I haven't read the paper, only the article. This jumped out at me because, while I'm far, far, far from pro-police, I can see the utility in traffic stops that don't result in official action....
In Riverside, about 83% of deputies’ time spent on officer-initiated stops went toward traffic violations, and just 7% on stops based on reasonable suspicion.
Moreover, most of the stops are pointless, other than inconveniencing citizens, or worse – “a routine practice of pretextual stops,” researchers wrote. Roughly three out of every four hours that Sacramento sheriff’s officers spent investigating traffic violations were for stops that ended in warnings, or no action, for example.
Researchers calculated that more of the departments’ budgets go toward fruitless traffic stops than responses to service calls -- essentially wasting millions of public dollars.
(emphasis mine)
I haven't read the paper, only the article. This jumped out at me because, while I'm far, far, far from pro-police, I can see the utility in traffic stops that don't result in official action. Verbal warnings and reminders to follow safe driving practice from an authority figure can serve as wake-up incidents which can cause drivers to drive more carefully for a time afterward, potentially preventing future damage. While an official citation or ticket would serve the same purpose, a verbal reprimand is less financially damaging to people and provide the least amount of disruption to an individual's routine.
I guess that's a long-winded way to say that I can see the value in verbal warnings from traffic stops and think that labeling all traffic stops which don't result in tickets as "fruitless" is a symptom of exaggeration or an excessive bias.
I think my take away is that we have far better traffic calming measures that reduce dangerous/aggressive driving than a potential ticket from traffic police. It also leads me to question why we...
I think my take away is that we have far better traffic calming measures that reduce dangerous/aggressive driving than a potential ticket from traffic police. It also leads me to question why we give guns to people writing traffic tickets?
I have a cousin who has been a cop for 5 years. He was fully radicalized during initial training and has now killed 2 innocent people while on duty. 2 in 5 years!!! He's still an active cop and has had little to no repercussions to his actions.
In my country those who control traffic are not cops and don't carry guns. It's probably a dangerous job, but at the same time I never hear about people harming them in any way other than shouting.
In my country those who control traffic are not cops and don't carry guns. It's probably a dangerous job, but at the same time I never hear about people harming them in any way other than shouting.
While I see your point, I don't really want 60% of police hours to be going towards traffic warnings. If the vast majority of the time there isn't a great reason to stop someone, that's not a lot...
While I see your point, I don't really want 60% of police hours to be going towards traffic warnings. If the vast majority of the time there isn't a great reason to stop someone, that's not a lot of bang for the buck as far as providing value to society. Also, if we support a workflow that encourages many stops without a ticketable reason, that's just inviting systemic oppression. The article mentions that black people are 2x more likely to be stopped, after all.
The fact that no ticket was served doesn't mean the stop wasn't for a ticketable reason. If your left breaklight isn't working, you would probably appreciate getting away with a friendly reminder...
The fact that no ticket was served doesn't mean the stop wasn't for a ticketable reason. If your left breaklight isn't working, you would probably appreciate getting away with a friendly reminder to get that fixed ASAP. Antagonizing drivers for small violations like that is counterprodoctive.
I'm sure there are lots of ways to optimize day-to-day police work, and many traffic stops may be for racist and other bullshit reasons. But, in theory at least, I think traffic stops and similar interactions are a good opportunity for police to stay in touch with the rest of society. If you only get into contact wih police if you're in real trouble, those situations are more likely to escalate and everyone involved may overreact.
Actually I'd prefer to get the ticket for the brake light, or that no one ever gets a ticket. People still can get tickets without receiving any prior warning, and it's completely arbitrary...
Actually I'd prefer to get the ticket for the brake light, or that no one ever gets a ticket. People still can get tickets without receiving any prior warning, and it's completely arbitrary whether it happens or not. Selective enforcement is the problem. You could argue that it might be good to give cops the opportunity to be lenient when the situation warrants, but it's human nature to be selective in application of that leniency using factors other than just situation (like skin color), which causes bias in the system. So with this in mind, I guess I'd say to build leniency into the system (such as warning citations that lead to fines later) that are consistently enforced rather than just letting the individual officers decide when to be lenient.
Strongly agree here. For things like tail lights being out, I think it'd be fair to write everyone a ticket but allow everyone who gets such a ticket to waive it (at no cost) by uploading a...
Strongly agree here. For things like tail lights being out, I think it'd be fair to write everyone a ticket but allow everyone who gets such a ticket to waive it (at no cost) by uploading a picture of the fixed tail light. Offer financial assistance to people who might not be able to afford that kind of repair (ideally there should be viable alternatives to driving, but I digress).
I've gone back and forth on whether or not I like automated enforcement of violations like running red lights and speeding. Ultimately, I think I'm in favor of automation - assuming the systems are run by the city (not a private company) and they're designed to improve public safety rather than collect revenue. I think we should do away with fines altogether, but I'm not sure what a better option is.
Couple this with laws that adequately protect privacy (limiting use of ALPR for example) and I think we'd get a happy medium of safer roads, fewer police, and minimized negative side effects.
The one thing stopping me from being fully on board with red light cameras, even if they weren't operated for revenue: they fine the owner of the car, not its driver. This works for 90% of cases...
I've gone back and forth on whether or not I like automated enforcement of violations like running red lights and speeding.
The one thing stopping me from being fully on board with red light cameras, even if they weren't operated for revenue: they fine the owner of the car, not its driver. This works for 90% of cases where the owner and driver are the same person. It breaks down with shared cars in families.
Ok, but within a family if you're sharing a car it should be easy enough to handle paying the ticket equitably, right? Or is sharing a car with someone who you can't trust around money a common thing?
Ok, but within a family if you're sharing a car it should be easy enough to handle paying the ticket equitably, right? Or is sharing a car with someone who you can't trust around money a common thing?
This isn't really a problem because it's an open secret that in America the owner can just lie and say they weren't driving the car when it was photographed. And of course there's the issue that...
This isn't really a problem because it's an open secret that in America the owner can just lie and say they weren't driving the car when it was photographed. And of course there's the issue that cars without license plates have become increasingly common as traffic laws are less enforced post-COVID...
I don't know that that follows. If there other better ways to prevent those deaths, there's some reason we're not doing it, and those reasons are not because police give out tickets. There's not...
I don't know that that follows. If there other better ways to prevent those deaths, there's some reason we're not doing it, and those reasons are not because police give out tickets.
There's not only one effective way to address a problem, and even if there was, the somewhat effective mitigation that we're currently doing right now trumps the better solution that we may hypothetically do at some point.
The reason that we're not doing it is largely a lack of political will. That's not caused by police writing tickets, but it is a surmountable obstacle. The somewhat effective mitigation we're...
The reason that we're not doing it is largely a lack of political will. That's not caused by police writing tickets, but it is a surmountable obstacle.
The somewhat effective mitigation we're doing is also not harmless and without cost. It's a dangerous situation for the officer and the person they're interacting with. They can harm each other severely, or each be harmed by passing motorists. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, people of color are more likely to be targeted for these interactions. The officers must also continue doing this consistently forever in order to maintain any benefits. Traffic calming measures and creating a more walkable space doesn't have those drawbacks. It just requires a large investment and a change in the way we do things, which is difficult to make happen, but would be extremely worthwhile.
For the purposes of whether police should enforce traffic laws, it doesn't really matter why we're not doing those other things as long as police enforcing traffic laws isn't the reason, and I...
For the purposes of whether police should enforce traffic laws, it doesn't really matter why we're not doing those other things as long as police enforcing traffic laws isn't the reason, and I don't think it is.
Like I said, that means that those two mitigation methods are not mutually exclusive, so there's no reason to not continue enforcing traffic laws while we work on more effective ways to minimize deaths and injuries, and there's no reason to not continue to enforce traffic laws even after those mitigations are put in place.
The result of the study is that police are not primarily enforcing traffic laws. Issuing warnings may reduce infractions, but it's not enforcement. Uneven enforcement is part of the problem. As...
The result of the study is that police are not primarily enforcing traffic laws. Issuing warnings may reduce infractions, but it's not enforcement. Uneven enforcement is part of the problem. As far as what they are doing when they're initiating stops that aren't enforcement, we don't actually know how much of that is issuing warnings, and how much is harassment, or simply wasting time. It may be effective and useful, it may be harmful and useless, we don't know in what measure. We can measure the effectiveness of roundabouts much more easily.
I'm not sure there's a causative correlation between police stops and traffic deaths. Unless those are deaths from officers shooting the person(s) they're stopping which has a clear causation.
I'm not sure there's a causative correlation between police stops and traffic deaths. Unless those are deaths from officers shooting the person(s) they're stopping which has a clear causation.
I think it's pretty well established that excessive speed is a factor in most traffic fatalities. That means the only thing in question is whether the threat of getting a ticket or license points...
I think it's pretty well established that excessive speed is a factor in most traffic fatalities.
That means the only thing in question is whether the threat of getting a ticket or license points or jail reduces the likelihood of people speeding.
I can only speak personally, but it's the main reason I don't speed in many situations.
If the study says most of the traffic stops are pointless, and waste a lot of time for either no or minor enough offenses, then I think it's not just the correlation, it's whether the actual stops...
If the study says most of the traffic stops are pointless, and waste a lot of time for either no or minor enough offenses, then I think it's not just the correlation, it's whether the actual stops are doing anything useful or just stressing everyone out.
That's not what the study says. The study says that most of officers time overall is spent doing officer initiated stops, versus responding to calls. Which, yes, that makes sense. It doesn't say...
That's not what the study says. The study says that most of officers time overall is spent doing officer initiated stops, versus responding to calls. Which, yes, that makes sense.
It doesn't say that those stops are pointless. There's a line that says that 3/4ths of the time, the stops ended in something other than issuing a ticket, which again, isn't pointless.
If someone's speeding, and a cop pulls them over and tells them to slow down, that wasn't pointless. He stopped someone from breaking the law, which is what they're supposed to do.
Yes, speeding is a minor offense, but it's still breaking the law, and there's a reason that law exists. The idea that police officers shouldn't bother enforcing minor offenses is bizarre to me, because if that was really the case, why bother even making it illegal in the first place?
Sorry the article specifically called them fruitless and a waste of time not the study. Are the stops predominantly for speeding or for other things like brake lights, "improper lane usage", or...
Sorry the article specifically called them fruitless and a waste of time not the study. Are the stops predominantly for speeding or for other things like brake lights, "improper lane usage", or "failure to signal". Which again, I'm not saying no one should care about. But my point is they aren't all speeding stops, they're not necessarily all high rates of speed and thus the stops would need several steps of causative correlation to determine if it actually increases safety or if it puts more people - both officers and citizens - at risk to be pulled over at the side of the road more frequently for minor offenses.
I'm not claiming to have the answer, just that I'm not convinced on the face that this is a truth.
More creative people than I have come up with solutions to having police stops for some of the minor offenses. Police contact is not inherently safe for everyone - and it's often being used as pretext for searches that are fruitless.
Yeah, the conclusion is that the "fruit" of policing is tickets. It's not. Police's job isn't to write tickets. It's why ticket quotas are illegal in most places. The amount of tickets a police...
Yeah, the conclusion is that the "fruit" of policing is tickets.
It's not. Police's job isn't to write tickets. It's why ticket quotas are illegal in most places. The amount of tickets a police department writes is not how we judge their effectiveness.
Police's job is provide public safety. Tickets are one tool they use to provide that safety.
Measuring a cop by how many tickets he writes would be like measuring a baker by how many oven mitts he goes through. The tickets are the tool, not the product.
On the other hand though part of me dislikes any kind of selective enforcement. Allowing police to give verbal warnings to some while ticketing others inherently means their personal and societal...
On the other hand though part of me dislikes any kind of selective enforcement. Allowing police to give verbal warnings to some while ticketing others inherently means their personal and societal biases become an institutional part of law enforcement.
I'm not sure I'm committed to this argument as I haven't fully thought it through, but it could be argued that police should never even be allowed to give verbal warning. They further discrimination and allow unjust laws to remain on the books because they don't get applied to the people in power or their supporters who always get off with warnings.
If tax dollars are going to be spent enforcing a law, shouldn't that enforcement always be subject to the laws we've enacted as a society through our democracy? If we currently think those laws are too harsh to apply to everybody, shouldn't they be rewritten to be more lenient instead of letting people be singled out for disproportionate punishments? They could be more explicit in what specific actions are worthy of a higher punishment, and codify a warning system through democratic law-making processes instead of hoping you don't catch a cop on a bad day.
Instead we outsource judicial powers to law enforcement via selective enforcement. Those laws never end up getting rewritten because they aren't applied to the people who can exert the political will to change them. Law enforcement's hold on selective enforcement powers almost reminds me of corporate self-regulation where they implement a half-solution for optics (that's still unjust) to avoid attracting enough ire for real regulation.
Obviously there's downsides and risks to making police into enforcement robots, but I think it would at least help towards getting people to actually utilize our democratic methods to fix systemic problems that could then be pinned down to specific laws instead of undocumented behavior. Frankly though I've lost so much faith in the American police already that I don't ever really trust their judgement simply by means of their choice to participate in the current system. Anything that makes us rely less on their judgement feels like it would be a win to me now.
Idk, I'm open to thoughts. I can certainly see this falling into the "doesn't work in practice" category that I'm a bit too blinded to see in my current mindset.
I don't know enough to say for this specific question, but in general, I'm wary of the assumption that replacing human judgement with rule-following will result in increased justice. I think we...
I don't know enough to say for this specific question, but in general, I'm wary of the assumption that replacing human judgement with rule-following will result in increased justice. I think we hire people and ask them to use their best judgement for good reasons.
Unfortunately, that does mean that there's the possibility of bias or worse. To some extent, that can be solved with better hiring and better training, but it's hard.
If requiring people to follow the rules evenly doesn't result in increased justice it seems worse to ask individuals to ignore the inconvenient rules on an arbitrary basis rather then reform the...
If requiring people to follow the rules evenly doesn't result in increased justice it seems worse to ask individuals to ignore the inconvenient rules on an arbitrary basis rather then reform the rules.
I put that very abstractly, but an example of allowing less discretion is mandatory sentencing rules that judges have to follow (often very harsh). Judges have more discretion when the sentencing...
I put that very abstractly, but an example of allowing less discretion is mandatory sentencing rules that judges have to follow (often very harsh). Judges have more discretion when the sentencing rules are just guidelines, allowing judges to decide on sentences in a wide range, or even letting the defendant go for time served.
Why might applying rules uniformly be bad? Because the world is complex. People are not all the same and circumstances are not all the same, for reasons not captured by the rules.
Similarly for the police. Are their judgements better or worse if they're allowed to use their discretion? Hell if I know. Certainly there are famous cases of bad judgement, but maybe there are more cases of good judgement that don't make the news?
I think if/when we lived in an environment where we had higher levels of trust in government to have our best interests at heart and a willingness to conform to unspoken norms, an overall...
I think if/when we lived in an environment where we had higher levels of trust in government to have our best interests at heart and a willingness to conform to unspoken norms, an overall environment of genteel rulebreaking to make the system work wouldn't be as harmful. But we don't live in that world, and as such, it seems foolish to trust institutions we very clearly know don't really care about us, and are run by people who will happily upset the apple cart to get things their way in the short term.
Given my understanding of the world, giving cops leeway in ticketing and courts in sentencing just makes it even more "rules for me and none for thee" than it otherwise would be. And you're right that mandatory sentencing is bad. But I'd rather it be uniformly bad and thus more broadly incentivize reform than it be the sort of bad that only really ever gets applied to minorities and other politically weak groups.
I'm not talking about rule-breaking, or at least not by the government. I mean rules that allow government officials to make their own decisions, legally. I gave one example - flexibility in...
I'm not talking about rule-breaking, or at least not by the government. I mean rules that allow government officials to make their own decisions, legally. I gave one example - flexibility in sentencing guidelines. Another example is that prosecutors get to decide which cases to pursue. It's necessary to prioritize because the courts have limited capacity. If they don't do a good job of it, maybe we should elect a new prosecutor?
I would agree, and criminal science supports this. Giving warnings without punishment is extremely important: it creates an atmosphere of lawfulness. It lets people know that someone is watching....
I would agree, and criminal science supports this. Giving warnings without punishment is extremely important: it creates an atmosphere of lawfulness. It lets people know that someone is watching.
That page draws its conclusions from this paper, which has the following in its abstract: Soo... it has nothing to say on how police actually show that people will be caught, the complex...
That page draws its conclusions from this paper, which has the following in its abstract:
There are four major research gaps. The first concerns the mechanism by which police affect perceptions of the probability of apprehension. The second concerns the inextricable link between the deterrent effect of the threat of punishment and the potentially criminogenic effect of the experience of punishment. The third concerns the concept of a sanction regime defined by the sanctions legally available and how that legal authority is administered. Theories of deterrence conceive of sanctions in the singular, not the plural, and do not provide a conceptual basis for considering the differential deterrent effects of different components of the sanction regime. The fourth involves sanction risk perceptions. Establishing the link between risk perceptions and sanction regimes is imperative; unless perceptions adjust, however crudely, to changes in the sanction regime, desired deterrent effects will not be achieved.
Soo... it has nothing to say on how police actually show that people will be caught, the complex interactions between interactions with the cops and characteristics that cause lawbreaking behavior, the specific laws that are in place and how they're implemented, or how to increase the perception of risk when it comes to being caught.
So it does show that people will commit less crimes when they think they'll be caught, but it actually explicitly disavows any support for your conclusion that warnings without punishment is an effective deterrent to lawbreaking.
If someone is pulled over, regardless of whether they're ticketed, surely that counts as "being caught"? I think the paragraph you quoted is getting at the uncertainty around punishments and...
So it does show that people will commit less crimes when they think they'll be caught, but it actually explicitly disavows any support for your conclusion that warnings without punishment is an effective deterrent to lawbreaking.
If someone is pulled over, regardless of whether they're ticketed, surely that counts as "being caught"? I think the paragraph you quoted is getting at the uncertainty around punishments and warnings. If a driver knew that 100% of the time they broke the law they'd get caught, surely that'd affect decision making. Though if being caught always meant a simple verbal warning, that'd probably be less effective but the research is unclear there.
So I'm pretty far from a thin-blue-line kind of person, but I feel like the article and the linked report are missing some kind of comparative context that would make them more persuasive or at...
So I'm pretty far from a thin-blue-line kind of person, but I feel like the article and the linked report are missing some kind of comparative context that would make them more persuasive or at least more interesting. There seems to be a subtext of "look at how much time and money is spent on traffic stops, police are obviously a huge waste", but traffic accidents are one of the leading non-medical causes of death in the United States. It seems plausible that traffic stops that only result in a warning, which the article calls "pointless", "fruitless", and "wasting millions of public dollars", might still have an overall positive effect on public safety, but they jump to the conclusion that all of it was wasted effort.
I think a more convincing argument would be to compare similar cities with different policing strategies or look at crime rates before and after changes in policing techniques. As presented it feels like they probably have a point but didn't show all of their work.
The issue for me is that if ordinary police are not trying to solve murders or burglaries with their time, then who does? Who should? Traffic control is important but so is dealing with existing...
The issue for me is that if ordinary police are not trying to solve murders or burglaries with their time, then who does? Who should? Traffic control is important but so is dealing with existing felonies and preventing future ones from the same bad actors. I live in a city known for inept policing. (That's a kind description) and also known for crime. Recently the governor tasked the state highway patrol to periodically come in and investigate crime in our city and there have been a significantly higher number of arrests during those periods.
I am against abusive policing. I am also against living hostage to violent people and burglars and auto thieves. Actual crime is a problem that needs solutions.
It's a lack of proper seperation of duties. Traffic cops are important, helping direct flow of traffic and ticketing violations, including parking violations. But they don't need guns to do that....
It's a lack of proper seperation of duties.
Traffic cops are important, helping direct flow of traffic and ticketing violations, including parking violations. But they don't need guns to do that.
Being an official witness to gather testimony and gather evidence as a neutral third party is important. But that neutrality is compromised when you exist as part of the same unit doing prosecution.
Being a mediator in public spaces is important, to help keep situations from escalating. But having to juggle that with the above, and also carrying a gun, reduces your ability to specialize at that.
Wouldn't that mean that you'd need way, way more cops? If a regular cop can't do traffic enforcement, and a traffic enforcer can't be an official witness, and a witness can't do mediation, then...
Wouldn't that mean that you'd need way, way more cops?
If a regular cop can't do traffic enforcement, and a traffic enforcer can't be an official witness, and a witness can't do mediation, then you'd need 3 people in an area where those things might be likely to happen instead of one normal police officer.
I do know that many cities have public safety officers that aufment police doing the kind of traffic enforcement you describe though. (I think they mostly direct traffic and respond to minor accidents rather than pull people over though, which can be pretty dangerous.)
I don't think it would cause that much of an expansion of the workforce. I'm going to make up some numbers. If there's 100 units of work each month, and of those official witnesses are needed for...
I don't think it would cause that much of an expansion of the workforce.
I'm going to make up some numbers. If there's 100 units of work each month, and of those official witnesses are needed for 10, traffic enforcement is needed for 70, and mediation is needed for 20, you currently have generalists who do all of them at 6 units per person, and it's fine. You need 16.67 generalists to do the work, so you have 17 people (or more to handle varying demand, but this is already too complex.) But if you switch to specialists that each do 6 units in their area, you get 2 witnesses, 12 traffic enforcers, and 4 mediators, for an overall boost of 1 person.
And this is under the assumption that the specialists are going to only be as effective as the generalists. If they can be more effective, it's possible that needed staffing goes the other direction.
And much like we have volunteer firefighters, we well could probably have something like volunteer part-time mediators for de-escalation which don't have authority to charge people with crimes,...
And much like we have volunteer firefighters, we well could probably have something like volunteer part-time mediators for de-escalation which don't have authority to charge people with crimes, but receive training, further reducing burden on the full-time staffers.
I mean, it's a pretty concise summary, and only sensationalist insofar that it runs completely counter to the primary narrative spouted by public figureheads (and often the public itself)...
I mean, it's a pretty concise summary, and only sensationalist insofar that it runs completely counter to the primary narrative spouted by public figureheads (and often the public itself) regarding policing in the USA.
The TL;DR is that they're mostly harassing black kids, and spending 80%+ of their time on traffic violations that more often than not end with warnings or no action. This is re-enforcing older, existing research that has confirmed much of the same, with new and better data....as the USA has notoriously bad collection on policing data.
"2022 California data further supports findings that police are not primarily crime fighters, consistent with most other research that's been done on this topic since 2015 or so" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
I don't know if they changed it since you posted but "Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data" isn't particularly sensationalist imo with the added context of it being...
I don't know if they changed it since you posted but "Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data" isn't particularly sensationalist imo with the added context of it being data-based, not an opinion.
I haven't read the paper, only the article. This jumped out at me because, while I'm far, far, far from pro-police, I can see the utility in traffic stops that don't result in official action. Verbal warnings and reminders to follow safe driving practice from an authority figure can serve as wake-up incidents which can cause drivers to drive more carefully for a time afterward, potentially preventing future damage. While an official citation or ticket would serve the same purpose, a verbal reprimand is less financially damaging to people and provide the least amount of disruption to an individual's routine.
I guess that's a long-winded way to say that I can see the value in verbal warnings from traffic stops and think that labeling all traffic stops which don't result in tickets as "fruitless" is a symptom of exaggeration or an excessive bias.
I think my take away is that we have far better traffic calming measures that reduce dangerous/aggressive driving than a potential ticket from traffic police. It also leads me to question why we give guns to people writing traffic tickets?
I have a cousin who has been a cop for 5 years. He was fully radicalized during initial training and has now killed 2 innocent people while on duty. 2 in 5 years!!! He's still an active cop and has had little to no repercussions to his actions.
I say let's narrow car lanes, put regulations on car size/weight and bumper height, and remove firearms from "traffic leaning" individuals. We already have specialized teams to deal with active shooters and violent situations.
In my country those who control traffic are not cops and don't carry guns. It's probably a dangerous job, but at the same time I never hear about people harming them in any way other than shouting.
While I see your point, I don't really want 60% of police hours to be going towards traffic warnings. If the vast majority of the time there isn't a great reason to stop someone, that's not a lot of bang for the buck as far as providing value to society. Also, if we support a workflow that encourages many stops without a ticketable reason, that's just inviting systemic oppression. The article mentions that black people are 2x more likely to be stopped, after all.
The fact that no ticket was served doesn't mean the stop wasn't for a ticketable reason. If your left breaklight isn't working, you would probably appreciate getting away with a friendly reminder to get that fixed ASAP. Antagonizing drivers for small violations like that is counterprodoctive.
I'm sure there are lots of ways to optimize day-to-day police work, and many traffic stops may be for racist and other bullshit reasons. But, in theory at least, I think traffic stops and similar interactions are a good opportunity for police to stay in touch with the rest of society. If you only get into contact wih police if you're in real trouble, those situations are more likely to escalate and everyone involved may overreact.
Actually I'd prefer to get the ticket for the brake light, or that no one ever gets a ticket. People still can get tickets without receiving any prior warning, and it's completely arbitrary whether it happens or not. Selective enforcement is the problem. You could argue that it might be good to give cops the opportunity to be lenient when the situation warrants, but it's human nature to be selective in application of that leniency using factors other than just situation (like skin color), which causes bias in the system. So with this in mind, I guess I'd say to build leniency into the system (such as warning citations that lead to fines later) that are consistently enforced rather than just letting the individual officers decide when to be lenient.
Strongly agree here. For things like tail lights being out, I think it'd be fair to write everyone a ticket but allow everyone who gets such a ticket to waive it (at no cost) by uploading a picture of the fixed tail light. Offer financial assistance to people who might not be able to afford that kind of repair (ideally there should be viable alternatives to driving, but I digress).
I've gone back and forth on whether or not I like automated enforcement of violations like running red lights and speeding. Ultimately, I think I'm in favor of automation - assuming the systems are run by the city (not a private company) and they're designed to improve public safety rather than collect revenue. I think we should do away with fines altogether, but I'm not sure what a better option is.
Couple this with laws that adequately protect privacy (limiting use of ALPR for example) and I think we'd get a happy medium of safer roads, fewer police, and minimized negative side effects.
The one thing stopping me from being fully on board with red light cameras, even if they weren't operated for revenue: they fine the owner of the car, not its driver. This works for 90% of cases where the owner and driver are the same person. It breaks down with shared cars in families.
Ok, but within a family if you're sharing a car it should be easy enough to handle paying the ticket equitably, right? Or is sharing a car with someone who you can't trust around money a common thing?
This isn't really a problem because it's an open secret that in America the owner can just lie and say they weren't driving the car when it was photographed. And of course there's the issue that cars without license plates have become increasingly common as traffic laws are less enforced post-COVID...
More people die in car accidents than they do from homicide. It seems like a pretty good use of police time on the face of it.
Not if there are other, better ways to prevent those deaths.
I don't know that that follows. If there other better ways to prevent those deaths, there's some reason we're not doing it, and those reasons are not because police give out tickets.
There's not only one effective way to address a problem, and even if there was, the somewhat effective mitigation that we're currently doing right now trumps the better solution that we may hypothetically do at some point.
The reason that we're not doing it is largely a lack of political will. That's not caused by police writing tickets, but it is a surmountable obstacle.
The somewhat effective mitigation we're doing is also not harmless and without cost. It's a dangerous situation for the officer and the person they're interacting with. They can harm each other severely, or each be harmed by passing motorists. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, people of color are more likely to be targeted for these interactions. The officers must also continue doing this consistently forever in order to maintain any benefits. Traffic calming measures and creating a more walkable space doesn't have those drawbacks. It just requires a large investment and a change in the way we do things, which is difficult to make happen, but would be extremely worthwhile.
For the purposes of whether police should enforce traffic laws, it doesn't really matter why we're not doing those other things as long as police enforcing traffic laws isn't the reason, and I don't think it is.
Like I said, that means that those two mitigation methods are not mutually exclusive, so there's no reason to not continue enforcing traffic laws while we work on more effective ways to minimize deaths and injuries, and there's no reason to not continue to enforce traffic laws even after those mitigations are put in place.
The result of the study is that police are not primarily enforcing traffic laws. Issuing warnings may reduce infractions, but it's not enforcement. Uneven enforcement is part of the problem. As far as what they are doing when they're initiating stops that aren't enforcement, we don't actually know how much of that is issuing warnings, and how much is harassment, or simply wasting time. It may be effective and useful, it may be harmful and useless, we don't know in what measure. We can measure the effectiveness of roundabouts much more easily.
I'm not sure there's a causative correlation between police stops and traffic deaths. Unless those are deaths from officers shooting the person(s) they're stopping which has a clear causation.
I think it's pretty well established that excessive speed is a factor in most traffic fatalities.
That means the only thing in question is whether the threat of getting a ticket or license points or jail reduces the likelihood of people speeding.
I can only speak personally, but it's the main reason I don't speed in many situations.
If the study says most of the traffic stops are pointless, and waste a lot of time for either no or minor enough offenses, then I think it's not just the correlation, it's whether the actual stops are doing anything useful or just stressing everyone out.
That's not what the study says. The study says that most of officers time overall is spent doing officer initiated stops, versus responding to calls. Which, yes, that makes sense.
It doesn't say that those stops are pointless. There's a line that says that 3/4ths of the time, the stops ended in something other than issuing a ticket, which again, isn't pointless.
If someone's speeding, and a cop pulls them over and tells them to slow down, that wasn't pointless. He stopped someone from breaking the law, which is what they're supposed to do.
Yes, speeding is a minor offense, but it's still breaking the law, and there's a reason that law exists. The idea that police officers shouldn't bother enforcing minor offenses is bizarre to me, because if that was really the case, why bother even making it illegal in the first place?
Sorry the article specifically called them fruitless and a waste of time not the study. Are the stops predominantly for speeding or for other things like brake lights, "improper lane usage", or "failure to signal". Which again, I'm not saying no one should care about. But my point is they aren't all speeding stops, they're not necessarily all high rates of speed and thus the stops would need several steps of causative correlation to determine if it actually increases safety or if it puts more people - both officers and citizens - at risk to be pulled over at the side of the road more frequently for minor offenses.
I'm not claiming to have the answer, just that I'm not convinced on the face that this is a truth.
More creative people than I have come up with solutions to having police stops for some of the minor offenses. Police contact is not inherently safe for everyone - and it's often being used as pretext for searches that are fruitless.
Is a problem.
Another reason why public transportation is good
Yeah, the conclusion is that the "fruit" of policing is tickets.
It's not. Police's job isn't to write tickets. It's why ticket quotas are illegal in most places. The amount of tickets a police department writes is not how we judge their effectiveness.
Police's job is provide public safety. Tickets are one tool they use to provide that safety.
Measuring a cop by how many tickets he writes would be like measuring a baker by how many oven mitts he goes through. The tickets are the tool, not the product.
On the other hand though part of me dislikes any kind of selective enforcement. Allowing police to give verbal warnings to some while ticketing others inherently means their personal and societal biases become an institutional part of law enforcement.
I'm not sure I'm committed to this argument as I haven't fully thought it through, but it could be argued that police should never even be allowed to give verbal warning. They further discrimination and allow unjust laws to remain on the books because they don't get applied to the people in power or their supporters who always get off with warnings.
If tax dollars are going to be spent enforcing a law, shouldn't that enforcement always be subject to the laws we've enacted as a society through our democracy? If we currently think those laws are too harsh to apply to everybody, shouldn't they be rewritten to be more lenient instead of letting people be singled out for disproportionate punishments? They could be more explicit in what specific actions are worthy of a higher punishment, and codify a warning system through democratic law-making processes instead of hoping you don't catch a cop on a bad day.
Instead we outsource judicial powers to law enforcement via selective enforcement. Those laws never end up getting rewritten because they aren't applied to the people who can exert the political will to change them. Law enforcement's hold on selective enforcement powers almost reminds me of corporate self-regulation where they implement a half-solution for optics (that's still unjust) to avoid attracting enough ire for real regulation.
Obviously there's downsides and risks to making police into enforcement robots, but I think it would at least help towards getting people to actually utilize our democratic methods to fix systemic problems that could then be pinned down to specific laws instead of undocumented behavior. Frankly though I've lost so much faith in the American police already that I don't ever really trust their judgement simply by means of their choice to participate in the current system. Anything that makes us rely less on their judgement feels like it would be a win to me now.
Idk, I'm open to thoughts. I can certainly see this falling into the "doesn't work in practice" category that I'm a bit too blinded to see in my current mindset.
I don't know enough to say for this specific question, but in general, I'm wary of the assumption that replacing human judgement with rule-following will result in increased justice. I think we hire people and ask them to use their best judgement for good reasons.
Unfortunately, that does mean that there's the possibility of bias or worse. To some extent, that can be solved with better hiring and better training, but it's hard.
If requiring people to follow the rules evenly doesn't result in increased justice it seems worse to ask individuals to ignore the inconvenient rules on an arbitrary basis rather then reform the rules.
I put that very abstractly, but an example of allowing less discretion is mandatory sentencing rules that judges have to follow (often very harsh). Judges have more discretion when the sentencing rules are just guidelines, allowing judges to decide on sentences in a wide range, or even letting the defendant go for time served.
Why might applying rules uniformly be bad? Because the world is complex. People are not all the same and circumstances are not all the same, for reasons not captured by the rules.
Similarly for the police. Are their judgements better or worse if they're allowed to use their discretion? Hell if I know. Certainly there are famous cases of bad judgement, but maybe there are more cases of good judgement that don't make the news?
Ultimately I don’t think the judgement should lie with police. A judge (or jury) is much more equipped to handle circumstances needing discretion.
Even traffic court is more inconvenient for everyone, compared to the police letting someone go with a warning. (Let alone a jury trial.)
I think if/when we lived in an environment where we had higher levels of trust in government to have our best interests at heart and a willingness to conform to unspoken norms, an overall environment of genteel rulebreaking to make the system work wouldn't be as harmful. But we don't live in that world, and as such, it seems foolish to trust institutions we very clearly know don't really care about us, and are run by people who will happily upset the apple cart to get things their way in the short term.
Given my understanding of the world, giving cops leeway in ticketing and courts in sentencing just makes it even more "rules for me and none for thee" than it otherwise would be. And you're right that mandatory sentencing is bad. But I'd rather it be uniformly bad and thus more broadly incentivize reform than it be the sort of bad that only really ever gets applied to minorities and other politically weak groups.
I'm not talking about rule-breaking, or at least not by the government. I mean rules that allow government officials to make their own decisions, legally. I gave one example - flexibility in sentencing guidelines. Another example is that prosecutors get to decide which cases to pursue. It's necessary to prioritize because the courts have limited capacity. If they don't do a good job of it, maybe we should elect a new prosecutor?
This isn't about "genteel rulebreaking" at all.
I would agree, and criminal science supports this. Giving warnings without punishment is extremely important: it creates an atmosphere of lawfulness. It lets people know that someone is watching.
From: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence
We know:
That page draws its conclusions from this paper, which has the following in its abstract:
Soo... it has nothing to say on how police actually show that people will be caught, the complex interactions between interactions with the cops and characteristics that cause lawbreaking behavior, the specific laws that are in place and how they're implemented, or how to increase the perception of risk when it comes to being caught.
So it does show that people will commit less crimes when they think they'll be caught, but it actually explicitly disavows any support for your conclusion that warnings without punishment is an effective deterrent to lawbreaking.
In fact, your link specifically says: "Certainty has a greater impact on deterrence than severity of punishment." That doesn't sound like "cops should have the ability to cut some people a break" to me.
If someone is pulled over, regardless of whether they're ticketed, surely that counts as "being caught"? I think the paragraph you quoted is getting at the uncertainty around punishments and warnings. If a driver knew that 100% of the time they broke the law they'd get caught, surely that'd affect decision making. Though if being caught always meant a simple verbal warning, that'd probably be less effective but the research is unclear there.
So I'm pretty far from a thin-blue-line kind of person, but I feel like the article and the linked report are missing some kind of comparative context that would make them more persuasive or at least more interesting. There seems to be a subtext of "look at how much time and money is spent on traffic stops, police are obviously a huge waste", but traffic accidents are one of the leading non-medical causes of death in the United States. It seems plausible that traffic stops that only result in a warning, which the article calls "pointless", "fruitless", and "wasting millions of public dollars", might still have an overall positive effect on public safety, but they jump to the conclusion that all of it was wasted effort.
I think a more convincing argument would be to compare similar cities with different policing strategies or look at crime rates before and after changes in policing techniques. As presented it feels like they probably have a point but didn't show all of their work.
The issue for me is that if ordinary police are not trying to solve murders or burglaries with their time, then who does? Who should? Traffic control is important but so is dealing with existing felonies and preventing future ones from the same bad actors. I live in a city known for inept policing. (That's a kind description) and also known for crime. Recently the governor tasked the state highway patrol to periodically come in and investigate crime in our city and there have been a significantly higher number of arrests during those periods.
I am against abusive policing. I am also against living hostage to violent people and burglars and auto thieves. Actual crime is a problem that needs solutions.
It's a lack of proper seperation of duties.
Traffic cops are important, helping direct flow of traffic and ticketing violations, including parking violations. But they don't need guns to do that.
Being an official witness to gather testimony and gather evidence as a neutral third party is important. But that neutrality is compromised when you exist as part of the same unit doing prosecution.
Being a mediator in public spaces is important, to help keep situations from escalating. But having to juggle that with the above, and also carrying a gun, reduces your ability to specialize at that.
Wouldn't that mean that you'd need way, way more cops?
If a regular cop can't do traffic enforcement, and a traffic enforcer can't be an official witness, and a witness can't do mediation, then you'd need 3 people in an area where those things might be likely to happen instead of one normal police officer.
I do know that many cities have public safety officers that aufment police doing the kind of traffic enforcement you describe though. (I think they mostly direct traffic and respond to minor accidents rather than pull people over though, which can be pretty dangerous.)
I don't think it would cause that much of an expansion of the workforce.
I'm going to make up some numbers. If there's 100 units of work each month, and of those official witnesses are needed for 10, traffic enforcement is needed for 70, and mediation is needed for 20, you currently have generalists who do all of them at 6 units per person, and it's fine. You need 16.67 generalists to do the work, so you have 17 people (or more to handle varying demand, but this is already too complex.) But if you switch to specialists that each do 6 units in their area, you get 2 witnesses, 12 traffic enforcers, and 4 mediators, for an overall boost of 1 person.
And this is under the assumption that the specialists are going to only be as effective as the generalists. If they can be more effective, it's possible that needed staffing goes the other direction.
And much like we have volunteer firefighters, we well could probably have something like volunteer part-time mediators for de-escalation which don't have authority to charge people with crimes, but receive training, further reducing burden on the full-time staffers.
Kind of like a neighborhood watch.
Detectives are who are spending their time trying to solve murders and burglaries. Ordinary police respond to calls and perform patrols.
The headline is pretty sensationalist, but not sure how to write a concise alternative.
I mean, it's a pretty concise summary, and only sensationalist insofar that it runs completely counter to the primary narrative spouted by public figureheads (and often the public itself) regarding policing in the USA.
The TL;DR is that they're mostly harassing black kids, and spending 80%+ of their time on traffic violations that more often than not end with warnings or no action. This is re-enforcing older, existing research that has confirmed much of the same, with new and better data....as the USA has notoriously bad collection on policing data.
"2022 California data further supports findings that police are not primarily crime fighters, consistent with most other research that's been done on this topic since 2015 or so" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
I don't know if they changed it since you posted but "Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data" isn't particularly sensationalist imo with the added context of it being data-based, not an opinion.
Probably not, as this article was published back in 2022.
If only!
The very first line of the article, perhaps?