Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/police-are-not-primarily-crime-fighters-according-data-2022-11-02/

by wahnfrieden • 3 years ago

129 167 3 years ago

rolph4• 3 years ago

these numbers[data] came from the article :

[In 2019, 88% of the time L.A. County sheriff’s officers spent on stops was for officer-initiated stops rather than in response to calls. The overwhelming majority of that time – 79% – was spent on traffic violations. By contrast, just 11% of those hours was spent on stops based on reasonable suspicion of a crime.

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].

[0] The report was published Oct. 25 by advocacy group Catalyst California and the ACLU of Southern California. It relies on county budgets' numbers and new policing data provided under the state’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act, which took effect in 2019.

[1] Report https://catalyst-ca.cdn.prismic.io/catalyst-ca/126c30a8-852c... [PDF]

throwaway33381• 3 years ago

I feel as though this isn't that surprising when you realize that for most municipalities police forces are revenue generators. Meaning that their main job is in increasing the funding of the precincts they belong to by issuing tickets to traffic violators. You could go a step forward and say they are systemically incentivized to target specific groups due to them being perceived as outsiders but I think a lot of police precincts still enforce broken window theory.

wahnfrieden10• 3 years ago

Pretext stops don’t generate ticketing revenue. They’re used in the hopes of finding more serious (by law anyway) crimes once they’re able to get a closer look.

tremon• 3 years ago

most of the stops are pointless, other than inconveniencing citizens [..] that ended in warnings

Such actions are most emphatically NOT pointless, they are preventative: informing someone that their bad behaviour is noticed is often enough to keep well-meaning citizens on the right side of the law. What's your proposed alternative? That every interaction with the police must result in a fine?

deepfriedchokes• 3 years ago

Isn’t that really just harassment and intimidation?

bluepizza• 3 years ago

Aren't accidents something like the third largest cause of death in the US?

Sounds quite logical to me that they'd spend the largest amount of time and resources on that.

wahnfrieden10• 3 years ago

These are pretext stops. They target people they aim to escalate charges with, not dangerous drivers. That’s why they end with minor warnings.

ldoughty2• 3 years ago

The source material makes it sound like the traffic stops are like.... profiling people and wasting their time...

The 79% on traffic stops is an officer acting on what they classified to be a traffic violation -- it's not 79% of them are pretextual stops & warnings, and 11% are catching speeders/reckless drivers... it's 79% pulling over speeders/reckless/etc. drivers and 11% "reasonable suspicion of a crime that is not traffic related"

If you think about it that way... People CONSANTLY violate traffic laws... So it's not terribly surprising. I certainly hope calls for help are promptly answered, but that source doesn't seem to include data other than the fact that responding to calls for help takes twice as long as a traffic stop for an officer's time.

Edit: removed attribution to parent post

rolph4• 3 years ago

actually the entire block of text, is from the article, none are my comments, i posted this for convenience so people would have it righthere.

so please take this into account.

rolph4• 3 years ago

>ldoughty I get it, its an honest mistake, in response to a muddy quotation style.

cheers

mschuster917• 3 years ago

Who would have guessed... the problem is that police and especially police unions became behemoths in themselves, effectively being ungovernable and unauditable. And you can't even change that because police can simply refuse to do their job without any repercussions and have done so multiple times [1].

Under the current set of rules, ACAB until proven otherwise. Police, in terms of the institution police, the theories behind policing, and its staff, need to be torn down completely and replaced by something entirely new, based on an actual legally defined purpose which was democratically decided and with clear metrics, transparency and accountability on all levels. No charlatans like Dave Grossman ("Killology") and his ilk should be allowed anywhere near a police precinct.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/what-can-mayors-do-when-t...

influx2• 3 years ago

I was with you until you used the inflammatory ACAB term. It’s incredibly offensive and doesn’t help your argument.

mschuster917• 3 years ago

Of course it is offensive. But so are all the "cops" who follow the Korpsgeist and keep their mouths shut when they see their colleagues openly break the law. Or those that spend 80% of their work time on "traffic stops" aka harassing Black people and other minorities.

Remember George Floyd or all the others who died under suspicious circumstances without a bystander live-streaming their deaths.

megabless123• 3 years ago

Counterpoint: it's not offensive at all and helps lots of people to understand the inherent problems with policing.

james4k2• 3 years ago

Time and time again this kind of civility check, often arbitrary, reinforces the existing social order and the everyday violence underneath it. But that's okay because if you don't pass the civility check, you are deemed undeserving of humanity.

eschaton2• 3 years ago

What are you, a bootlicker?

throwaway649302• 3 years ago

I feel like this perspective comes from not having coming face to face with the nihilistic, sociopathic behavior of a decent percent of the underclasses. Some people don’t understand anything but immediate pain. It’s tragic, the life circumstances that got them to that point, but that’s where they are. Maybe we can do things to prevent more kids from growing up into that. But right now, millions of good people, who can’t afford to move to a nice suburb far away from the problem, need cops who are willing to bring that pain, and if that doesn’t work, lock the criminals up until they’re old enough to be docile.

mschuster917• 3 years ago

I feel like this perspective comes from not having coming face to face with the nihilistic, sociopathic behavior of a decent percent of the underclasses.

I got more experience in that than one might believe on a tech forum, from working as a bartender in soddy half-casino half-bar locations.

The entire point of dismantling and rebuilding police from scratch obviously includes creating actually sustainable structures to help people with issues: expanding mental health care access, housing-first programs, financial/food aid and safe injection sites would be the top priorities.

Someone with mental health issues and a drug addiction on top isn't going to get helped by getting arrested and thrown into jail repeatedly, and yet that seems to be the common approach to such people worldwide.

rocqua4• 3 years ago

So the job of police is (or at least should include) not crime fighting, but beating some sense into the underbelly of society?

You talk about preventing kids from growing up and becoming bad people, but consider what it does to a kid (or any person for that matter) to see the government only interact with anyone through violence. Is that not going to exacerbate the problem?

hotpotamus• 3 years ago

My suspicion is that society would be much nicer if we could find a way to reign in the nihilistic, sociopathic behavior of the upper classes much more than the lower ones.

james4k2• 3 years ago

incarceration rates in the US have been higher than anyone else by a huge margin for decades. it doesn't help anyone. it keeps people, families, communities perpetually in poverty.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 3 years ago

But right now, millions of good people, who can’t afford to move to a nice suburb far away from the problem, need cops who are willing to bring that pain, and if that doesn’t work, lock the criminals up until they’re old enough to be docile.

The cops bring that pain indiscriminately. The people who can't move away get it every bit as much as the sociopaths, maybe more so... because unlike the sociopaths, some instinct of theirs is that they should be safe for being innocent, and so do less to avoid interactions with cops.

The cops don't even help much when their attention accidentally falls on the sociopaths. Far from prosecuting and deterring the crimes that impact those "who can't move away", they invariably target drug crimes. Why? Because it's free cash. There are no amounts of cash that are so low that they don't invite civil forfeiture. Or for that matter, no sorts of valuables... jewelry, electronics, just whatever. If the cops only had sailing ships and eyepatches, they'd meet every criteria there is to become classical pirates. (Funny, but civil forfeiture law seems to originate in laws much like the letters of marquee nation-states used to issue...)

They perform no investigations, save those obligated in obvious homicides. None for larceny, petty or gross. Often, they'll only take reports of such things when victims require it for insurance claims, but then only begrudgingly and only because too many accusations of refusing to take reports is likely to stir up shit at the state capitol. They do not patrol, and if you see a car out there that looks like it might be patrolling it's more likely it's just out there trying to ambush someone for that sweet, sweet civil forfeiture money.

For some very vast majority of the public, if the cops disappeared tomorrow, nothing would change at all for better or worse. And that could continue for as long as no one realized they were gone (the panic is what could cause chaos, not the "lack of deterrence" that some would expect).

concordDance11• 3 years ago

The British police (apart from the metropolitan police) are just fine thank you very much.

Please don't try and generalise problems from (parts of) the USA to the entire world.

mschuster917• 3 years ago

I'm not even American, I'm German. Our police are better than in the US, but still nowhere near the quality one generally observes in your police officers. IIRC, you Brits run a completely different, community-based approach, in contrast to almost anywhere else. And unlike even us Germans, there are barely any guns, which is a serious game-changer in how cops can interact with citizens safely.

holbrad• 3 years ago

The British police don't do anything.

croisillon• 3 years ago

police behave essentially the same problematic way in france, germany and a lot more countries

yellowapple2• 3 years ago

The British police (apart from the metropolitan police) are just fine thank you very much.

That the phrase "All Cops Are Bastards" originated in England suggests otherwise.

kergonath3• 3 years ago

The British police (apart from the metropolitan police) are just fine thank you very much.

They are really not. The whole thing is dubious and the several recents scandals in local police forces show it (the latest example being the chief constable of the Devon and Cornwall police being suspended for misconduct a couple of days ago).

I do agree that it is still way better than in the US, in that you don’t expect to be killed just or having interacted with a cop and they are not vengeful thugs.

halostatue5• 3 years ago

English police are very much not fine.

Maybe you’re thinking of the fine upstanding members of the Greater Manchester Police who destroyed evidence and did not turn over evidence to the prosecution (to provide to the defence) which have cost Andrew Malkinson 17 years of his life: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jul/26/appeal-court...

Or are you perhaps thinking of the upstanding members of the South Yorkshire Police involved in the disastrous crowd control and subsequent cover up of said incompetence around the Hillsborough incident?

It seems unlikely that Northern Ireland’s police services are fine, either, given that sectarian violence and military involvement rampant in the Troubles (caused mostly by hard-liners and reciprocal incidents, and the Iron Lady’s stance helped everything as much as anything she ever did, which is to say not at all), but that may have changed since the Good Friday Accords took effect. It may also not have changed, given that sectarianism is still fairly rampant and the DUP are acting like spoiled children.

Maybe the Welsh and Scottish police are fine, but I am sure that a few minutes of searching could find examples of institutional issues for both of them.

NonEUCitizen• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jean_Charles_de_Me...

ukuuru• 3 years ago

Despite the article is on US data, it is no different in other countries, which many of them don't have the structures regularly held responsible for in the US. It is by the nature of the very system we have in common; central government. Law enforcement is primary goal of police, not crime prevention, it is nuanced and magnified in practice by the sophistication of our societies and more grift nature of everyday violent crimes.

inamberclad• 3 years ago

I find it amazing that the police of a given city will protest anything they think is unfair refusing to work. How is this not armed mutiny?

specialist• 3 years ago

"Become"? Did US law enforcement ever "serve & protect" the people? SCOTUS forceably rejected that theory.

The entertaining book Seattle Justice details how Seattle's police was conceived to protect business interests and quickly morphed into a protection racket. With drugs, gambling, and sex trafficking as side hustles. Adorable!

I now assume that's the norm (in the west).

The stated purpose of our "well armed miltias" was to repel slave rebellions (in response to Haiti as well as some domestic agitators).

The job of sheriffs et al was to catch slaves.

The job of Texas Rangers was to exterminate the Comanche.

This is just what I remember from popular media. I'm sure an expert has many more examples.

selimthegrim• 3 years ago

Sheriff comes from shire reeve in the UK, was their entire job keeping villeins down?

slibhb• 3 years ago

California should pursue a "reimagination of community safety". The rest of the country can watch the results play out. Either way we'll learn something.

ceejayoz5• 3 years ago

https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...

When New York police officers temporarily reduced their “proactive policing” efforts on low-level offenses, major-crime reports in the city actually fell, according to a study based on New York Police Department crime statistics.

gruez6• 3 years ago

This doesn't pass the sniff test

[...] the NYPD held a work “slowdown” for about seven weeks [...]
[...] The scientists found that civilian complaints of major crimes dropped by about 3% to 6% during the slowdown. [...]

If we assume that "complaints of major crimes" is a reliable proxy of actual major crimes being committed, as the article suggests, what are we supposed to conclude from this? That within weeks of the police not catching people for minor crimes, that criminals called an armistice stopped committing crimes? Or 3-6% of "major crimes" were only committed because police were doing stop and frisk? I'm aware of arguments about how aggressive policing creates a cycle of broken families and thereby creating future criminals, but that can't explain the effect materializing within weeks.

ddq2• 3 years ago

I think the reimagining should start at the community level and grow. Town, city, county, up to state level.

Hell, start at both ends and meet in the middle. Top-down change seems like it’d benefit a lot from bottom-up support.

idlewords3• 3 years ago

This is the same logic as arguing cats are bad at rodent control because they spend very little time each day catching mice.

tycho-newman• 3 years ago

The cats that are good at rodent control, almost by definition, will not need to spend a lot of time chasing mice. They are efficient mouse catchers.

Considering the abysmal clearance rates while violent crime rates have gone down, it is clear these cats are not good at catching mice. There is some other factor at work.

User23• 3 years ago

Why would the police bother to catch criminals in the big left wing cities? Carjackers are being let off without even an agreement. The electorate has clearly communicated that they don't want the laws enforced if they have disparate impact. This is democracy in action, doing the will of the people. Where is the problem?

Edit: It's not a rhetorical question. If you disagree please tell me where the problem is. I don't agree with the policy decisions in question, but I respect democracy so I live with being in the minority whose policy preferences aren't enacted. That is how the system is meant to work, right?

idlewords3• 3 years ago

The smell of even the most inept cat still scares off mice.

wahnfrieden10• 3 years ago

No it’s not.

idlewords3• 3 years ago

I'm afraid to say that it is, too.

rocqua4• 3 years ago

If someone argues: "cats are bad at rodent control because they spend very little time each day catching mice" that might be missing the point. But a better analogy might be "cats are bad at rodent control because they spend very little time each day catching mice, and I keep seeing mice-droppings everywhere".

Pulling away from the analogy, the argument seems to be "There is a lot of hints that high-level crime still persists, and yet cops aren't spending much time fixing it, so their job must not be fighting high-level crime".

KennyBlanken• 3 years ago

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.

And we wonder why our roadways are among the most dangerous in the world, especially for people not in enclosed motor vehicles. On rare occasion when people are stopped it's for racist reasons, they're not ticketed (because the cops were looking for drugs and guns, you know Real Police Stuff) so motorists learn there's no consequences to dangerous behavior.

Things aren't much better on the other coast, with NYPD issuing the vast majority of bicycling tickets to non-white riders: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/01/04/nypds-racial-bias-in-...

This is the real icing on the cake:

The new data follows similar reporting by Streetsblog, which revealed that police issued a whopping 99 percent of tickets for jaywalking to Black and Hispanic New Yorkers during the first quarter of 2020 — a stat that worsened after Streetsblog's initial expose. A City Council bill to decriminalize jaywalking was held up in committee, and would have to be resubmitted by a new council member.

smallstepforman• 3 years ago

The primary purpose of law enforcement officers is to maintain the authority of the state. Preventing crime is an indirect activity. However, in thousands of years of organised goverment, its the best system we currently have.

justnotworthit• 3 years ago

you may be interested in James C. Scott's books.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governe... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott#Major_works

Super_Jambo• 3 years ago

America's varied policing systems seem to be wildly worse than average for the developed west.

ekam• 3 years ago

In what ways?

polski-g• 3 years ago

That is because America is largely under-policed: https://twitter.com/SwannMarcus89/status/1675570458069028866

Increasing police staff by 10% reduces violent crime by 13%: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/16507235903066890...

konschubert• 3 years ago

Those are the same things.

rocqua4• 3 years ago

Preventing crime and defending the authority of the state are quite different.

Plenty of protests that challenge the authority of the state are completely legal. The state will not lose much authority if laws broken behind the front door of a family go unpunished.

Most of us here are lucky enough to live in a country where the laws were written for more than maintaining the authority of the state.

wahnfrieden10• 3 years ago

If it were true, wage theft would be the priority over shoplifting as it’s by far the largest category of theft

convolvatron• 3 years ago

you don't see a difference there 'I have this authority for the common good, and if I don't use it wisely I can undermine my very goals' vs 'I have this authority, to protect this authority, and if you act to call that into question I have no choice but to make you hurt badly'

not really the same

bigfryo• 3 years ago

This video seems to be what modern policing is all about in America https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pDSXf608kqU

thuridas• 3 years ago

We should measure a police department response to reporting a stolen mobile device with active localization. How eager is the police to fight a real crime.

I have a personal hypothesis that that some small locations depend too much on traffic fines and pay for productivity pluses. Most of those fines will be from outsiders. Probably it all started with an unexpected income, a proud politician announcing tax reductions and traffic fines become a real need for this location

wahnfrieden10• 3 years ago

These are primarily pretext stops, not revenue generating ones. They profile based on their perceived likelihood of escalating to a more severe crime - that is, the crimes they're interested in pursuing with the people they're interested in.

(If they actually prioritized crime severity, they would prioritize visibly rich business owners over the poverty-stricken or marginalized populations given that wage theft is by far the largest category of theft)

halostatue5• 3 years ago

In the U.S., they mostly profile based on skin colour, even if they claim otherwise. (In Canada, it’s also mostly on skin colour, but depending on the region, they’re probably looking far more for Indigenous peoples, and it’s just as wrong as American policing.)

quickthrower23• 3 years ago

I remember someone on HN said (and I believe it) that in SF they wont come out for a burglary. Because there is too much more problematic crime than that.

drewbug01• 3 years ago

I have a personal hypothesis that that some small locations depend too much on traffic fines

Your personal hypothesis has substantial basis in fact: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/us/police-ticket-quotas-m...

cantrevealname• 3 years ago

fruitless traffic stops than responses to service calls

As a counterargument, I read somewhere that the number one way that serious criminals are caught is due to motor vehicle violations. The theory being that someone who doesn't care about laws against serious acts cares even less about traffic laws.

Timothy McVeigh was caught because he was stopped for driving without a license plate on his car. Law enforcement perhaps would never have solved one of the biggest crimes in U.S. history if the police had not made a minor traffic stop.

prepend• 3 years ago

Yes of course if you stop lots of people you will find criminals. If you go door to door you will as well.

Stop and frisk reduced crime as well.

It’s like the fact that the greater the number of people in jail, the lower the crime rate. It’s true because a certain percentage of people commit crimes and if they’re in jail, they won’t.

That doesn’t mean we should go these things. We need to evaluate net impact. Or just not do things that are wrong even if they have utilitarian benefit.

lamontcg2• 3 years ago

Yes of course if you stop lots of people you will find criminals. If you go door to door you will as well.

"papers, please"

Eisenstein4• 3 years ago

That is like saying 'we need to cure heart attacks because most people die of heart attacks'. Something has to kill you -- when your heart stops that's a heart attack.

Someone had to catch McVeigh -- it just so happened it was cop that pulled him over.

If we focused resources on the community instead of punitive 'catch the offenders (if it is convenient, like, you already stopped them)' maybe McVeigh wouldn't have wanted to blow up a Federal building because the FBI was involved in a string of mis-advised deadly interactions where they shot first and asked questions later (Waco, Ruby Ridge -- this is what McVeigh was specifically pissed about).

gruez6• 3 years ago

If we focused resources on the community instead of punitive [...]

Yeah, but the problem with this approach is that the benefits are uncertain and take forever to materialize. Going back to the example of heart attacks, we might be able to prevent them if only we convinced people to have healthy diets and exercise, but doing so is fiendishly hard, so we end up with the imperfect solutions of open heart surgery and statins.

quickthrower23• 3 years ago

Yet in all the tv/movies (breaking bad coming to mind) they are careful about this. Taillights working, don’t speed etc.

Scoundreller4• 3 years ago

“Break only one law at a time”

gruez6• 3 years ago

Ocean's 11 would be a pretty bad movie if the crew got caught on outstanding warrants and/or parole violations because they were going 50 in a school zone.

concordDance11• 3 years ago

Got to say, you don't often see someone making the argument "but it works like that in the movies".

Makes me wonder if writers have an obligation to ensure what they right is realistic to prevent the masses from being mislead...

Fnoord• 3 years ago

Yes, smart criminals don't get caught (or don't get easily caught, ie. after much effort and resources). They know that breaking the law in one hand can lead to a domino effect. I mean, look at Gus Fring's enterprise. Turns out, the entire chicken nugget industry was a front. They're probably the exception to the rule though.

banannaise• 3 years ago

Every few years a new video makes the rounds where a guy gets pulled over for driving exactly the speed limit or slightly under it, because apparently following all the laws is also suspicious. All behavior is "suspicious", so there's no true way around that pretext for a stop.

mschuster917• 3 years ago

The issue with traffic stops, particularly "random" ones instead of "road is cordoned off, and every vehicle coming along is checked" checkpoints, is that they tend to be very selective in enforcement.

Basically, if you look somewhat rich (e.g. in a suit) or in trades clothings, and your car isn't too shabby you won't get stopped randomly.

Someone driving a beater though because that's all they can afford? Perfect target for "random" traffic spots.

halostatue5• 3 years ago

Or, as is far more often the case, they find someone of colour (usually Black) driving a car that fits some racially biased‡ preconceived notion (e.g., the only way a Black man could be driving this car is either (a) they are a drug dealer because they’ve got lots of cash or (b) they’ve stolen it).

‡ While an unfortunately large number of police officers in the U.S. (and elsewhere) are outright racist, not all are. However, most do pattern matching according to what they’ve been trained as "indicators of criminality", and most of those patterns have their basis in systemic racism that have no connection to real criminality. As I pointed out on a wholly separate discussion the other day, the most common and largest form of theft — and the one least prosecuted — is wage theft by white collar workers.

digdugdirk• 3 years ago

As someone who likes to have a "beater" vehicle for work/puttering, this is shockingly noticeable.

I've gotten pulled over multiple times in a crappy old pickup, while never being pulled over in a slightly less crappy, slightly less old Lexus that I drove far more regularly and far more... spiritedly.

concordDance11• 3 years ago

Basically, if you look somewhat rich (e.g. in a suit) or in trades clothings, and your car isn't too shabby you won't get stopped randomly.

Might this make sense if what they're looking for are outstanding warrants or drugs?

I could see those two groups having a lower likelihood of those two things.

sixothree• 3 years ago

In high school I had a friend who received a pretty cheap car as a gift from his grandmother. I was with him when we were stopped and essentially harassed for some 30 minutes. We all knew it was the car and the disparity to the nicer neighborhood we were in.

His parents knew it too. He literally never once drove the car again and got rid of it soon after. They continued to let him drive their cars until college.

scottlamb• 3 years ago

As a counterargument, I read somewhere that the number one way that serious criminals are caught is due to motor vehicle violations.

Seems entirely consistent to me. If traffic stops are (nearly) the only thing police do, that is the only way police will find criminals. It doesn't mean it's a good way.

ddq2• 3 years ago

Counterpoint: possible sampling bias because traffic stops are one of the most common pretexts for police searches.

Zigurd2• 3 years ago

Using racially biased traffic stops is worse than any poster here has yet to fully explore. Biased systems of laws and policing were used to re-enslave black people after emancipation, feeding them into the convict leasing system. That lasted well into the 20th century, and the ghost of that system haunts US policing and incarceration.

Racism in laws and law enforcement is intentional and by design.

pauldenton4• 3 years ago

It's like racially biased gun laws. The origin of gun control is southern Democrats trying to keep guns out of emancipated blacks after Republican Lincoln ended slavery

mabbo3• 3 years ago

My brother is law is a British police officer. He laughs at how much effort we spend in the US and Canada policing traffic. "We just have cameras. They do the same work for free."

His job is to investigate violent and serious crimes, rather than to bother motorists.

fsckboy• 3 years ago

does he suggest that if we put police cameras in people's homes that would eliminate a lot of domestic incidents? The issue is a bit more nuanced than he's making out.

edu2• 3 years ago

The difference between public and private space is pretty clear.

mjevans2• 3 years ago

Traffic cameras are not a safety encouragement device. I'd classify them as a 'revenue generating device' or a regressive tax.

I would feel much safer if the majority of police resources were allocated to the 'worst' violations of the laws (hardest crimes) first.

8organicbits3• 3 years ago

Why do you believe they don't provide safety? Some countries apply fines proportional to income, so there's no inherent need for them to be regressive.

Having driven in places where some roads are dotted with cameras and others are bare, the driving behavior is clearly altered. With cameras present, most drivers don't speed. Others speed just below the ticket threshold (+5mph?), or speed only between the cameras. On the roads without cameras drivers are often 10-15mph over the limit with some even faster.

Scoundreller4• 3 years ago

At least in many euro countries, a camera ticket will still go against the driver and their license.

In North America we’ve given up on this safety aspect and just ticket the vehicle owner with no ability to assign liability (or points) to the actually guilty driver.

gruez6• 3 years ago

I would feel much safer if the majority of police resources were allocated to the 'worst' violations of the laws (hardest crimes) first.

Like motor vehicle deaths? In 2022 there were 42,795 such deaths in the US. Meanwhile there were only 22,941 murders in 2021.

ldoughty2• 3 years ago

Traffic cameras as they are now are probably not the best safety encouragement device. I don't understand why states or localities have not run cameras along major routes and looked for speeding over a longer period of time, as opposed to speeding at a specific point.

It certainly would be a safety device if you were seen traveling effectively +20 mph over 15/20/30 minutes along a highway.. proves a willful negligence to traffic laws while leaving unharmed those that go 15 over to skirt by an 18 wheeler that is fish-tailing.

lamontcg2• 3 years ago

On the one hand I totally agree and I've been arguing locally against proposals to put in traffic cameras on the basis of them being regressive taxes--and that we should be putting in place more traffic calming devices and road diets to stop speeding.

But OTOH I'd like to get the cops entirely out of the business of enforcing traffic laws and doing stops entirely. Make all traffic enforcement automated and legalize all drugs. Make the cops go find something else to do with their time.

concordDance11• 3 years ago

Traffic cameras are not a safety encouragement device. I'd classify them as a 'revenue generating device' or a regressive tax.

Here in the UK they are clearly signposted so you can slow down before you get to it.

If you don't slow down because you're going too fast or aren't paying attention then you're behaving dangerously and need discouraging. They genuinely improve safety imo.

8organicbits3• 3 years ago

This was shocking to me when I traveled. Worse, traffic stops are a major cause of deaths for officers and drivers. What's the urgency to chase down and ticket traffic infractions when cameras seem extremely effective elsewhere?

[1] https://abc17news.com/news/crime/2022/01/28/numbers-rising-f...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/06/us-police-ki...

Edit: I've often wondered why someone didn't put a license plate reader at every on/off ramp. You can compute speed from the elapsed time and there's no way to game/avoid/learn the positions of the cameras. Purge readings that don't generate tickets, for privacy. Wouldn't take many cameras.

adammarples2• 3 years ago

This is called an average speed check in the UK and I hate them, you literally can't speed at all

Scoundreller4• 3 years ago

I feel like Canadian cops have generally given up on traffic violations.

The mis-step we have in some areas is that we still have some police forces that are effectively just a highway patrol, at least in Southern Ontario.

We do have a regulatory problem: most accidents require a police report. And a response problem where police would be first to a scene of a blocked lane on a major highway.

Meanwhile in France, they have a “safety” crew that first-responds to mechanical issues. After a collision, there’s just a form that both parties fill out and send off to their insurance company. No police involvement unless it was serious.

mabbo3• 3 years ago

effectively just a highway patrol, at least in Southern Ontario

There's that one pair of overpasses on the 401 that the Woodstock police setup as a giant speed trap machine like every other weekend in the summer.

Part of me is impressed by the efficiency of the whole thing.

worik• 3 years ago

Backwards.

What we want is the police to prevent crime, not stop it.

Their role in that project is not to solve every crime but catch every criminal.

I imagine they do not do well from that metric either.

In too many places the police are the army of the rich controlling the plebians

mschuster917• 3 years ago

What we want is the police to prevent crime, not stop it.

Police aren't a hammer, that is the first problem.

A lot of crime comes from poverty, drug usage and mental health issues. Fix that and crime goes down, without the followup costs of throwing people into jail where nothing improves in their lives.

quickthrower23• 3 years ago

You need to solve most crimes to catch every criminal, because of justice. And the simple problem of knowing who the criminals are.

shmde• 3 years ago

I was shocked to see how absolutely callous american police was while browsing this youtube channel [1]. Many of these are incidents where death was EASILY avoidable. There are videos where the "Police" openly shoots at a group of people because one of them was the suspect. Maybe this callousness is a direct result of lax gun laws ?

[1] https://youtube.com/@PoliceActivity

cratermoon• 3 years ago

It's been a long time since I believed that police fight crime. I read an article a long while back in which policemen described themselves as humanity's janitors. They felt their job was about going to places and dealing with situations and events most people would prefer to believe don't exist. If a crime happened to be the cause, they'd take a report, but mostly they were just picking up the pieces of people's lives after they'd been destroyed by poverty, addiction, greed, or hate.

neonate• 3 years ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20230729211626/https://www.reuter...

oatmeal1• 3 years ago

In Seattle at least, this wouldn't be surprising. Criminals with 34 cases since 2014 including allegations of attempted rape out on the streets. Why book someone when the cases go nowhere?

https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=493

Another highlight: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=981

They finally created a program last year to address repeat offenders:

https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/seattle-crime-118-repeat-o...

cannabis_sam• 3 years ago

https://pastebin.com/qc35SG1G (if anybody else got blocked through the web archive link. If not allowed please delete)

leeroyjenkins11• 3 years ago

Wow, amazing, the policies of LA and CA aren't effective, even in 2019? Maybe the article should be titled police in LA and Riverside have stopped putting themselves in high risk situations, and focus on traffic violations. Maybe it has something to do with DAs not prosecuting crimes or reclassifing crimes.

wahnfrieden10• 3 years ago

You have contrary stats on police elsewhere in America? If not please take your parroted culture war talking points somewhere else

ooterness• 3 years ago

I'm not sure that "time spent directly addressing violent crimes" is the best heuristic. By that metric, Judge Dredd is the best officer of all time. Mega City One is not a nice place to live.

wahnfrieden10• 3 years ago

well article says "serious or violent crime". it doesn't propose "time spent on violent crime" as a measure of effectiveness. it says that they don't accomplish much with the violent crime that does occur already. presumably because they are more fussed over pretext stops.

ecf• 3 years ago

Police spending most of their time enforcing traffic? That’s a shock to me because I’d count half a dozen easy tickets for cars parked in protected bike lanes while commuting to work in Oakland.

wahnfrieden10• 3 years ago

The article talks about how their traffic focus is generally for pretext stops. Parking violations aren’t helpful for pretext stops.

deterministic• 3 years ago

The primary objective of police around the world is to maintain order and status quo. Solving crimes indirectly helps with that by reducing the number of people who choose to enforce the laws themselves. Less disruptive shootings in the streets.

Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data

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