Of course, this also assumes that felonious arrests rise or fall in a direct correlation with the felony crime rate. This data shows no clear correlation, direct or otherwise, between stops, misdemeanors, and their affects on felonious crime.

This is conclusive to what people have recognized from the time the very first laws were laid down in roman times, and before that, which is that desperate people, or evil people, bad people will always find a way around the law, or do it in spite of the law, while good people don't need the law to tell them how to act and will act good regardless of the law, but they will certainly not be moral if they follow immoral laws.

Let's talk about the costs. The economic burden placed on our system by continuing to enforce these laws, albeit less stringently as of late, is simply enormous. Officer overtime costs, court fees, and other associated costs come out of the taxpayer's pocket.

That a nice way of saying that the money people pay in form of sales tax, tax on fuel, tax on production and materials included in the products themselves, import tax on some products, the wages, all the way to city and state/federal taxes, somehow get approportionated back into the community or at least into the running of government in all its functions, espeically policing, but what is happening is these taxes pay the interest on the loans that fund the police department, that fund state and federal programs like the PD. These things are paid with by the loans which the federal government requests with each budged, from the fed, and those taxes do nothing but pay the interest on those loans, if that.

To close, the people that fund the police are not the community, or taxes, but the people that write the loans, and they get to say how much anybody gets, not anyone else.

In my view, the legalization of marijuana would go a long way in helping to restore trust between law enforcement and the public simply by removing one of the most common catalysts for police encounters from the equation. And, as shown in the data above, heavy-handed enforcement on misdemeanor offenses (such as CPM) has shown little to no correlation to reducing violent felony crime. America needs to let this particular law go the way of the Dodo bird, so that police departments nationwide can focus their efforts more responsibly, most particularly on the deterrence and investigation of violent crime.

Arguably not including police brutality, police murder, rape and pedophilia, asset forfeiture and other forms of theft, intimidation and civil sabotage as evident by the NYPD during occupy. Those will continue, and regardless of the numerous cops, the Tens of Thousands of cops against prohibition, nobody has a right to legalize nature, any more than they have to outlaw it, and enforcing such things for over 90 years in spite of weed being the most studied plant, won't be repaired because they admit that "it dodon't work"

For cops to repair their image it would require them to stop policing the roadways like they own them, being involved in "deterrence" as any reasonable person would recognize the aforementioned truth that it's impossible to prevent bad people from doing bad, as impossible it is from preventing accidental fires or natural disasters and good people don't need to be told how to act. The whole point of police is to be responsible for responding and investigating crimes, and it shoots itself in the foot with each cop driving as they stare into their computer instead of the road, while pulling people over for talking on the phone, and especially by enforcing IQ Limits for who can be part of the process of responding and investigating crimes. A monopoly on force doesn't seem like the way to implement efficiency or utility, but more as a way to fleece people while evading accountability and exemplifying hypocrisy.