Let’s get one thing out of the way: it’s not normal to stuff $100,000 in cash into a suitcase and then check said suitcase on to a domestic flight. It’s extremely weird, in fact, not something you’d expect a typical person to do in their lifetime. However, doing so is emphatically
This demonstrates why no government agency should be self-funding. If fees are collected they should be refunded to taxpayers. If a budget is needed it should go through the normal budget process and be given a budget directly from incoming taxes. So everything’s aboveboard and transparent.
As soon as an organization is self-funding it’s open to both regulatory capture and corruption. We need to remove the incentives for bad actors, not just trying to catch bad actors after the fact.
This would have a huge impact on small police departments who self-fund through tickets in the community exploitation. Police should not be tax farmers. Police should be for the people and buy the people, tax farmers are exploitive by their very nature. They should not be the same person.