Probably the money should simply be destroyed. There's too much conflict of interest when law enforcement can become a profit centre.

There's a 25 MPH speed trap near me (no schools or anything nearby) that uses photo enforcement instead of actual police officers. It's basically an ATM for the tiny village of 179 residents. In 2013, they stopped 26 people for going too slow. Yes, too slow.

Edit: more about Linndale: http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/12/linndale_wi...

In Pennsylvania, more than half of the fees on tickets I have seen go directly to charity or similar (government) funds, if I remember correctly. This is the right strategy.

I don't have the information on traffic fees, but there's strong evidence that lottery fees are supposed to go to charity but get put in general state funds instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PK-netuhHA

That just seems... idiotic. Not only would it raise taxes across the board and deflate currency, that money could _at least_ go to some charity.

You could say the same thing about alcohol & vice taxes.

It might make more sense than I realize, but destroying punitive damages seems like a terrible option. Damages are meant to penalize the offender; destroying wealth penalizes everyone.

Destroying currency doesn't destroy wealth. It just transfers it from the person who held it to everyone who holds that currency.

It's a very modest deflationary effect.

Printing currency costs money, so they probably shouldn't actually destroy it. But you can certainly destroy money without destroying currency.

So how do you remove the conflict of interest? They have every incentive to abuse these revenue (more like theft) streams and become dependent on them.

Give or take demerit points, in my area of the world there are 9 points and when gone you no longer have a driver's license. It's for severe infractions such as DUI, reckless driving, excessive speed.

Although for a speeding ticket one point is harsh maybe 1/2 point or 1/4 point if less than 30km/h over the posted speed with a 10km/h grace (speedometer error/wind etc.).

No monetary gain or loss for either side no incentive to catch speeders going a little bit over the limit and a big incentive as a driver to not get caught.

My area of the world (Utah, USA) also has a licensing point system. Accrue enough points and your license gets suspended.

Problem is, like my wife a decade ago when she tried to get her license renewed, it had been revoked a year prior to that because of excessive speeding tickets and due to her being young and moving a lot managed to not receive the postal notification (or she ignored it, you can choose). What do you do when people just start ignoring the points? Have more points that accrue on subsequent violations that further prevent someone from renewing their license after a probationary period? What if they ignore that point system also?

The executors of the Justice system of the United States relies almost entirely on trust. It's trivial to break trust.

Up here in BC, we have a points system for traffic violations. A typical speeding-just-a-bit ticket would earn you 3 points. But 3 points get removed from your balance every year, so it's like being able to have one 'free' speeding ticket per year. When your points exceed 3 points your insurance rates go up and if I remember right there is a threshold at which you can no longer purchase insurance. So the points are a pretty good enforcement system for most people. Of course it still won't stop the people willing to drive without insurance or a valid license, but that's a different (smaller) category of offenders :).

The same thing we do with people who ignore fines and tickets for DUI, put them in prison.

"Send it far, far away" might be enough. It was only after local police departments started getting a cut of civil asset forfeitures (they used to be sent to the FBI, I believe) that counties started abusing it.

There are surely other options too, such as spreading it out. You could fund a flat tax credit for all residents of the county with the fines. The wealth is not destroyed, and if the credit is on the order of a handful of dollars per resident, no one is going to have any strong incentives. You could vote to double all traffic fines- but if you personally stand to gain $3.72 from that doubling, the incentive exists but is very small.

Money != wealth, but I like the flat tax credit idea--unless they do something shady like raise taxes because of the additional credit.

You could remove all perverse incentives by putting all fines, fees, etc into a state fund that is paid back annually to citizens via a rebate of some sort.

All funding of government would come only from taxes. This would eliminate any financial benefit to the government from fines, fees, and asset forfeiture.

Then the state will get used to having a certain volume of such funds, and the departments that provide a substantial fraction of those funds will tend to get looked on favorably...that doesn't end well, either.

Fines should go directly to a federally recognized not-for-profit. This is how repaying the community for a fine-able offence could be made. Also they should be /on top of/ damages. (In the case of most non-accident traffic matters, the 'damages' are non-existent.)

Nope. The Clinton Foundation is a "Federally Recognized not-for-profit." Could you imagine the stratospheric levels of corruption of non profits start to demand law enforcement revenues.

The money should go to the general revenue fund but as an offset against tax income. More fines: lower taxes (which essentially means that the fines are distributed to the taxpayers, which is completely fair since the crime is against "the people."

Law enforcement should never get fine money. That's a huge conflict of interest. It would be like a foreign government donating to the non profit of a sitting Secretary of State.

There actually is a system like this in place in Germany. Not for traffic fines, but if you get a fine in criminal court (technically your case is suspended conditionally on paying X€) it will go to a local charity.

Caused quite a bit of drama a few months ago when the "Kinderschutzbund" refused the payment in a widely publicized child pornography case (the defendant was a member of the federal parliament at the time of the crime) despite accepting it before in similar cases.

Then the state will start profiteering, as they do where I live. Here the government decided to just double the speeding fines, and they still pretend they do it for "traffic safety". It's a farce.