| > Wouldn’t this just encourage law enforcement to cite everyone for every little infraction? 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. |
How about in the tiny cities discussed in the article that have the current problem?
It’s also easy to make it a year without an infraction: just don’t drive. Use Uber or get a friend/family to drive you. This gets easier in the cities. I know several people who have drivers licenses that never drive because they don’t have to. Do they deserve money at the end of the cycle?