Speaking of Corruption

This Country Just Made It Legal for Cops to Keep 70% of All the Traffic Fines They Collect

Officials do not foresee a rash of spurious fines being handed out as a consequence

Drivers in Cambodia have a lot to contend with: cavernous potholes, weaving motorcycles kicking up clouds of choking dust and noodle hawkers trundling down the “fast” lane. Now motorists may find their pockets as ravaged as their nerves, after officials announced a fivefold bump in traffic fines and gave permission for issuing officers to keep 70% of all cash collected.

The new rules, coming into force in January, are an attempt to curb corruption, reports the Phnom Penh Post. Currently, traffic cops keep half of much smaller penalties, meaning that many supplement their meager salaries by soliciting bribes.

The current $1.25 official penalty for not wearing a car seat belt, for example, will rise to $6.25, with the officer allowed to keep $4.38. Of the remaining 30%, some 25% will go to the station where the officer is based, with the final 5% sent to the Ministry of Finance.

I guess I understand the motivation behind this: Cops are taking bribes from drivers, who may or may not have committed an offence, which may or may not be of a significant nature, so they don't get ticketed.  There's a culture of corruption there, with both the officers, and members of the public.  And the government wants to discourage that.

Currently, he said, traffic cops are already given 50 per cent of the much smaller penalties they collect, meaning the change effectively represents a seven-fold increase in the revenue they can legitimately earn from dishing out fines.

Wait, so the government, which apparently knows its cops are underpaid, already have a system in place that encourages spurious stops...and they wonder why drivers are offering, and no doubt some officers, soliciting bribes ?

And rather than top up the base-pay of the police**, to make them less tempted by bribes, they now want to give cops, any way you cut it, an even greater motivation to stop drivers, in which they get a much bigger payout than before, whether the driver attempts to bribe them or not, though they now stand a chance at getting exponentially bigger bribes from those who can afford it ?

What could possibly go wrong ?


h/t Boing Boing

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Back in the West, of course, we may have somewhat less corruption, but there's still far too much motivation for spurious traffic-stops (So, Officer Doe, I see you seem to be having trouble meeting our monthly departmental quota lately ?  Maybe we should have a chat in my office...), and the consequences can be far higher in the case of the gun-loving US -- sadly as we see over and over in the headlines, even fatal.

What we could really do with is some way to disincentivise over-policing of minor violations generally (but without necessarily encouraging cops to not enforce given laws across the board) combined with greater accountability for the cops.  Which yes, includes technologies like body-cameras, which we can fairly easily afford, even if Cambodia could not.

And what we could also do with is to remove entirely the financial incentives for traffic-stops & tickets.***  The motivation for stopping a driver, or a citizen generally, should have precisely zero to do with departmental budgets, zero to do with quotas, zero to do with anxieties about career-advancement, and everything to do with the nature of the offence, the severity or lack thereof of any threat to public wellbeing, and the benefits of a stop versus the risks to everyone, police-officer & civilian alike, involved.


* Apologies for the likely sloppy flow of this post.  It flipped about quite a bit, then bifurcated altogether.

** Yes, I'm aware that Cambodia's not the richest country in the world.  But there have to be better, less abuse-prone if not abuse-rife ways of funding the police than this.

*** And if a municipality in the US is unable to independently afford its own police-force, then maybe it shouldn't exist as a separate municipality at all.  Thinking of  the case of St. Louis/Ferguson et al. here, with the phenomenon of  so-called 'white flight', though there are no doubt similar examples across the US.