Homeless in Arizona

AZPOST, which is a police agency gets 100% of it's funding from you guess it, criminal violations.

So the more crimes cops arrest people for the more money AZPOST gets. AZPOST stands for Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board.

AZPOST, which provides training and misconduct oversight for Arizona’s police, receives 100 percent of its revenue from the Criminal Justice Enhancement Fund.

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The law-enforcement-based pool is fully funded by a 47 percent surcharge tacked onto city citation fees.

“I think this is the consequence of bad public policy,” she said. “So now we’re not funding (programs) because people are obeying the law? That’s crazy. Do we want to go out there and tell people to commit more crime?”

When Rain Baker was shaken down by the Phoenix Police on bogus marijuana charges she was hit with something like an outrageous 80% surcharge on her $10,000 which raised the file to almost $20,000.

Sadly the criminal justice system is mostly about $$$ MONEY $$$ and has very little to do with justice.

Eleanor Eisenberg of the Arizona ACLU loves to call it the "Criminal Injustice System", which I agree with 100%.

Source

35% drop in traffic tickets is good for Arizona drivers, but bad for statewide programs

Megan Cassidy, The Republic | azcentral.com 10:36 a.m. MST August 15, 2016

In Arizona, dozens of notable programs are partially or fully funded by speeders, red-light runners and drunken drivers.

In Arizona, dozens of statewide programs are partially or fully funded by speeders, red-light runners and drunken drivers.

The state’s low-level scofflaws contributed tens of millions to public causes in 2015 alone through an automatic 83 percent surcharge added to citation fees.

Beneficiaries include the Arizona Clean Elections Commission, the Department of Public Safety’s DNA Fund, and a trust for spinal and head injuries.

But what happens when police hand out fewer than two-thirds of the tickets they did eight years ago?

That scenario is now reality for many state organizations, which have seen funding shrink as Arizona’s traffic tickets dropped by 35 percent since 2008.

“We’ve had to make significant cuts,” said Jack Lane, the executive director of the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board. “It’s probably one of my highest priorities, trying to look at some alternative funding sources.”

AZPOST, which provides training and misconduct oversight for Arizona’s police, receives 100 percent of its revenue from the Criminal Justice Enhancement Fund.

The law-enforcement-based pool is fully funded by a 47 percent surcharge tacked onto city citation fees. It divvies out its revenue to 18 different organizations that offer programs such as street-crime control projects, fingerprint ID systems and prosecutor training.

Surcharges vs. taxes

The funding challenges come amid a national discussion about the fairness of court fees that can be financially crushing for the working poor.

Arizona, like many other states, adds fees and surcharges onto court cases to avoid competing for a slice of the state's general fund.

Proponents reason that lawbreakers, the “customers” of the criminal-justice system, should shoulder the financial burden of running the criminal-justice system.

Critics argue that this logic means that a group of disproportionately indigent residents pays for programs that benefit the public at large.

In addition, reliance on fees creates an unreliable source of revenue, according to political consultant Meg Wuebbels Leal.

Wuebbels Leal, a former legislative liaison for the Maricopa County Public Defender’s Office who lobbied against several surcharges when they were added in the late 1990s, said it was always impractical to rely on lawbreakers to fund important programs.

“I think this is the consequence of bad public policy,” she said. “So now we’re not funding (programs) because people are obeying the law? That’s crazy. Do we want to go out there and tell people to commit more crime?”

Fewer police, fewer tickets

Arizona police officers in 2015 wrote 1.18 million civil traffic citations, fewer tickets than they had in a generation. The citations figure has plummeted since its apex of 1.81 million in 2008 and is 240,000 fewer than the 1.42 million tickets written in 1996, according to records provided by the Arizona Supreme Court.

Criminal municipal citations, as well as DUIs, have fallen as well.

Overall, fine revenue dropped roughly 21 percent from 2008 to 2015, from $145 million to $113.5 million, according to court records.

Dave Byers, administrative director of the courts, said a statewide shortage of officers, paired with the reduction in traffic cameras and the burgeoning popularity of ride-share programs, all have played a role in the decreased enforcement.

“There’s substantially fewer law-enforcement officers on the street,” he said. “And when you have fewer law-enforcement officers, they’re predominantly going from call to call, domestic violence to burglary, and that means there’s substantially less time to spend on traffic enforcement.”

Byers said while there’s no proof, some have speculated that the rise of low-cost taxi alternatives such as Uber and Lyft have contributed to a decrease in drunken drivers and therefore a decrease in DUIs.

All indicators point to the trend continuing downward.

“At the national level, people are also talking about the potential impact driverless cars will have when they saturate the highways,” Byers said. “You might eliminate things like DUIs and speeding to a very large extent.”

In addition to fewer police officers, more agencies are considering and shifting to a less punitive approach to policing.

More departments may begin looking to a "high-visibility enforcement" model such as the one in Oro Valley, a Tucson suburb. Oro Valley Police Chief Daniel P. Sharp said the agency partners with the media to advertise problem areas and lets the public know where officers will be visible and at what times.

The result, Sharp said, has been safer drivers and fewer citations.

"We’ve got a new paradigm where we feel that we’re getting a very good response from the motoring public," he said.

Change looms for organizations

Thomas Collins, executive director of the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission, said the declining revenues haven’t affected its programs yet.

“But what we know is that there’s a delta somewhere,” he said. “If the revenues fall and you continue to have whatever expenses you have, you will eventually run into a problem.”

“But what we know is that there’s a delta somewhere. If the revenues fall and you continue to have whatever expenses you have, you will eventually run into a problem.” Thomas Collins, executive director for the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission Collins defended the program’s source of funding: a voter-approved 10 percent surcharge on citations.

“We’ve always said, look … if people don’t like clean elections, the easiest way to avoid paying for them is to not get a traffic ticket,” he said.

The Arizona Criminal Justice Commission recently appointed a working group that will explore different revenue generators for the various programs, according to spokesman Andrew Lefevre.

One option could be shuffling some of the programs back into the tax-supported category, or perhaps others could find different revenue sources on their own. That way, the programs that continue to be paid by surcharges and fees would receive a larger piece of the pie.

“What the answer is, I don’t know yet,” he said. “It’s clearly something that we recognize here, especially in Arizona, that something’s going to need to change.”