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The Finance Director wanted the police to generate more revenues from fines If you've already criminalized so much of daily life that there's an essentially un

The Finance Director wanted the police to generate more revenues from fines If you've already criminalized so much of daily life that there's an essentially unlimited amount of "criminals" to go out and fine whenever you need a little extra cash, you've ceased to be "law enforcement" at all and have simply implemented a brutally regressive tax scheme, Sheriff of Nottingham style.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
superuser2 10y ago
That's pretty much what speed limits are.
- brian-armstrong 10y ago
  I don't think that's a fair comparison, no. A car is a multiton killing machine if used improperly. Speeding is substantially more dangerous than jaywalking, and it moves the risk to other people.
  - mcbits 10y ago
    Speeding is a chicken-and-egg problem due to the culture of driving 10-15 over whatever the speed limit is. It's generally safe (weather permitting) because the speed limits are low enough to offset it, but it creates an atmosphere where police can pick and choose who to pull over. If the speed limits were raised to a level where speeders were genuinely unsafe without a major attitude adjustment among drivers, the roads would be considerably more dangerous.
    - gambiting 10y ago
      To offer one example - in Poland, the motorway limit is very high, 140km/h(90mph), highest in Europe I believe if we ignore the unrestricted sections of the Autobahn. That leads to two things: 1) most people actually drive slightly below the limit, since vast majority of cars are not comfortable cruisers at 90mph, sure you can get to 90mph in your 1.4 Polo but it will be very loud inside and uncomfortable. 2) Even less people drive significantly above the speed limit, so the police does not see patrolling motorways as worth their time - even if you were doing an otherwise crazy 120mph(200kmh) the largest ticket they could give you would be like ~$100 and a few points on your licence(you need 21 to lose it). So it's not worth their time. As a result, when I drive there I don't have to worry about constantly being 5-10mph over the limit, since 90mph is fast enough. Setting the speed limit on a 4-5 lane highway to 50mph like in some places in the States is just asking for trouble,and I'm sure it's an excellent source of revenue for the local law enforcement.
      - DanBC 10y ago
        Before we rush to the Polish model: http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/06/20/road-safety-in-poland http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/06/20/road-saf... > Poland has one of the highest death rates for traffic accidents in the European Union, with 93 deaths per million persons per year, compared with the EU average of 55. EDIT: hang on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... Road fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants per year Poland: 10.3 US: 10.6
        dredmorbius 10y ago
        Fatalities/km corrects for differrences in per person driving habits.
        saint_fiasco 10y ago
        Maybe people in Poland use mass transportation a lot. That would reduce the death rate for traffic accidents regardless of the speed limits.
        superuser2 10y ago
        The right way to reason about traffic safety is to put "miles driven" in the denominator, not population.
        willvarfar 10y ago
        Are the numbers of on-motorway deaths particularly high? The non-motorway roads may be death traps.
  - mjevans 10y ago
    It actually is. In Washington state there are signs along parts of the freeway reminding motorists to 'Keep right except to pass'; this is a friendly re-wording of state law. I have -never- seen a police officer pull someone over for violating this law. I also agree with the sibling poster that points out that the speed limits on roadways seem low. I know of a few residential areas where the roads are improperly not arterial (but should be due to traffic volume) leading to lower speed limits than they would otherwise appear to support. Highways should also have condition based speed limits; but really I'd prefer the HOV lanes are replaced with 'self driving car' lanes that have a speed limit in law, but based on the evaluation of the automated vehicles. Probably carpools should be given a kick-back based on occupancy volume.
  - superuser2 10y ago
    In the US on major roads, "everyone" drives 10-15mph over most of the time. Some roads that are physically identical to interstate highways marked 55-70, are actually marked 35-45, so people are generally speeding by quite a bit. Actually driving the speed limit would be quite dangerous - the speed differential between lanes, coupled with the impetus for those behind you to do a lot of lane-changing, is not pleasant. If we genuinely believed the speed limits mattered, we could enforce them uniformly against everyone using ANPR cameras and timestamps. Instead, squad cars pick a few random unlucky souls (out of the hundreds of people going roughly the same speed in their vicinity) to be slapped with a fine. They are more likely to do this at the end of the month, when ticket quotas are due. In some random jurisdictions you may pass through on a road trip, they are more likely to ticket travelers passing through, who aren't voting on the next sheriff. And yes, in some cases they are more likely to pick you if you're black (particularly if also driving a nice car). I'm not objecting to ticketing of drivers who are going substantially faster than traffic, weaving through lanes, etc. I am objecting to the fact that the normal daily driving behavior required to not cause an accident (i.e. go with the flow, 10-15mph over the speed limit) is criminal and enforcement is "random" with some opportunity for bias against people the local cops don't like.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    If speeding were really a problem the US government wanted to solve, then they could compel Google to hand over Maps location data, effectively identifying 100% of speeders.
    - drumdance 10y ago
      Thinking out loud here... In a world of self-driving cars, maybe speeding will be less like a fine and more like a toll. So if you want to go over the speed limit, you pay a toll to the local municipality for the right to do so.
runako 10y ago
The thing that gets missed is that a ton of laws on the books are written with the expectation that they will not be applied evenly. Some examples: - Nobody really expects the cops to sweep the dorms at NYU for marijuana, even though this would probably turn up a ton of arrests. Smoking a joint while looking like a minority and being in a minority part of town carries a much higher probability of being arrested. - Crossing the street against the light at or around the front of MIT doesn't get you cited for jaywalking, ever. - All of New York City has (had?) a prohibition on open containers of alcohol. This prohibition is generally unenforced in non-minority areas. - Open carry laws in Georgia are not meant for dark-skinned Muslim men.
- int_19h 10y ago
  > Open carry laws in Georgia are not meant for dark-skinned Muslim men. Funny you should bring that up, but not only it's true, there's some considerable history there. Few people are aware of it these days, but historically, South was actually very restrictive with respect to right to carry arms - most of it prohibited _all_ forms of carrying outright (look at this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Rtc.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Rtc.gif - and note where the red color is concentrated in mid-80s). These laws mostly date to the post-Reconstruction era, and during Jim Crow (and later, but that's when it was most prominent) were effectively enforced or not enforced on the basis of race, and, to some extent, political affiliation (say, if you're a white dude who's travelling around the state to help blacks register in the 50s).
- pstuart 10y ago
  > Open carry laws in Georgia are not meant for dark-skinned Muslim men. Nor for dark-skinned men in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act
- simbalion 10y ago
  http://www.georgiapacking.org/law.php http://www.georgiapacking.org/law.php While Georgia allows open carry of long-guns without a permit, white people walking around with AR-15 rifles would probably be stopped and questioned by the police regardless. Open carry of handguns, and concealed carry of any weapon, in Georgia is only legal with a Georgia Weapons Carry License, which is only obtained after a background check and review by a local probate judge. While someone of darker complexion might run into trouble with certain racists on certain police forces, I don't think it's fair to damn the whole state's laws based on that. So called "Terry" stops are not allowed, no matter what color someone's skin is.
antisthenes 10y ago
> a brutally regressive tax scheme I would argue it's borderline racketeering, since the police are trying to "solve" a problem that doesn't exist.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  Racketeering and policing have only ever been at different coordinates on the same spectrum.
- gozur88 10y ago
  Sure they are, it's just not the problem you want them to solve. They problem they are solving is a lack of money at city hall.
  - DontGiveTwoFlux 10y ago
    It's the lack of political will to acknowledge that you've got to pay taxes.
    - gozur88 10y ago
      A lack of political will isn't the problem; the problem is the form the political will takes. Usually when towns rely heavily on ticket revenue they're citing people who don't actually live there. These are places that get a lot of commuters moving through, or they're on a highway in the middle of nowhere. It's literally highway robbery.
morgante 10y ago
When you see stories like this, it's hard to argue with the theory that the government is simply a stationary bandit.
- eevilspock 10y ago
  It's not government that's the real problem here, it's racism.
  - teddyh 10y ago
    If they weren’t bandits, their racism would be less of a problem.
  - rbanffy 10y ago
    And corruption/
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    > It's not government that's the real problem here, it's racism. Is it though, or is that just the hook being used to drive traffic? They found a correlation between the size of the African American population and the percentage of government revenue from fines, but what evidence is there that the cause is actually racism? The article essentially explains the cause -- African Americans tend to live in higher crime areas, which leads to more police presence in those areas and thus more fines. In other words, the real problem is that the cops can fine anybody for no real reason (and some municipalities use this for revenue generation), and that problem disproportionately affects African Americans because they have more proximity to more cops. The problem with framing it as racism is that support for a cause is generally motivated primarily by self-interest, and if you paint it as "this is a problem for black people" then the majority of voters hear that as "this is not a problem for you" when in actual fact it is a problem that affects everyone.
  - smilingtom 10y ago
    It's not racism. It's never been about race. It's always been about money. The people who have it and the people who don't.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

superuser2 10y ago

That's pretty much what speed limits are.

brian-armstrong 10y ago
I don't think that's a fair comparison, no. A car is a multiton killing machine if used improperly. Speeding is substantially more dangerous than jaywalking, and it moves the risk to other people.
- mcbits 10y ago
  Speeding is a chicken-and-egg problem due to the culture of driving 10-15 over whatever the speed limit is. It's generally safe (weather permitting) because the speed limits are low enough to offset it, but it creates an atmosphere where police can pick and choose who to pull over. If the speed limits were raised to a level where speeders were genuinely unsafe without a major attitude adjustment among drivers, the roads would be considerably more dangerous.
  - gambiting 10y ago
    To offer one example - in Poland, the motorway limit is very high, 140km/h(90mph), highest in Europe I believe if we ignore the unrestricted sections of the Autobahn. That leads to two things: 1) most people actually drive slightly below the limit, since vast majority of cars are not comfortable cruisers at 90mph, sure you can get to 90mph in your 1.4 Polo but it will be very loud inside and uncomfortable. 2) Even less people drive significantly above the speed limit, so the police does not see patrolling motorways as worth their time - even if you were doing an otherwise crazy 120mph(200kmh) the largest ticket they could give you would be like ~$100 and a few points on your licence(you need 21 to lose it). So it's not worth their time. As a result, when I drive there I don't have to worry about constantly being 5-10mph over the limit, since 90mph is fast enough. Setting the speed limit on a 4-5 lane highway to 50mph like in some places in the States is just asking for trouble,and I'm sure it's an excellent source of revenue for the local law enforcement.
    - DanBC 10y ago
      Before we rush to the Polish model: http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/06/20/road-safety-in-poland http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/06/20/road-saf... > Poland has one of the highest death rates for traffic accidents in the European Union, with 93 deaths per million persons per year, compared with the EU average of 55. EDIT: hang on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... Road fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants per year Poland: 10.3 US: 10.6
      - dredmorbius 10y ago
        Fatalities/km corrects for differrences in per person driving habits.
      - saint_fiasco 10y ago
        Maybe people in Poland use mass transportation a lot. That would reduce the death rate for traffic accidents regardless of the speed limits.
        superuser2 10y ago
        The right way to reason about traffic safety is to put "miles driven" in the denominator, not population.
      - willvarfar 10y ago
        Are the numbers of on-motorway deaths particularly high? The non-motorway roads may be death traps.
- mjevans 10y ago
  It actually is. In Washington state there are signs along parts of the freeway reminding motorists to 'Keep right except to pass'; this is a friendly re-wording of state law. I have -never- seen a police officer pull someone over for violating this law. I also agree with the sibling poster that points out that the speed limits on roadways seem low. I know of a few residential areas where the roads are improperly not arterial (but should be due to traffic volume) leading to lower speed limits than they would otherwise appear to support. Highways should also have condition based speed limits; but really I'd prefer the HOV lanes are replaced with 'self driving car' lanes that have a speed limit in law, but based on the evaluation of the automated vehicles. Probably carpools should be given a kick-back based on occupancy volume.
- superuser2 10y ago
  In the US on major roads, "everyone" drives 10-15mph over most of the time. Some roads that are physically identical to interstate highways marked 55-70, are actually marked 35-45, so people are generally speeding by quite a bit. Actually driving the speed limit would be quite dangerous - the speed differential between lanes, coupled with the impetus for those behind you to do a lot of lane-changing, is not pleasant. If we genuinely believed the speed limits mattered, we could enforce them uniformly against everyone using ANPR cameras and timestamps. Instead, squad cars pick a few random unlucky souls (out of the hundreds of people going roughly the same speed in their vicinity) to be slapped with a fine. They are more likely to do this at the end of the month, when ticket quotas are due. In some random jurisdictions you may pass through on a road trip, they are more likely to ticket travelers passing through, who aren't voting on the next sheriff. And yes, in some cases they are more likely to pick you if you're black (particularly if also driving a nice car). I'm not objecting to ticketing of drivers who are going substantially faster than traffic, weaving through lanes, etc. I am objecting to the fact that the normal daily driving behavior required to not cause an accident (i.e. go with the flow, 10-15mph over the speed limit) is criminal and enforcement is "random" with some opportunity for bias against people the local cops don't like.
- ethbro 10y ago
  If speeding were really a problem the US government wanted to solve, then they could compel Google to hand over Maps location data, effectively identifying 100% of speeders.
  - drumdance 10y ago
    Thinking out loud here... In a world of self-driving cars, maybe speeding will be less like a fine and more like a toll. So if you want to go over the speed limit, you pay a toll to the local municipality for the right to do so.

runako 10y ago

The thing that gets missed is that a ton of laws on the books are written with the expectation that they will not be applied evenly. Some examples: - Nobody really expects the cops to sweep the dorms at NYU for marijuana, even though this would probably turn up a ton of arrests. Smoking a joint while looking like a minority and being in a minority part of town carries a much higher probability of being arrested. - Crossing the street against the light at or around the front of MIT doesn't get you cited for jaywalking, ever. - All of New York City has (had?) a prohibition on open containers of alcohol. This prohibition is generally unenforced in non-minority areas. - Open carry laws in Georgia are not meant for dark-skinned Muslim men.

int_19h 10y ago
> Open carry laws in Georgia are not meant for dark-skinned Muslim men. Funny you should bring that up, but not only it's true, there's some considerable history there. Few people are aware of it these days, but historically, South was actually very restrictive with respect to right to carry arms - most of it prohibited _all_ forms of carrying outright (look at this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Rtc.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Rtc.gif - and note where the red color is concentrated in mid-80s). These laws mostly date to the post-Reconstruction era, and during Jim Crow (and later, but that's when it was most prominent) were effectively enforced or not enforced on the basis of race, and, to some extent, political affiliation (say, if you're a white dude who's travelling around the state to help blacks register in the 50s).
pstuart 10y ago
> Open carry laws in Georgia are not meant for dark-skinned Muslim men. Nor for dark-skinned men in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act
simbalion 10y ago
http://www.georgiapacking.org/law.php http://www.georgiapacking.org/law.php While Georgia allows open carry of long-guns without a permit, white people walking around with AR-15 rifles would probably be stopped and questioned by the police regardless. Open carry of handguns, and concealed carry of any weapon, in Georgia is only legal with a Georgia Weapons Carry License, which is only obtained after a background check and review by a local probate judge. While someone of darker complexion might run into trouble with certain racists on certain police forces, I don't think it's fair to damn the whole state's laws based on that. So called "Terry" stops are not allowed, no matter what color someone's skin is.

antisthenes 10y ago

> a brutally regressive tax scheme I would argue it's borderline racketeering, since the police are trying to "solve" a problem that doesn't exist.

jessaustin 10y ago
Racketeering and policing have only ever been at different coordinates on the same spectrum.
gozur88 10y ago
Sure they are, it's just not the problem you want them to solve. They problem they are solving is a lack of money at city hall.
- DontGiveTwoFlux 10y ago
  It's the lack of political will to acknowledge that you've got to pay taxes.
  - gozur88 10y ago
    A lack of political will isn't the problem; the problem is the form the political will takes. Usually when towns rely heavily on ticket revenue they're citing people who don't actually live there. These are places that get a lot of commuters moving through, or they're on a highway in the middle of nowhere. It's literally highway robbery.

morgante 10y ago

When you see stories like this, it's hard to argue with the theory that the government is simply a stationary bandit.

eevilspock 10y ago
It's not government that's the real problem here, it's racism.
- teddyh 10y ago
  If they weren’t bandits, their racism would be less of a problem.
- rbanffy 10y ago
  And corruption/
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  > It's not government that's the real problem here, it's racism. Is it though, or is that just the hook being used to drive traffic? They found a correlation between the size of the African American population and the percentage of government revenue from fines, but what evidence is there that the cause is actually racism? The article essentially explains the cause -- African Americans tend to live in higher crime areas, which leads to more police presence in those areas and thus more fines. In other words, the real problem is that the cops can fine anybody for no real reason (and some municipalities use this for revenue generation), and that problem disproportionately affects African Americans because they have more proximity to more cops. The problem with framing it as racism is that support for a cause is generally motivated primarily by self-interest, and if you paint it as "this is a problem for black people" then the majority of voters hear that as "this is not a problem for you" when in actual fact it is a problem that affects everyone.
- smilingtom 10y ago
  It's not racism. It's never been about race. It's always been about money. The people who have it and the people who don't.