[rightbyte]

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.