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[wierd]

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-gttf-opening-statements-20180123-story.html

Part of the ongoing saga.

http://www.wbaltv.com/article/seven-baltimore-police-officers-indicted-on-federal-racketeering-charges/9078446

You mean that allowing civil forfeiture, and enabling civic government to use it to fund itself results in the law enforcement officers becoming organized robbers!?  SAY IT AINT SO!!! /s

For real people, civil servants need to remain servile, or they become civil oppressors that abuse their authority.  You do that by NOT enabling them to get every little thing they want to "make their job easier." (You know, like tanks, riot gear, things like that.) It also means paying attention to their mental health status, and when they become jaded with empathy deficits, you put them on light duty, like enforcing parking meters until they recover.

But that makes too much sense or something.

Admittedly, this is a pretty biased source to drag up, but also pretty interesting.
http://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit/

[smjjames]

@misko: Shouldn't that be 'Dark Lady'?

[misko27]

@misko: Shouldn't that be 'Dark Lady'?

No, because's she's actually Putin.

Putin uses male pronouns, so far as I know.

[sluissa]

@misko: Shouldn't that be 'Dark Lady'?

No, because's she's actually Putin.

Putin uses male pronouns, so far as I know.

He's going to break that glass ceiling by becoming the first Russian President of the United States.

[martinuzz]

@misko: Shouldn't that be 'Dark Lady'?

No, because's she's actually Putin.

Putin uses male pronouns, so far as I know.

She is correct, because under his mask, Putin is secretly Merkel

[Helgoland]

At some point it's just the Onion version of Joe Biden, over and over to infinity.

[Starver]

@misko: Shouldn't that be 'Dark Lady'?

No, because's she's actually Putin.

Putin uses male pronouns, so far as I know.

She is correct, because under his mask, Putin is secretly Merkel

Who is secretly 148-year-old Friedrich Trump, from Bavaria.

[SalmonGod]

Admittedly, this is a pretty biased source to drag up, but also pretty interesting.
http://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit/

But combining profit motive with public service is the most 'Murrican thing one can do.

[martinuzz]

Admittedly, this is a pretty biased source to drag up, but also pretty interesting.
http://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit/

But combining profit motive with public service is the most 'Murrican thing one can do.

There will come the day that the US nukes itself to secure more profits for their RadAway and RadX producing companies

[EnigmaticHat]

Admittedly, this is a pretty biased source to drag up, but also pretty interesting.
http://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit/

But combining profit motive with public service is the most 'Murrican thing one can do.

I'm curious for our non-Americans in this thread, do other countries fund local governments out of ticket fines?  So like a speeding ticket goes to the state or city government.

[scriver]

Partly, as far as I know, but not to the same extent. Or perhaps rather, the strategy does not exist as a practice to the same extent. Sweden has three levels of government, communes, landthings, and the state, and all police goes under the state. While there were separate regional organs in the old police system they were mostly scuttled in the police reorganisation that was started a few years ago (the one that basically killed the Swedish police system), so there's basically just one police, and not different levels of police like local/city/state/federal. So all police are funded by the state level.

But yeah iirc there's some amount of a fine that the police get to keep.

[Lord Shonus]

Using things like traffic and parking tickets as a revenue stream is - in principle - a perfectly fine idea as long as there's a good system of checks and balances to ensure that the violations are genuine. Regulated traffic is safe traffic, and parking congestion is a serious problem in a lot of places. Thus, the only way that this can cause any real problem is if the laws are enforced unequally or the stops are fabricated.


Where the problem comes in is the idea of confiscating the profits of illegal operations. On paper, this is still reasonable enough - the fundamental purpose of policing is to deter and limit crime, after all, and the possibility of a few years in prison is a lot less of a deterrent if you get to keep all the money you made selling drugs or guns or whatever. After all, most people who get busted for theft have to compensate the people they robbed, and it is easy to argue that this is sort of the same principle. The trouble (besides rights issues - I'm looking at this from a practical sense, not a philosophical one) is that the rules for such a system are (have to be) so vague that any form of checks and balances are very difficult to enforce, and the financial potential is so high that it is ripe for abuse.

Police auto auctions are a special case in this regard. These are almost always vehicles that get impounded and never picked up, and are primarily a way for the police to dispose of the vehicles they've gotten stuck with.

[EnigmaticHat]

So from what you're saying, the difference between civil forfeiture and a speeding ticket is that if I get a speeding ticket I can go to court to dispute it?

I suppose based on your post the other problem would be the "victimless" nature of drug crimes.  If I steal money from someone and get caught the police can give the money back.  But the police aren't going to give a drug dealer's money back to their clients.

[Frumple]

Huh. Kinda' makes me think letting it happen, but having any funds generated pointedly not go to enforcement efforts could conceptually be a thing. Rather than back into police budgets, drug bust (or whatever) funds would go into healthcare/education/poverty reduction measures, etc.

... or did for a few seconds, after which the illness haze cleared enough I remembered half(/some indeterminate percentage of) the reason shit's like it is is because "collections" efforts are assumed to be there when budgeting is happening, and all that would mean is said other measures would get shafted in funding and expected to make up the shortfall with bandit money, like police precincts already are to varying degrees.

I'unno, maybe it can all go into a universal fund, but to access the fund costs like... fingers. Every few (tens of) thousand(s of) dollars requires the sacrifice of a finger. From the police chief equivalent, whoever is head of their accounting, whoever sets the budget, and one random officer. No more than once per year, no more than available amount of fingers. So you'd have the money there, but you'd have a holy shit incentive to get your costing estimates right the first time.

[Lord Shonus]

So from what you're saying, the difference between civil forfeiture and a speeding ticket is that if I get a speeding ticket I can go to court to dispute it?

Sort of, but not quite. With traffic tickets, there are very firm limits on what you can be ticketed for, disputing it is fairly easy if you place a reasonable burden of proof on the police (requiring video evidence of the violation would handle anything but speeding, and even speeding could be evaluated by how the rest of traffic is moving), and the only thing that happens if the cops aggressively enforce the laws to raise more revenue (unless they're making up violations or unevenly enforcing) is that the roads get safer. In other words - Mission Accomplished.

I suppose based on your post the other problem would be the "victimless" nature of drug crimes.  If I steal money from someone and get caught the police can give the money back.  But the police aren't going to give a drug dealer's money back to their clients.

That's a pretty good summation (remembering that I'm discussing this solely from the perspective of practicality) of part of the other problem. A large part of the idea behind confiscating ill-gotten gains is that nobody wants people to think "Well, I could raise quite a bit of money by crystal meth, and if I do get caught it's probably only going to be five years for a first offense. I'll never make a million bucks working for five years, so I'll just think of jail as an unpleasant job if it comes to that". Since there's no way to use that money for restitution once it is confiscated, might as well use it to fund things. This makes sense on paper, but in practice it leads to things like catching somebody with half a joint in their pocket and confiscating the money from their wallet. It is just too abuseable.

The problem I don't think I adequately conveyed is that there is no way for a reasonable burden of proof to be placed - if you catch a guy selling coke, you have no way to know how much money he's made doing it, and thus he has no way to prove that that shiny new watch on his wrist or the fancy pickup in his driveway wasn't paid for with drug money. That fact alone means that corruption is inevitable.