I think what he’s saying is that at some point the penalty is too low and the time has no value or the price of the ticket isn’t worth the officers time.. Seattle has already started to have this problem where crimes where the city will not enforce laws against hobos and addicts. It’s not worth the officers time to arrest someone who is on heavy drugs and committed property crimes because the processing will take a long time and the tiny penalty is not a deterrent. It’s really hard to punish people who are living near rock bottom without going either way overboard or not being effective.
So, the point of it being income based is that the cost of the fine will have an impact on everybody getting the fine, not just poor people. The price being too high for rich people while simultaneously too low for poor people doesn’t really fit. Maybe he was poorly quoted, but he didn’t mention quotas which isn’t really a problem with this type of fine, it’s a problem with police. If it was public knowledge that I didn’t do my job all month and had to scramble to finish it at the end I wouldn’t be very highly regarded. Having said that even if the problem stays and we change the fines they could simply make the quota about the number of fines as opposed to the amount of money coming in.