[Porsche-O-Phile]

My issue isn't necessarily with the tactics (although admittedly some are dirtier than others), it's with the premise behind the underlying laws - 100% about revenue. Any safety benefit is an unintended side benefit.

These sorts of stupid laws that exist solely to redistribute wealth from one group of people and give it to another ought not exist, IMHO. And to see LE spending such disproportionate amounts of their resources enforcing these laws (the stupid ones) is quite frustrating.

Police departments were never intended to be profitable. Neither were courts. Both represent liabilities (not assets) to the governments that support them and the people who support those governments. That's the way it's supposed to work - that they perform their duties to higher and more noble aspirations than simple dollars in the name of upholding higher principles. Somewhere along the line we've lost our way and put pressure on the PDs and the courts systems to defray their operating costs (admittedly some of this probably comes from stories of abuses of public money like every other corrupt government agency). The fact of the matter remains that if the public-at-large wants an orderly society, there are some things it has to be willing to pay for - and law enforcement and the court system are two of them.

Of course this presupposes that the laws being enforced and upheld in the courts are sensible to begin with, but that's an entirely different discussion. We have WAY too many stupid/unnecessary laws that simply enable an ever-increasing high-budget bureaucracy and police departments that simply toss anything and everything back under "public safety", which is a load of horse manure (a variation on the old, "won't someone please think of the children" sensationalism to make it politically incorrect to ever talk about curtailing the budgets/scope of "those who know what's best for us").

Rubbish.