The problem with "the police"

The problem with "the police" is not "structural racism" or "systematic racism" or "the legacy of slavery" any other Democratic Party lie; the problem with "the police" is that the policing power is being used by *all* levels of government as a revenue-generating scheme. The problem with "the police" is that they are responding, as all humans do, to incentives ... but, the incentives are perverse.


Remove the perverse incentives, that is, take away the ability of government bureaucracies to profit by the fines and penalties they impose, and most of the problems with "the police" will solve themselves.

Here is one way that can be done --

When a citizen is fined by a government entity, the monies -- including "court costs" -- are forwarded to the local government where the citizen lives (*), where the total of those monies is used to reduce the tax burden of *all* citizens subject to that government entity. That is, the monies are not *added* into the budget of the government entity, but rather reduce the amount of the existing budget to be extracted directly from the citizens.

For example, property taxation is almost universal. If a county is scheduled to raise $10 million in property taxes, and the total fines and penalties imposed on the citizens of that county for that year somehow also amounted to $10 million, then no one would have to pay property tax that year, and the county would still have the amount for which it had budgeted.


(*) this is to remove the temptation to live off the backs of out-of-towners.