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by LeafItAlone
713 days ago
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> If you have government ID and make it a whole calendar year without getting cited/arrested (let alone convicted), you should get an equal slice of the criminal seizure/fine money from the feds and the city/county/state that has jurisdiction over the address on your ID. Wouldn’t this just encourage law enforcement to cite everyone for every little infraction? > In short, redistribute the fine money from those who broke the law to those who didn't (or at least didn't get caught). Everyone breaks law the eventually. The article mentions the “Miami right” as an example. > The other far simpler option is that all fines/penalties automatically get applied to paying down debt owed by the collecting government. So the government can purposefully take on more debt and then find infractions to pay it off? |
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Hmm, potentially...if they thought that would secure a much larger slice for themselves by knocking people out of the running...so maybe they'd have to be ineligible. However, in most cases that would require citing a hell of a lot of people (Jacksonville, FL has ~3000 cops for ~1.2m people, so they'd have to each cite several locals a day all 365 days of the year to make a dent in who's getting any money)
Since some criminals would be non-locals, you could also hand out the fines equally to all locals regardless of whether they got busted for anything or not.
> Everyone breaks law the eventually. The article mentions the “Miami right” as an example.
Yes, there is a randomness to it all (breaking the law vs breaking and getting caught) but I'm not going to try to compensate for or control it.
> So the government can purposefully take on more debt and then find infractions to pay it off?
Yeah, I realized this oversight 5 minutes after I clicked submit. However, perhaps it could be pooled and redistributed equally to pay down equal amounts of debt for all the governments in a region.
The point is that fines/seizures should not be a line item in a government budget EVER because then somehow the government will become dependent on criminal activity to an extent and go looking for it just for the money. It should be a completely unexpected windfall and thus either returned to the people or used to pay down debt. That's my hope, the details could probably take months to hammer out.