The entire US continent is home to "a troubling police force."

As usual, the problem here is profit motive. The police force has a budget like everyone else and in order to help with expenses, thou must extract money from the populace.

If people would just agree that yes, a well trained (and well funded) and ethical police force is necessary for a free society and that said education and training are a priority and not traffic fines. We already have serious debates about legitimate taxation, we don't need taxation in this particular form. There are probably better ways to motivate people to drive safer. If you're wealthy, you aren't going to give a shit about a fine. (gotta love the cop's remark about protecting us against the 1% btw. yes I know he wasn't referring to the wealthy 1%, but still, it was amusing)

Either law enforcement is a priority and thus is deserving of funding so that they don't need to resort to petty ways of extracting money....or it's not a priority. Make a decision please.

The other problem is while yes, I think we need STRONG traffic law enforcement, but we need to take advantage of technology and make it so that manpower isn't focused on traffic enforcement, but on actual in-progress crimes.

The Mafia now wearing uniform.

I've been friends with a lot of law enforcement types and basically all that I have known personally have their heads on straight like this guy seems to. They take the whole "protect and serve" thing seriously.

But, it seems like the larger a place gets the more opportunity there is to divert things into this profit-based direction. Not to say that small towns would be immune, but the likelihood is lower. I feel sorry for this guy losing his job, but I think if he was willing to move and put out some resumes to small towns, being very upfront about being fired and what he believes caused it, he could land on his feet someplace where his attitude would be appreciated instead of disapproved of. Sometimes it sucks when the answer is "don't like it, move", but I think that might be his best bet.

"Profit motive" is an extremely disingenuous term to use for this story, because that term refers specifically to the goal of businesses to make money.

Business vs. the State is an important distinction we should make here, because, well, doesn't a business only exist to make profit? That's the consensus on wikipedia anyhow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_motive

The State, on the other hand, exists obviously to represent the people. You're making an unfair argument associating the State and its budget with the profits of a business, in my opinion.

*promote

Self promoting this video back to the front page; last published Wednesday, July 24th, 2013 2:29pm PDT - promote requested by original submitter blankfist.

You are correct, this is not profit-seeking which tends to be mutually beneficial to both parties and creates wealth. It would more accurately be considered rent-seeking a scenario in which resources are spent but there is no wealth created. Instead, there is simply a redistribution of wealth from one sector of the economy or one class of people to another.

You're comparing the motive for the need to balance the budget. The analogy is with the need for balancing the budget affecting the actions of the work. In this sense, the comparison with a business is fair.

The budget decisions should lead to questions such as 'what is the most effective police work we can do within our available budget?', where as in some cases it seems to be just 'what is the most effective way to balance our budget?'.

In that case, the police work is no longer a primary consideration and the tail is wagging the dog. They may as well stop doing police work altogether and start opening hardware stores, or lemonade stands to pay their salaries and maintain their buildings.

To paraphrase Charles Goodhart: once a measurement becomes a goal, it stops being a measurement.

One possible solution:

1) provide the police an operating budget that comes from the taxes that a city normally collects.
2) ALL money from police citations, fines, etc. goes into a separate account.
3) Appoint a citizens committee (Absolutely no government employees/contractors etc) that will decide at the end of the year where the money is spent. with some limitations. It can NOT be spent on day to day police or city budgets. For example. They can decide to fund the city homeless shelter, fund a city beautification project, scholarships for residents of the community, fourth of July celebration, etc. (MAYBE a %5-%10 amount could be budgeted to be given to fund special projects for the city or police force).

This isn't about capitalism. I don't know what it's about, but the motive for a police chief to throw some asses in jail and to require his officers to interfere in the lives of the local citizens isn't a profit motive. There's pressure coming from somewhere and I can't figure out where. We must assume that this chief believed he was *personally* going to be getting some kind of reward for it, like an easy promotion ladder or something, which means someone higher up desperately wants all these contacts to happen.

Important: arresting people doesn't increase profitability for the police department, so that doesn't fit.

This is without doubt about money. What else could it be if it isn't about generating income through fines and securing funding by artificially creating a need for a bigger than necessary police force? If not this, for what the incentive to generate more arrests and tickets? Just as a career move by somebody higher up? I doubt that, as higher crime rates tend to reflect negatively on elected officials and cops. Especially when the rate is fixed like this.
Locking up people is a business in the states and it shouldn't be but that's why America has the biggest prison population in percentage and headcount. And the same goes for militarizing the police. There's money to be made and those who get it do everything they can (lobbying for example) to make sure they keep getting more. This is not different.