Local police are locally funded which creates huge issues even for private companies. IMO, removing all local police funding would 'solve' most of these issues much more directly.
PS: Ditto schools. Also, this is about funding nothing says control can't remain at the local level, but traffic ticket revenue for example should not end up in a small towns budget.
Police departments as a whole should be fully funded through taxes, and any money from fines and civil asset forfeiture should go either into the state's general fund, or towards indigent legal defense and recidivism reduction. Localities need to fund their own governments directly instead of waiting to win the drug deal lottery.
If you don't like police in your community elect officials (or get elected yourself) to stop paying for them. If you don't pay the cops they will not show up. I assume many of the commenters on this post have some advantages that would aide in persuading the local citizens of the benefits of transferring funds for police to education, mental health care, tax reduction, or whatever.
I agree, money from ticketing should go to some other use than directly to the police in the locality where the ticket was given. Hell it should go to education or something useful like that. Or to a general fund that is redistributed based on size to all police forces in a state. (obviously that isn't perfect either, that could lead to over hiring)
Urban spending is disproportionately police. If each area pays their own way, urban areas get basically nothing but a ton of police. Then the cops, who live in the suburbs, take that money (and its potential tax revenue) elsewhere.
You will note that this is already a problem, because we already have a partial pay-your-own-way system.
There's no reason why this couldn't be replaced by tax revenue though. I know I'd vote for a tax to fund police if it was explicitly stated that this would allow them to stop picking people up on petty crimes.
I definately disagree with the idea that adding private security won't remove funding from public security. If the vasy majority of wealthy townships start funding their own private security, it will be much harder to justify expensive policing budgets, and potentially even cheap police budgets.
Short term there are only upsides, but in the long run this will weaken the local governments.
At face value, many police departments do seem overfunded. In many small towns you'll see too many patrol cars for the area, new patrol cars too often, unnecessary improvements to the department, etc. while other areas of the budget languish because it's politically unpopular to go against the police department and people fear retaliation for advocating against them.
It's not as though cities and towns are using fine dollars to educate children and feed the homeless. They're not. They're using it to pay more police salaries so they can write more tickets. They're simply using the money to further their own existence. God forbid the towns be forced to find an alternate way to pay for, reduce or cut a service in the face of shrinking revenues.
What if police were funded at the state level and all revenues from fines went to the central gov't?
Ration of officers per 1,000 people would be distributed where they are statistically needed more --that way you avoid wealthy areas with cops who sit around pulling over out of towners because they have little else to do and locales that need a police force to deal with the crime can have more officers to police the locale.
Bonus, one pension one authority to negotiate contracts, etc.
Big question is does police currently have enough funding for those main tasks? If not defunding them by taking money from them only makes situation even worse.
Or do you actually need more funding to spend on the other stuff? Which could in best case over some years decrease overall costs for society.
You should look at how much of the budget the police dept takes of an average town. In my med-small town they're 50% of the city budget. Police depts are shockingly well funded compared to the problems they actually end up solving.
I live in an area with a bad police department. I've never seen our police care about crime. To be frank, I'm not sure how I'd be any worse off without them. I suspect we need some of the higher-end investigative units (e.g. detectives who solve murders and similar), but the run-of-the-mill police units seems like a waste of my taxpayers dollars. I'd support disbanding our police in an instant.
Schools are one area where there's a lot of money involved, it's a direct service to normal people, and those people actually can do a pretty good job without the school (not saying that everyone can or that it's easy).
Some communities highly dissatisfied with their police attempted to defund and/or defunded their department. That's not a great example because self-service policing doesn't work very well, but it's kinda close.
Ultimately, if you want the voters' money, you need to convince them that you at least won't use it against them. And it's really easy for people to start thinking that it's being used against them when engaging in culture war or political issues.
The whole point of a taxpayer funded police force is so that police operations are not biased because of where the money comes from. Having the police profit from police operations completely subverts that.
PS: Ditto schools. Also, this is about funding nothing says control can't remain at the local level, but traffic ticket revenue for example should not end up in a small towns budget.
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