percent of its revenue from fees and fines, our model predicts that clearance rates would fall to 41 percent for violent crimes and 16 percent for property crimes. That’s a stark drop of 12 and 16 percentage points, respectively.

I want to see this broken down in terms of business days between crime and someone being charged.

I have a suspicion that the correlation is being diluted by all the open and shut "guy A punches guy B and gets charged with assault and battery because everyone in the bar saw him do it" cases that don't require any investigating (other than possibly collecting statements) types of violent crime that will get "solved" regardless of how much time the police spend collecting fines.

But those types of crimes would need to occur at significantly different rates between different fine and fee jurisdictions.

I think this misses the point. Issues like this are multi-faceted. Would people rather pay higher taxes or have the police get the money from speeders and parking violators? People who live in cities must have parking rules or you are walking 4 blocks from your car to house each night.

My brother-in-law is a state police. When he was on patrol, they would get lots of calls because someone mowed across someone else's property line. Or someone stole someone else's pet rabbit. Once a mom called in and claimed that her teenage son was assaulting her. When they arrived, it turned out he just wasn't listening to her and doing chores and homework so she wanted to 'scare him straight' and have the police tell him he had to. Other ones are because some 15 year old texted nudes or posted on Instagram that they were going to 'kill' a teacher that gave them a bad grade.

He is now a detective and it is like you say above. The easy ones get solved right away after some minor investigation but there are no resources to spend weeks investigating murders with no witnesses or likely suspects.

In the end, part of it comes down to what do you want the police function to be.

> Would people rather pay higher taxes or have the police get the money from speeders and parking violators? People who live in cities must have parking rules or you are walking 4 blocks from your car to house each night.

Given that everyone[1] speeds, I think you're comparing half dozen of one to six of the other.

[1] Okay, something like 95% of the vehicles on the road, and everyone hates the other 5%.

> Once a mom called in and claimed that her teenage son was assaulting her. When they arrived, it turned out he just wasn't listening to her and doing chores and homework so she wanted to 'scare him straight' and have the police tell him he had to

Wow.... I would like to see that parent charged with wasting police time.

It's almost like we need a separate force to deal with many of the issues you're describing. It could probably lessen the load of traditional police forces and at a reduced cost.

Plus, there may be some social benefits to having a civic response force that does not wander the streets with loaded firearms.

someone stole someone else's pet rabbit. scare him straight

Aren't these better cases for a fine than ticketing someone for going 5mph over limit?

How about this:

Places where the police collect more fines has higher criminality and the police has less resources per crime to solve crimes?

I don't believe this nonsense article at all. They are overfitting their data. It's more or less fraud. They are mixing units in the regression. Most of the control variables are correlated etc.

They even tried to link fracking to this somehow, but didn't find significance.

http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/upload_documents/...

"Our results suggest that institutional changes—such as decreasing municipal government reliance on fines and fees for revenue—are important for changing police behavior and improving the provision of public safety."

What they are acctually discovering is that crime clearance rate is mostly dependent on crime rate.

I wasn’t able to find any controls for the possibility of high percent fee-funded police department having lower ability to invest in quality workforce and training.

I see the correlation, but not the causal link. Is high fee a symptom of lower effectiveness rather than high fees causing lower effectiveness? Or they have no causal link at all?

This seems pretty important, anybody else get this from the paper?

I’m interested in having this research concluded because my gut agrees with the sentiment that incentivizing police to collect fees will reduce impact on non-fee crimes. But my head won’t let me act without reliable evidence.

yeah - i don't even know how you begin to compare a rural police department with a handful of officers (who hand off major cases to county/state investigators and are really there to break up bar fights/domestic disputes, keep the roads safe, and provide police reports for property crimes) to say the NYC police department that has 30k+

Instead of pushing for a data driven conclusion, what about this:

A police officer has 1.0 amount of time in a shift. If he spends 0.2 of his shift sitting at a speed trap trying to meet some quota, he has 0.8 of his shift left to patrol / help solve crimes; however, the reciprocal of this ratio could occur to, depending on which duties he is assigned.

Now step back... The entire police force has 1.0 amount of time per officer per shift. In order to meet budget goals, they allocate 0.8 of that time to speed traps. Now 0.2 of man hours are spent actually doing anything useful (hint: solving crimes do not pay the bills... ).

We can examine data to confirm this, however I don't see the need. When you have a time budget, every activity takes a portion of that time. If you spend 90% of your time playing solitaire at work, you aren't going to be very productive. The relationship is absolute, so the data should support it. If not, there is some noise interfering.

Logically it makes sense, but would there be no officer at all without the .8 spent on speed traps? So is it bad governing that underfunds police so it must spent .8 on ticketing? Or is it the spending .8 of time on ticketing that causes less effective police?

As a programmer, I don’t agree with the absolute that someone who spends 90% of their day playing solitaire will be less productive than another spending 0% of their day.

One of the reason why fine collection and civil forfeiture is prioritized is because of the underfunding of police and other basic services.[0] Politicians encourage this because they cut taxes too much, and this is a way to essentially impose a tax, but not call it a tax.

The police know the game, and so you end up with these bizarre situations like when the NYPD union announced they they were going to stick it to DeBlasio by making arrests “only when necessary.”[1] (Which of course is an implicit admission that arrests were being made that weren’t necessary.) The real target was the NYC budget, because the NYPD brings in half a billion dollars a year. (Over 10 million a week) That’s insane. Ironically, even though the police stopped citing people, crime remained low and steady.

[0] https://www.rand.org/blog/2015/03/to-serve-and-collect.html

[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/1/6/7501953/nypd-mayor-arrests-unio...

Driving is the most dangerous thing most people do. So if the need to collect fines causes more traffic enforcement the result could be more total lives saved and injuries prevented.

No understand the title. The article is blocked (at least in Europe).

The crux quote from the article is "Police departments that collect more in fees and fines are less effective at solving crimes."

Normally, I'd suggest you subscribe to support quality journalism, but since you are from Europe:

http://archive.is/hvDCa

The grammar must have been butchered when creating an HN-friendly title.

The current WaPo headline: "What happens to police departments that collect more fines? They solve fewer crimes."

Serious question then:

So if a police department didn't profit from any of the spoils of (alleged) crime, they would be an ideal force?

It is obvious in retrospect: if they major on quota-day, they minor on felonies.

Another reason why the U.S.A. should have stayed on with the British Crown. In the UK revenue from speeding tickets goes to the Queen's Consolidated Fund:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Fund

Police officers in the UK don't get to enrich their departments or their local towns by fining more people. For that we have parking and 'yellow box junctions' where councils can make lots of money by fining motorists. It is just a tax on motorists, not really 'crime' what goes on with this.

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