Someone was asking how traffic and road fines are handled in the United States.
It doesn't matter if your a US citizen or not. If your pulled over by the police in the United States in almost every jurisdiction your given a ticket for your offense. Not only are you not asked to pay on the spot you in all likelyhood can't pay on the spot. The police are not collections agents they are law enforcement. They issue you a ticket. You can pay the ticket by mail before the specified date or appear in court. If you don't pay then it is assumed that you wanted to appear in court.
When you don't show to court the judge issues a bench warrant requiring you to appear. This automatically puts you into the system and flagged so the next time your stopped you are arrested and taken to the local jail to await a hearing with a judge.
County clerks collect money. Not police.
If your a foreign national and leave the country then obviously you aren't going to be tracked down by US police to get the cash. You are however going to have a really fun time the next time you try to come back to the US via a border checkpoint.
I remember very vividly an incident 20 odd years ago when I was 17 and pulled over for speeding the first time. I asked the officer how much the ticket would cost me and tried to give him cash. He immediately stepped back from me and told me to put my money away or he might think I was trying to bribe him. They don't take cash. Period.
Basically the police make court documents. They don't handle the entire process.
-Rav
Excluding Wisconsin as stated is post #179.
With your post you have also described the protocol used in Europe. As an exception some countries (Spain for instance) have changed their protocol when it cames to giving tickets to foreigners, because it would be otherwise hard to collect the tickets afterwards from some person living in another country. This is due to the
Schengen Area which includes most of the Europe.
"The Schengen Area is a group of twenty-five European countries which have abolished all border controls between each other. It originates from the eponymous agreement signed in the Luxembourgish town of Schengen in 1985, which has since been absorbed into the European Union. All EU members except Ireland and the United Kingdom are required to implement Schengen and, with the exceptions of Bulgaria, Cyprus and Romania, have done so. Three non-member states, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland, have also implemented the Schengen rules. As such, the Area currently covers a population of over 400 million people and an area of 4,312,099 square kilometres (1,664,911 sq mi).
Implementing the Schengen rules involves eliminating border controls with other Schengen members while simultaneously strengthening border controls with non-member states. The rules include provisions on common policy on the temporary entry of persons (including the Schengen visa), the harmonisation of external border controls, and cross-border police and judicial co-operation.
A passport or an EU approved national identity card should be brought anyway when travelling, since identity checks can be done at places like airports, hotels and by the police. This depends on national rules and varies between countries. Occasionally regular border controls are done between Schengen countries."
Because of the bolded part there isn't actually a similiar system like in the US that you mentioned. Somebody with a standing violation can travel back to the "crime scene" many times because the border and other identity checks are random when traveling by road.
