Hacker News Reader

Comment by arpinum | Hacker News Reader

State constitutions should be updated to force all revenue and assets derived from fines to be distributed equally to all residents. That would distribute the benefits widely enough to remove the current incentives where fines line the pockets of local police and fund town operating budgets.

View on HN

One state (North Carolina) does do something very similar, that keeps this kind of harassment largely in check [1]. By ensuring that all fines and forfeitures paid in a county must be used for that county's public schooling, they've essentially eliminated the incentive for cops to paper as many cars as they can.

[1] https://jeremymarkovich.substack.com/p/why-north-carolina-do...

ETA: This doesn't completely solve the problem, as the federal government provides some air cover to keep screwing people over, but it does do _something_

you'd think, but a surprisingly high number of cops are married to teachers badum-tss

I can't believe this practice is so ubiquitous all over the world. It is such a clear cut case of conflict of interest and should be made a textbook example that ends all discussion but here we are. An organisation that apparently has no funds to do its job, spends all its funds in employing people to gather funds so that it can continue to keep paying salary to those people gathering funds.

For other examples, look at "administrative costs" at 501(c)(3) organizations, via Charity Navigator.

501(c)(3) corporations typically do not have armed robbers walking around in public robbing anyone they please.

The comment was specifically about orgs that spend most of their money raising more money.

But it’s not a conflict of interest for a charity to do so.

That depends on what you consider a conflict of interest.

Avoiding any actual names: if Charity X advertises itself as a leading way to fight hunger / homelessness / animal abuse / poverty, but 90% of X's budget goes to raising more money, I call that "a conflict of interest." (90% is not a disqualifying amount, by the way.)

As a donor, if you think you're fighting <whatever> but what you're really doing is providing salaries for friends and family of the founders, then you're actually doing something else. What would you call it?

I'm not sure that would help. From the picture and some other information, it seems a lot of this is to police Interstate 22, which runs past the town. My guess is the town sees fines from out-of-towners as a source of revenue, one that probably benefits the residents of the town proper.

This isn't a good thing, but it probably needs to be dealt at a state level, by passing laws preventing local officers from enforcing traffic laws on the interstate.

The police are financing themselves with the fines. Without the fines, they wouldn't be able to go from 1 officer to 8 officers in a single year.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/5Ge7V/2/

They're probably financing a lot of the rest of the town, too.

It has been dealt with at the state level just this past summer: https://www.wkrg.com/local-news/new-alabama-law-limits-polic... This sounds like a rogue police force of organized criminals.

In my state, it is the state police that have jurisdiction over all highways. For example, if you have a car accident, Based on where it is, the 911 people will dispatch the city, county or state police.

Missouri passed a law that required assets seized by the police to go to the education budget. Police responded by calling in the feds to do the seizing, who then give a kickback to the police. The federal government's name for this program is "Equitable Sharing"

Guide to Equitable Sharing for State, Local, and Tribal Law Enforcement: https://www.justice.gov/criminal-afmls/file/794696/download

St. Charles, Missouri police have been coercing drivers into signing over millions of dollars of their assets without convictions or even charges:

https://reason.com/2019/12/30/missouri-cops-used-federal-loo...

the impact of these sorts of redirections is limited. in Maryland, casino revenue ostensibly funds schools. but if casino revenue drops for some reason (eg, covid), the deficit is made up elsewhere. funding for important state organs is always somewhat fungible.

if for some reason the revenue can't be made up elsewhere and the schools come to depend on revenue from fines/seizures, that still leaves the police department with a lot of leverage.

I have long thought that safety related fines should go to cover people harmed by those accidents. Hit by running a red light, receive some compensation from the red light ticket fund.

Traffic-related fines should go to a state public transit fund.

As the top parent says, it should not go to any special group, neither victims nor transit, as anything like that sets up perverse incentives. All fines should be revenue neutral, because the only thing they should accomplish is to be a disincentive for some behavior, not any other side effects.

Public transit gets people off the roads, though.

Certainly that's where parking tickets should go, and probably drunk driving fines. At the very least.

No, they should not. If you want to fund transit, fund it directly. It's an independent decision.

I'm just a big fan of feedback loops, I guess.

Feedback loops are cool, but ultimately money is fungible. It might be possible to legislate around this, but normally I'd assume the sort of government that is going to essentially turn their police into highwaymen isn't above saying "well, we funded the school through tickets, so we can point all the tax money at new police cruisers."

Earmarking revenue just gets worked around. If an agency's budget is $100M from the general operating budget, and $20M earmarked revenue suddenly comes in to that agency, their share of the general operating budget will simply be reduced to $80M.

It's the same reason why lottery revenue or (in California) bond approval propositions are typically earmarked for "noble causes" (schools, firefighters, parks...). It's a cheap promise to make, and the share of general operating revenue allocated to these departments can quietly decrease as lottery or bond financing replaces it, completely working around the spirit of the earmarking.

It sounds trivial to say but control of budgeting decisions is obtained through control of budgeting decisions; earmarking constraints are just accounting games to make spending more palatable to taxpayers.

Earmarking revenue to a "noble cause" is a great way to protect the thing that is generating that revenue. It becomes a "you don't like firefighters/children/etc" argument whenever you want to remove or reform the thing that is providing that earmarked revenue.

Why is funding a bus from speeding tickets a "certainty?"

Just eliminate fines altogether and give some more appropriate punishment like traffic school (which must also be free...)

After all, any law which is enforced by fines is a law solely for the poor.

You need fines, because some people don't care about anything else. You can set up a system of just points, with no fine, and people will just drive with revoked licenses. I don't know about you but my I am very rarely pulled over and there are several stretches of my life where you could have revoked my license for a year, or five, and I could have kept driving without a problem.

Maybe it's just your points idea that's not very good. If you were punished with traffic school and just ignored it they can still increase penalities and eventually come arrest you. Unless your plan involves hiding out in the mountains somewhere or something.

Laws aren't only for punishing people who have something to seize. How else do we deal with people who have no money but still commit minor infractions?

It's not my idea, it's how states take licenses away from repeat offenders, but yes I'm sure there's a better way to do it than that.

Either eliminate fines altogether or collect the fines and then burn the money in a furnace. Any system that derives revenue from lawbreaking has the perverse incentive of increasing lawbreaking.

Or sent directly to the IRS and subject to a Federal write-off as a sin tax: if you want to disincentivize tickets-for-dollars from conservative-leaning cops, turn them into Federal tax collectors.

They should especially apply that to civil asset forfeiture

Civil asset fortfeiture shouldn’t be a thing, period.

But that’s exactly what they do. Provide excellent services at low tax rates for “us” by raising all the revenue from “them.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com