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DOJ Cracking Down On Profit-Driven Policing, Audit Looks At How Far It's Spread (muckrock.com)
v3rgEz writes: Federal civil rights officials at the Department of Justice are launching an effort to combat widespread constitutional abuses in U.S. courts in the hope of ending budget-driven policies that cripple those unable to afford fines and fees for minor offenses, the Huffington Post reports. The DOJ's focus on court fees and bail practices follows the Ferguson report which found officials had colluded to raise revenue when they hit residents with exorbitantly high fines and fees, regardless of their ability to pay, and jailed people to extract the money. The Sunlight Foundation and MuckRock recently launched an audit to see how widely the practice has spread.
I used to live in a place where the usual way to deal with speeding was to pay the standard bribe. If it was a bus, the bribe was bigger but the passengers would pitch in without complaint. As far as I can tell, that system worked very well for traffic violations and way better than the American system, where everyone is pretending they don't do bribes but instead they do it via crappy laws/policies and more inefficiently. Another similarity/difference is, there officers' salaries were reduced to account for the traffic violation income, while in the US police department budget is reduced to account for the traffic violation income.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Another way to make money is to make excessive bail requirements in possible
collusion with bail bondsmen.
TL;DR - bail should be set by the circumstances of the person's ability to pay and
the nature of them being a flight risk, NOT the nature of the crime.
Now the "I'm sorry but it got long" part:
Bail from the eighth amendment to the Constitution of the United States:
"Excessive bail shall not be required"
Excessive is when it's greater than the amount necessary to bring the offender to trial. From Wikipidia:
"In Stack v. Boyle, 342 U.S. 1 (1951), the Court found that a defendant's bail cannot be set higher than an amount that is reasonably likely to ensure the defendant's presence at the trial" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Judges are starting to agree: http://blog.simplejustice.us/2...
But some are still hungry for HUMONGOUS bail to avoid looking soft on crime when BAIL HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE CRIME.
Man kills cop: 3 million dollars
http://www.philly.com/philly/n...
Man kills man: 2 million dollars
http://www.bellinghamherald.co...
Cop kills man: 1.5 million:
http://abc7chicago.com/news/ja...
The US DoJ ought to take a long hard look at how our nation's Courts are handing out large bail
requirements --unconstitutionally-- to make it look like they're "tough on crime."
In fact, the people being granted bail are innocent until proven guilty, AND
the amount of the bail is only supposed to ensure they show up for trial.
We need a lot of reform in the criminal justice system. Hopefully the DoJ won't whitewash
bail while they look at the other methods that "the justice system" screws the people.
Full disclosure: I've never been arrested, offered bail, denied bail, nor am personally
part of the legal / "justice" system.
E
No, there's a simpler solution than that: don't let municipalities keep the money from traffic tickets (or any kind of fine). The payments should be made directly to the state's general fund. Take away the profit motive, no more profit based policing.
North Carolina does this. The state constitution actually requires that all fines collected "shall be faithfully appropriated and used exclusively for maintaining free public schools."
I've seen this work to have the desired effect.
The campus police at some of the state universities used to issue all sorts of nuisance parking tickets for things like "parked too close to line". At the time, the universities were keeping the money from the fines. Quite a few years ago, there was a legal case that went to the state supreme court where they ruled that the universities couldn't keep the money. After that, the number of nuisance fines dramatically decreased, even though officials claimed that there was no correlation between these events.