Policing for profit seems like a new problem. It isn’t. A look at history makes clear that opposition to such a system of “justice” is at the heart of our country’s founding.
At a forum hosted by the Hamilton Project on Friday, Danielle Allen pointed out that the use of policing as a source of revenue generation was one of the original motivations behind the Declaration of Independence. Then it warranted not merely political change but revolution. Allen, the director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, said that a key objection to British rule was a system of taxation without representation that not only fed British coffers but enriched and funded the tax collectors themselves, enabling their operations on the backs of the colonists. Judges, customs officers, and other agents of enforcement stood to personally gain from the fines, fees, and seizures they procured.
That complaint was registered in the Declaration of Independence, where the colonists, speaking about King George III, wrote, “He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”
As Allen put it, that is “a comment on … the administration of justice as a revenue generation source.” Justice, the colonists thought, should be administered for justice’s sake, not as a means to raise funds for the government or to enrich its enforcers. As she went on to explain, when it came time to write the Constitution, the founders made sure to guard against such abuses as enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.
Yet for all of modern America’s love for the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Founding Fathers, the very system the founders found so objectionable is exactly what has been reproduced today as cities and states, along with courts and police departments, increasingly rely on fees, fines, and seizures of property to fund their operations and, in some cases, raise money for other government needs entirely. Such fees were used so extensively in Louisiana, for example, that the state Supreme Court found that their use violated the separation of powers. Justices found it unacceptable that “the threshold to our justice system be used as a toll booth to collect money for random programs created by the legislature.”
The problems with this system haven’t changed. The incentives for using justice as a tool to raise money, best thought of as a tax themselves, still mean that justice is poorly served, laws are enforced not to benefit the community but to raise money, and fees are levied and property seized to benefit administrators and the enforcers.
The purpose of justice must be justice, not revenue extraction, especially from the communities least able to pay.
