New scam by suburban police

Suburban police have apparently come up with a new scam to justify their jobs and raise revenue for their towns. The policemen simply go through shopping center parking lots, removing vehicle license stickers and then ticketing those cars for driving without a sticker.

[Some background: States like Illinois no longer issue aluminum license plates every year. Instead, they merely issue vehicle license stickers that the car owner sticks to his license plate. The stickers are supposed to be impossible to remove, but that turns out to be a joke--they can be pulled off rather easily.]

After getting a ticket for this manufactured infraction, a car owner who calls up the town hall is told that "the stickers fall off all the time" and then the owner "should use Super Glue." The truth, however, is that the stickers certainly don't "fall off" anywhere but in one or a few crooked towns. The other excuse given by the town hall is that "crooks pull a sticker off one car to use it on another." If true, this would clearly happen most often in the poorest and highest-crime neighborhoods, but it doesn't--it mysteriously happens in one or a few lily-white suburbs only.

The most logical explanation is that suburban policemen are under pressure to justify their own jobs and to raise revenue for their towns. There isn't really enough crime in a lily-white suburb to justify such a bloated police force, so the police need to "manufacture" petty crime in order to provide a reason for their own existence.

So why doesn't this happen in a city (of 100,000 people or more)?

1) A real city typically has real crime to keep its policemen busy.

2) A real city has so-called home rule power, which includes the ability to levy a sales tax to support itself. A real city doesn't have to resort to penny-ante tickets to raise money, nor would such chicken feed provide any significant benefit to the city budget.