Prison for Tickets?

Tickets written solely for revenue might cost officers if this law passes:

• It can be argued that police departments across the country practice a form of legal extortion, in which victimless misdemeanors and infractions are punished with excessively punitive citations. The generation of state and city revenue via Kafkaesque civil and municipal violations is perhaps most apparent in the application of parking tickets, whereby inscrutable, sometimes illegible street signs make well-intentioned motorists increasingly susceptible to fines.
  
  In the city of Los Angeles alone, fine revenue has increased 50% since 2003 and is expected to reach $180 million by 2018. In recent years, many online social media movements have surged in response to this transparently fraudulent urban taxation, with many citizens demanding their local city governments take action against cops filling their ticket “quotas.”
  
  A new bill introduced by Representative Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri may soon push the movement forward. In the wake of the Department of Justice report regarding the police brutality and resulting riots in Ferguson, Missouri, Cleaver wants such unjust ‘policing for profit’ tactics to be considered federal civil liberty violations.
  
  Calling the bill The Fair Justice Act, Cleaver wants any police officer charged with enforcing criminal or traffic laws for the sole purpose of raising revenue to face prison time — for up to five years!

Smaller municipalities have often balanced their budgets based on ticket revenues and required Officers to generate money or face some form of discipline. And let's be realistic - Chicago's ticket cameras, speed and red light, exist solely to generate money for (A) the installing company and (B) assorted city funds. But to put the onus on Officers instead of the politicians who demand money to feed the ever growing "entitlement community," that's not going to inspire coppers to go and write tickets.