"Crime" That Pays
Parking fines are now outrageous here in LA. A person oversleeps and doesn't move their car in time and it's a $68 fee. Okay, some fee -- like the $25 it was in the 90s -- incentivizes people to move cars for street cleaning. $68 is about easy funding for bloated bureaucracy.

But the incentive to bleed the residents, little by little, is too tempting for bureaucrats -- especially because they get funded by the swells, and the swells probably squawk less, if at all, about a parking ticket that eats up a day's pay for a restaurant worker.

Cities are using cops as revenue collectors, writes Daniel Kowalski at FEE, and it's time they stopped.

PS, as Kowalski writes, "The practice is a major source of resentment against the police."

Local governments are spending more money than they receive through taxes, and they are making up the difference through fines and fees.

...In 2015, New York City took in almost one billion dollars from fines, with fines and fees funding 37 percent of the city's budget for that year. Parking violations were the biggest earner in categories of fines with $565 million collected. The people who write and issue these citations work for the New York City Police Department and wear police uniforms.

Getting a traffic or parking ticket can ruin anyone's day, but it's worse when you receive a citation for a violation that isn't even illegal anymore. As of 2008, it is perfectly legal to park your car in front of a pedestrian ramp that is in the middle of the block, but the city's parking enforcement agency is still issuing $165 tickets for this violation. There are even instances of people who don't live in New York City, let alone New York State, who are receiving citations in the mail for violations that never happened. These injustices are being perpetrated by officers that are either incompetent or corrupt, but these acts are also being enabled by a system whose primary purpose is to extort the public out of their money in order to fund an oversized government that can't be sustained with just taxes alone.

Do the Police Have Ticket Quotas?

There's a belief in the New York City area that you're more likely to be issued a ticket at the end of the month. It turns out there is data to back this up. Jonathan Auerbach of the New York Daily News reviewed two years of NYPD statistics and found that there are on average 25 percent more tickets issued on the 30th than one the 1st of every month. According to NYPD officer Adhyl Polanco, the culture within the department is that if you're not issuing tickets and making arrests, then you're not doing your job. This incentivizes the police to go out and find violations when there are no obvious ones in view.

New York City officials deny that there is a quota system, but at the same time, they projected revenue of $5.86 million from parking fines in 2017. If that amount is not matched or surpassed, then politicians will blame the police not doing their jobs as the reason for the budget shortfalls. Police officers are well aware of the pressure placed on them and their role in providing for the city's budget. In 2015, rank and file officers engaged in a slowdown to protest against Mayor DeBlasio where they wrote 92 percent fewer tickets than they did the week before along with 56 percent fewer arrests.

...Public resentment seems to be directed more at the people delivering these fees and fines than the people issuing the policies that create these situations. When a police officer gives you a ticket for something that you think is minor, you're angry at the police officer for not using discretion instead of the bosses down at City Hall who are tasking him to do this.

If we want to improve police-community relations, then we should demand that projected income from fines and fees be limited to not more than five percent of total revenue in government budgets. This will force politicians to meet citizens head-on about the costs of their decisions, and it will not incentivize law enforcement officers to spend their shifts on the hunt for people to write tickets to.

He gets it:

It's also a Ponzi scheme. More enforcement put on the street funded by more enforcement, spending more time in enforcement.
It also creates unnecessary stops, detentions and conflict. A certain number of those enforcement efforts will go sideways resulting in injury or death.

— Free Hong Kong (@NakatomiXmas) July 27, 2020