Public servants cost the taxpayer's money, and police officers are public servants; so fiscally concerned citizens should be concerned about how much police officers are costing them in the real world, alongside whether or not the officers are actually conducting themselves in a manner which is in the true interest of the public good. In point of fact, on a given day, there are all sorts of arrests of citizens for all sorts of alleged crimes, from the arrest of people for the pettiest of crimes, or even worse, trumped up charges of a crime, to crimes of real import. In the scheme of things, from a public safety standpoint, it would make a lot more sense that arrests be made of people that are actually harming others, or harming property, as compared to arresting people that are essentially committing "crimes" that are victimless. Unfortunately, though, because of the way the system is structured, we find that the desire for extra pay and the implementation of unofficial quotas can upset the sensibility of even the best of public servants, because police officers and those that manage them are prone to desire to "game" the system, for their own benefit, because as in most things, money matters.
That is to say, in the incarceration facilities and justice departments that are part of the system, they have a constant need for inventory, and those being arrested are the very first process in keeping that inventory, fresh. Further to the point, police officers are well aware that it behooves them to concentrate their arresting activities upon those that have the least representation in a given community, which thereby signifies that they overly target their arrests upon the poor and disenfranchised. Additionally, police officers know that if they don't consistently bring in a certain amount of arrests or tickets on a given shift or workweek, that they will not only have to answer for that shortfall in their unofficial quota, but may suffer directly from their lack of doing their part by subsequently having their shift hours changed to something far less desirable, as well as being susceptible to the receipt of a poor evaluation score, negating therefore their opportunity to advance or even to maintain their job. Also, police officers know that the easiest way to augment their pay is to make arrests, especially near the end of their shift, in order to thereby garner overtime by the process of taking their "collar" through the procedures and paperwork that each arrest so necessitates. This perverse incentive means that police officers have a strong bias to arrest those that have no voice, not really because these people are a clear and present menace to society, but mainly because there is good money to be had, by that overtime, and a timely arrest makes for easy money.
If, justice departments, actually were more concerned about doing what is right by their community, they would make it their point to concentrate their resources against those criminal activities that actually have an adverse material impact upon their communities, and rather than arresting citizens for drug possession and victimless crimes, would see to it, that it would be of far better service to that community, to address these non-desirable activities through proactive social services and the like. Instead, we have police departments that spend far too much time arresting those that by their arrest aren't going to make that community any safer, in which the taxpayer's pay for this, without getting anything that would approach fair value; nor is good justice rendered, for that matter.