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I was just listening to the head of a municipal bus line on NPR talking about how there’s 70% non-payment of fares. Less than a third of his riders are doing wh

by ericd 2y ago

I was just listening to the head of a municipal bus line on NPR talking about how there’s 70% non-payment of fares. Less than a third of his riders are doing what they’re supposed to. The interviewer then asked whether it was true that there was a policy not to even have a bus driver mention that the fare hadn’t been paid, let alone confront the person or kick them off, the guy responded, saying that that was indeed the policy, because the safety of his staff was paramount. This was just after he finished complaining about how people should follow social rules, but he’s apparently unwilling to enforce them. I personally think that public transportation should be fully subsidized as a public good, but if you’re going to have a rule, you need to enforce it if you want people to maintain general respect for the law. So maybe just letting people run away from the police because it might be dangerous to chase them doesn’t seem like the right solution. At least find another way to implement the consequence. The alternatives that spring to mind require extensive surveillance, though, so I’m not sure there is a preferable alternative.

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vundercind 2y ago
> maybe just letting people run away from the police because it might be dangerous to chase them doesn’t seem like the right solution. License plates exist and cop cars already scan those. Turning a possible arrest into a chase puts the suspect, anyone else in the car with them, the cops, and various uninvolved bystanders at risk of serious injury or death. It is an extreme escalation and should be reserved for extreme situations.
- ericd 2y ago
  Sure, assuming it's not a stolen car. But I don't think that's a safe assumption in the cases where a chase is potentially worthwhile.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    Potentially worthwhile isn’t enough to Mad Max after a suspect and maybe force them to lose control and crash, on public roads. These policies can and do kill and maim lots of people every year.
    - ericd 2y ago
      Yep, the current solution doesn’t seem great. Are there known-good alternatives that are probably equally effective as deterrents?
      - fmobus 2y ago
        Just do whatever other countries are doing, i.e. send the tickets by mail.
        ericd 2y ago
        Yeah I guess that’s reasonable.
r00fus 2y ago
> So maybe just letting people run away from the police because it might be dangerous to chase them doesn’t seem like the right solution. It's absolutely imperative for LEO's to consider safety of other residents when enforcing laws. There are much better ways to identify and detain suspects.
tzs 2y ago
Around 500 people in the US are killed in police chases per year, and around 1/4 of them are bystanders. Most of those chases are over traffic violations or non-violent crimes like shoplifting.
- vundercind 2y ago
  To put this in perspective, that’s about the same number of bystanders killed just by police chases, per year, as all officers killed by all causes while on duty in 2022, according to the FBI’s database of deaths and assaults of police officers. There are a lot fewer police officers than there are total people in the US, so it’s normally not useful to compare figures like this, however, in this case, it kind of is, because these are all deaths that involve police action, just like all the officer deaths (necessarily) are. If we (reasonably, I think) default to assuming all police killed in the line of duty by any cause basically did not “have it coming” (contrary to the other 75% of chase deaths that I’m ignoring for this analysis to focus on the least-defensible harm) and should be regarded as innocents, then bystander deaths in police chases are doubling the figure of total annual wholly-unwarranted deaths due to police action, just for this one narrow category of activity. If we regard police chase deaths as nearly always preventable and fundamentally “the fault” of police, and then only consider felonious killing of police officers (as opposed to purely accidental ones) for our comparison, then we’re looking at ~60 police deaths in 2022 vs ~125 bystander deaths from police chases, so the relative proportion of preventable harm during police activities due to this policy looks even worse. And this is while totally disregarding the people being chased as worth ethical consideration in the do-or-don’t chase calculus. Plus I don’t know if that figure counts passengers as bystanders.

by ericd 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

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vundercind 2y ago

> maybe just letting people run away from the police because it might be dangerous to chase them doesn’t seem like the right solution. License plates exist and cop cars already scan those. Turning a possible arrest into a chase puts the suspect, anyone else in the car with them, the cops, and various uninvolved bystanders at risk of serious injury or death. It is an extreme escalation and should be reserved for extreme situations.

ericd 2y ago
Sure, assuming it's not a stolen car. But I don't think that's a safe assumption in the cases where a chase is potentially worthwhile.
- vundercind 2y ago
  Potentially worthwhile isn’t enough to Mad Max after a suspect and maybe force them to lose control and crash, on public roads. These policies can and do kill and maim lots of people every year.
  - ericd 2y ago
    Yep, the current solution doesn’t seem great. Are there known-good alternatives that are probably equally effective as deterrents?
    - fmobus 2y ago
      Just do whatever other countries are doing, i.e. send the tickets by mail.
      - ericd 2y ago
        Yeah I guess that’s reasonable.

r00fus 2y ago

> So maybe just letting people run away from the police because it might be dangerous to chase them doesn’t seem like the right solution. It's absolutely imperative for LEO's to consider safety of other residents when enforcing laws. There are much better ways to identify and detain suspects.

tzs 2y ago

Around 500 people in the US are killed in police chases per year, and around 1/4 of them are bystanders. Most of those chases are over traffic violations or non-violent crimes like shoplifting.

vundercind 2y ago
To put this in perspective, that’s about the same number of bystanders killed just by police chases, per year, as all officers killed by all causes while on duty in 2022, according to the FBI’s database of deaths and assaults of police officers. There are a lot fewer police officers than there are total people in the US, so it’s normally not useful to compare figures like this, however, in this case, it kind of is, because these are all deaths that involve police action, just like all the officer deaths (necessarily) are. If we (reasonably, I think) default to assuming all police killed in the line of duty by any cause basically did not “have it coming” (contrary to the other 75% of chase deaths that I’m ignoring for this analysis to focus on the least-defensible harm) and should be regarded as innocents, then bystander deaths in police chases are doubling the figure of total annual wholly-unwarranted deaths due to police action, just for this one narrow category of activity. If we regard police chase deaths as nearly always preventable and fundamentally “the fault” of police, and then only consider felonious killing of police officers (as opposed to purely accidental ones) for our comparison, then we’re looking at ~60 police deaths in 2022 vs ~125 bystander deaths from police chases, so the relative proportion of preventable harm during police activities due to this policy looks even worse. And this is while totally disregarding the people being chased as worth ethical consideration in the do-or-don’t chase calculus. Plus I don’t know if that figure counts passengers as bystanders.