Nope. CAF is theft. Reallocating the ill got gains to something you like doesn’t make it right. SSA is worth funding on its own. We shouldn’t need to arbitrarily steal from people to fund it. And we certainly shouldn’t leave SSA funding up to the police.

We have fundamental concepts like equal representation and equal treatment under the law that clearly show CAF to be wrong.

Still a good idea for eg parking tickets (I don't think they meant to offer a defence of CAF).

If the law didn't allow local governments to keep fines or seized property the incentive to use the cops for tax farming would be negative.

CAF isn’t a tax. Incentives are irrelevant. This is highway robbery by the people who are supposed to prevent highway robbery.

If the feds force them to hand over the shit they steal to the Social Security Admin the incentives disappear.

That’s treating a symptom. CAF is already laundered through the feds. If local PDs give their CAF gains to the SSA (or any other organization) they will get equal contributions in return. This is literally what already happens.

The problem with that is as inefficiency grows within the organization that receives the money - so do incentives to capture more. Even if it's coming from an external organization (the police), they can still communicate and find ways to work together through this perverse incentive.

This is more difficult if 100% of it goes out the door. Hypothetically you could still get ecosystem issues, though. Where an org argues for more fines so that their existence is justified and that they don't shrink. etc.

The allocation of ill gotten gains is irrelevant. This is theft. These are assets that belong to honest citizens. It’s unacceptable that they would lose their honest gains to the whims of a cop.

Yea, don't think anyone (or at least myself and the parent) are arguing anything related to that.

we're discussing the incentives that lead to police becoming thieves. Which is just as important as the police being thieves. Assuming you want to fix the root cause, at least.

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And we need to instate harsh penalties for the ones who continue to steal.

The incentives are what put those systems in place. It's two halves of the same coin. One is cause, the other is effect.

You don't think as long as they have incentive to fine more as it directly influences their budget, that it might affect their actions towards fining and seizing citizens? Are you saying it's unrelated?

edit: To word it differently, do you think solving this one problem will end their association with your money and their budget?

Where I live we have the electricity bill system that kind of works that way.

The idea is that let us say the normal price of electricity would be e.g. 10c / kwH. To incentivize people to use less electricity we charge 20c/ but the extra 10c go to the fund which at the end of the year is split evenly between all electricity consumers.

So basically everyone pays 20c x consumption -10c x (average consumption).

So your suggestion is that the cops should seize everyone’s property then reallocate it at years end?

No. I'm just pointing out a working system where there is a negative financial incentive used to police the population behavior without the problem caused by making it a profit for whoever creates the policy.

We don’t need financial incentives in law enforcement. We need to lock up thieves regardless of their attire.