Police are Corporate Revenue Collectors

Police are Corporate Revenue Collectors

If you want to better understand why there is a divide between minority communities and law enforcement, consider how police have been forced by cash-craving municipal governments to abandon traditional policing and, instead, become mere revenue collectors. By handing out citations that carry heavy fines and fees, or by taking and keeping property through civil forfeiture, policing has become increasingly about profit rather than public safety. To rebuild trust among the communities they patrol, officers and prosecutors must stop treating citizens like ATMs.

The first way government uses law enforcement to fill government coffers is the one most people are familiar with: citations. Most Americans have received a parking or traffic ticket at one time in their life. But you may have noticed there are certain days in a month when ticketing by police seems a lot more common. Why? Well, for some American cities, revenue from tickets makes up a substantial part of municipal budgets. And when police begin to realize that their job is dependent on handing out enough tickets in a given month, they are going to make sure they find offenses, especially among those least able to fight back. Inevitably, this “taxation by citation” increases the number of confrontations between police and citizens, leading to more public frustration and less trust between the police and the people they are meant to protect and serve.

In its investigation of the Ferguson Police Department following the shooting of Michael Brown, the U.S. Department of Justice cited the city’s focus on generating revenue through law enforcement as a major problem. The report noted that, in March 2010, the City Finance Director wrote to the Chief of Police warning him that unless they ramped up ticket writing “significantly,” there would be a budget shortfall. In just one year, Ferguson’s court issued over 9,000 warrants stemming from minor violations such as parking infractions, traffic tickets, and housing code violations.

Unfortunately, Ferguson isn’t unique. Chicago is the third-largest city by population in the United States. The fact that fines and fees amount to more than 10% of the city’s revenue shows the mind-boggling size of the problem. An investigation from WBEZ and ProPublica Illinois looked at the more than 50 million tickets Chicago issued since 1996. These tickets resulted in $2.8 billion paid in fines, but also resulted in $1.8 billion in outstanding debt owed to the city. Chicago police officers were responsible for writing about 40% of these citations, with other city regulators and contractors responsible for the rest.

Some of this debt falls on individuals who had their cars impounded by the city, even though they did nothing wrong. Allie Nelson’s car, for instance, was impounded when she was in Houston recuperating from cancer treatments. She left her car with her granddaughter, with strict instructions that her granddaughter’s then-boyfriend was not allowed to drive it. But those instructions went ignored.