4 ms·

ticket revenue does not go to the police department == solved problem

• aero142 15y ago
  I've thought the same thing before. I get the feeling cops don't like traffic ticket writing, so having money going to the department ensures that their managers make sure they write tickets. This makes me think the tradeoff is between very few tickets being written for the cases where it is dangerous vs. writing tickets when safety isn't a factor because it generates revenue.
• orangecat 15y ago
  Yes. I've always thought the proper way to enforce penalties like traffic fines would be to literally destroy the offender's money. Then no specific entity benefits from the punishment; the gain is widely spread out by making everyone else's dollars very slightly more valuable.
• qq66 15y ago
  Ticket revenue does not, in general, go to the police department, it goes to the municipality (although the police department is a good chunk of the municipal budget). There was one case a few years back where a police department stopped writing tickets because the town didn't approve their pay increase. When the town sued they said, "Nobody's speeding!"
• Symmetry 15y ago
  There was a brouhaha in the last couple of years ago at some municipality where the state passed a law saying that all the money that the police seized was to go to the local school, but some police departments were refusing to hand the money over. I seem to recall that the police managed to win the dispute. EDIT: Found the original source. Apparently I misremembered several things, but the point is intact in that the police found a way to avoid turning over the money as the law required. http://kcsweb.kcstar.com/projects/drugforfeit/forfeit.htm http://kcsweb.kcstar.com/projects/drugforfeit/forfeit.htm