I believe policing for profit is wrong. The purpose of a fine should be deterrence and/or punishment, not revenue generation. That's what taxes are for.

Police should be motivated to enforce laws not to make money, but to keep order and maintain safety. Corrupt and predatory practices are encouraged by seeing fines as revenue.

To that end, it seems obvious that the entity doing the fining should not be the direct recipient of fine income.

Options?

*Fines go to the state

*Fines go to the Federal Government

*Fines get distributed to all citizens in some way, perhaps as a tax credit.

Fine money is *destroyed and taken out of the money supply. This would be a deflationary force, in that when you delete one dollar, every other dollar's value goes up. Overall effect, good/bad, who knows..

In any case, goal should be to remove financial motive in law enforcement.

Regarding income based fines.. If you take out the revenue aspect, all that's left is the punishment. The only purpose of the fine becomes punishment or deterrence. Therefore, it seems logical that fines should be proportional to the income or assets of the recipient.

To someone making minimum wage living paycheck to paycheck, a $500 fine is a huge deal. To a rich person, it's meaningless. The penalty for breaking a law should not depend on how wealthy you are.

Yes, that means a billionaire might get a million dollar traffic ticket, but I don't really see what the problem is. This means as much as $500 does to someone making $50,000. It's the same relative penalty is it not? As long as rich people aren't targeted just because their rich there should be no problem. If the entity doing the ticketing doesn't receive any of the money, they shouldn't have a reason to do this.

As for not being able to afford fines, they should simply garnish wages, or impose jail or community service type punishments. It's pointless and wrong to keep tacking on more and more fine debt and jail time to someone who can't or won't pay up.