On your two NYC law examples, while I agree the laws are bad the enforcement exacerbated the negative outcome. I would expect that management and bean counters are to blame but enforcing those laws should have focused on big fish not the weak, vulnerable and disadvantaged.
They should not be stopping and frisking the poor disproportionately, while that might get more arrests it hurts the relationship of enforcement with the community it is sworn to protect and serve. They instead should have upped their game and stopped and frisked a bunch of more affluent people who might also be packing. A little bit of that kind of action might actually gone a long way to getting NYC's draconian gun laws repealed.
Same deal on the cigarettes thing. Don't go after the guy selling loose cigarettes. Get the people selling cartons of untaxed cigarettes.
The leaders in law enforcement should have criticized those officers who harassed and arrested the minnows as wasting resources and causing a rupture in community relations. The bean counters for whom an arrest is an arrest are not putting proper values on the data. An arrest for an untaxed carton should equal two hundred arrests for a loosie. Law enforcement has discretion, I see it all the time but they seem to use it completely inappropriately. They will give a warning to someone who clearly can afford to pay a fine but ticket someone who can't and will probably lose their license or worse end up spending time in jail because they can't pay the fine or can't make it to court and finally get caught with an outstanding warrant.
Don't you think the disadvantaged need more breaks than the privileged. Equity is going to require inequality. The handicapped need a head start if they are going to finish with the able.
You seem to understand this. You use the term heavily regressive in reference to the cigarette tax.
Taxes need to be progressive, employment needs to be progressive (affirmative action), enforcement needs to be progressive (fining a poor person beyond their ability to pay leading to an outstanding warrant or jail time is counter productive, the only one who benefits is the jailer).
TEK
