Illinois ticket quota ban is useless to stop nation's 'stationary badged bandits'

Everyone has experienced the casual corruption of tiny burgs whose only purpose in life is to loot passing motorists of their hard earned money.  Like with most things, Illinois cops are particularly corrupt in this regard, taking the speed trap to ridiculous lengths by combining it with 'criminal forfeiture' laws to target people driving expensive cars with out of state licenses so that they can 'confiscate' these four wheeled 'crime implements' and turn them into cash for themselves.  They like to target people who look like they might smoke marijuana and then follow them on the interstate until they make a mistake like failing to signal for a lane turn or some other trivial 'offense'.  I was driving through the state in my parents minivan with Texas plates and one 'county mounty' followed me through two counties at exactly the speed limit  - 45 minutes directly behind me slowing down when I slowed down, speeding up when I sped up until finally, I found a rest stop to pull over in.  Ok, just to be clear:  I do not smoke marijuana - mostly because it makes me wheeze - I am a very conventional looking middle aged white man who was driving my 80 year old parent's minnivan for chrissakes.  And the last moving violation I had was a dozen years ago.

So if they'll screw with me, they'll screw with anyone.  Which makes me very supportive of anything that might restrain the stationary bandits that line our highways and byways looking for an excuse to relieve us of our wallets and cars. But the notion of a 'quota ban' is clearly bubba bait designed by the Illinois legislature to deflect attention without solving the problem.  You can tell it is because the second most corrupt state - New Jersey is quickly taking it up.  Innovations in state criminality spread rapidly.  The real game is the criminal forfeiture and besides your average speed trap burg has only a few cops and since the entire city government is typically a criminal enterprise, omerta will protect the guilty.

No, what's needed is a limiting law.  Municipalities should be limited in the number of traffic fines that they can assess based upon the traffic volume on their busiest arteries.  Some simple number like 2 or 3 times the state median municipality infraction rate should trigger outside scrutiny and result in all the excess fines plus some solid percentage of the other fines to be forfeited to the state and rebated back to the victims on a pro rata basis.  Asset forfeiture should be radically narrowed to focus only on serious crimes and the proceeds should not go to the department that does the forfeiture.

Taking these two common sense steps would go a long way towards improving the reputation of the police in our communities.  And decent, law abiding policemen (there are some, it's not all stationary bandits out there) should welcome the elimination of corrupt practices that leave conservatives like me more frightened for my kids safety from the depredations of the police than from that of criminals.