Police Guilty of Highway Robbery

Adam Carolla has a lot of anger, but one of the things he hates most is getting "chickenshit" traffic tickets in Los Angeles.  Last week on the podcast, he went off on this old standard with a fury like none before (tirade starts at 25 minute mark).

"OK, we definitely can't sell the lead as handsome..."

Carolla's take is that in Los Angeles, the cops write tons of meaningless tickets just so they can bring in more revenue.  He says Los Angeles is the one city stupid enough to fuck over its own taxpayers; essentially the employees (cops) are shaking down their bosses (voters).

While basic stupidity is usually the best explanation, here's another theory: Los Angeles isn't a single city, its a sprawling commuter metropolis of over a hundred separate municipalities, and when the cops pull someone over in, say, Glendale, there's a good chance that person is actually a resident of another town. 

 

LA County alone has 88 different municipalities.

In the smaller municipalities, the cops usually aren't shaking down their own taxpayers, they're exacting a toll on outsiders who are just passing through.  The city of LA has a smaller incentive to ticket because, being the biggest city, they're more likely to pull over their own residents, which would make the cops more likely to piss off the voters.  This theory is born out when Carolla says the worst cities are Santa Monica, Burbank, and Glendale, not the City of Los Angeles itself.

Donny suggests that he and Adam "sue the city for poor performance and lack of ability", but as Adam says "never gonna happen". What should happen is for the county as a whole to form an agreement where the "profit" from traffic tickets (funds above the cost of writing the ticket) in each city goes into one big pot for the whole county, those funds would then be dispersed back to each city in proportion to their populations.

 

There's a reason Donny gets told to "shut the fuck up".

The one big pot would remove the incentive for each municipality to "rape" the passers-through, cops would only pull over the people who cause real problems.  To replace the lost revenue, each city could simply raise taxes a little, they'd also save by paying for fewer chickenshit cops; the taxpayers would more than make that money back by having to pay fewer traffic tickets.  The revenues would stay the same for the cities, but you'd eliminate the transaction costs of all the BULLSHIT! and FUCKING HASSLE!! from the ASSHOLE COPS AND THEIR CHICKENSHIT TICKETS!!!