Having an "effectively infinite" list of crime isn't the result of a lack of funding, but the size of the set of things that technically constitute "crimes". Quadrupling their funding would still leave them with an effectively infinite amount of crime they could deal with. (This being another place where "unbounded" is probably a better word than "infinite"... there isn't literally an infinite amount of crime, but it is the case that pretty much no matter what they do, when they reach for another crime to prosecute, there will always be one there.)
One of the subtle checks & balances in our system is that we don't even want prosecution to literally go after every crime... we want them to choose the things that are actually important. There's a lot of things labeled "crimes" today where the cost of enforcement greatly exceeds any value to society of that enforcement.
(Expanding on that, one of the biggest problems, if not the biggest problem, with automated crime enforcement is that it removes this check & balance that almost nobody has even realized exists yet.)
That said, I will still take "biased human picking what to prosecute" over "a prosecution sufficiently funded to prosecute literally everything". I mean, sure, I'd prefer "real justice", but "biased human" is still constrained in their actions and has to produce enough results useful to society to be able to hide their corruption in, whereas totally perfect enforcement would be a nightmare.
If we can imagine perfect AD funding, we can imagine better legislation, can't we? You can't have perfect legislation (philosophy is not yet advanced enough) and you can't have perfect AD funding, but here is my proposed solution: every time you improve AD funding you improve legislation, so that they both converge in lockstep to perfect in the limit of infinite time.
I think first perhaps we should decide on a good way to measure legislation if you plan to improve it. Good luck with that, because now you're right back to the problem of people's biases affecting the outcome.
The world is made of individuals and groups with biases, and as long as they have even the tiniest amount of power, those biases cannot be removed from the process.
An open legislative process involving debate among many representatives is way less susceptible to bias than the personal priorities of a district attorney.
> here is my proposed solution: every time you improve AD funding you improve legislation
My point is that locking "improved funding" to "improved legislation" is impossibly without a way to usefully measure improvements in legislation. Improving funding has a few ways to measure it, but in the discussion we've been having I took improved to mean "more". As for legislation, I don't think we want more legislation, but any measurement is rife with problems. As a simple example, legislation if perpetual until changed (or created with an expiration), and laws created today with a beneficial effect may have a deleterious effect years or decades from now. Examples of this are abundant, such as patent and copyright laws not dealing with the nuance of the digital age, to privacy laws not taking into effect the ability to store everything that happens in a way that can be indexed and accessed because of computers.
A moderately good law today may become a real problem tomorrow. Given that, how do we measure legislation when the effect time is essentially unbounded?
Would it be possible to design a criminal justice system that recognizes only a bounded amount of crime?
I.e., a legal system where the "choosing" of which cases to go after, is somehow built into the letter of the law (maybe with a high bar in the indictment process?), such that everything that is illegal by the letter of the law is something necessary to go after (the societal equivalent of a showstopping bug—serial killers, for example), rather than just a "nice-to-have" that could be indefinitely deprioritized.
yah, besides decriminalizing large swaths of behavior to make case loads manageable, let's further strike down any law that's more costly to enforce than it provides in benefits (it's literally absurd to have them). instead, put those in a civics manual that guides people on how to be a good citizen and avoid conflict (and lawsuits) with others. and teach civics in school again.
that would only be true if the only benefits were financial ones to the municipality. that also requires a level of control and coordination that isn't present in many (especially larger) jurisdictions.
you'd instead be giving police the freed time and resources to both investigate real cromes like murder, theft and corruption, and also commit to community policing around observing, teaching and encouraging good civic behavior, rather than writing pointless jaywalking tickets.
One of the subtle checks & balances in our system is that we don't even want prosecution to literally go after every crime... we want them to choose the things that are actually important. There's a lot of things labeled "crimes" today where the cost of enforcement greatly exceeds any value to society of that enforcement.
(Expanding on that, one of the biggest problems, if not the biggest problem, with automated crime enforcement is that it removes this check & balance that almost nobody has even realized exists yet.)