Thanks for reminding me about the turn-of-the-century jihad against gatsos. A bunch wound up receiving a right necklacing with petrol soaked tyres.Originally Posted by mtnbkr
https://amp.theguardian.com/uk/2003/...nsport.ukcrime
One site that used to host a bunch of photos of burnt gatsometers now appears completwly broken.
You guys are the cops with street experience, and I admit many of my political ideas are crazy to most and I’m probably a lunatic. With that out of the way, I support stripping most traffic stop privileges from not only LE but the government entirely. I think (based on absolutely nothing. I’m a lunatic, remember) that 90%+ of traffic stops have little to do with safety and have more to do with an aggregate combination of:
- Ticket revenue quota
- Fishing for warrants
- Fishing for arrests
- Let’s pull over white people to balance out the racial metrics
- I’m bored
- That girl might be hot, I’d like a closer look
- It’s going to look like I didn’t do anything today if I don’t write some tickets
You mean to tell me driving 10MPH over an artificially low speed limit is such a danger to society that we need an armed officer to make him stop?
There’s a big difference between weaving in and out of traffic at high rates of speed, egregiously running red lights 3 seconds after red, and:
- Oh look that driver didn’t make two full complete stops, one at the sidewalk and then a second one 3 feet later
- The road is completely empty and he’s doing 20MPH on the interstate with dry conditions and 1/2 mile visibility
- He rolled through a stop sign after looking and seeing it was clear instead of a full 3 second stop
- He blew through a yellow light and clipped 1/10 second on the red
- He made a right turn into a multi lane street and turned into the middle lane instead of the right lane
I’ve only ever been pulled over for fishing nonsense, the cops were always polite, admitted they were fishing, apologized for wasting my time, and let me go with no ticket.
If we cut the shit and told the truth that a large percentage of all arrests occur from bullshit traffic stops because violent criminals who have warrants also tend to drive like shot, then I’d be more open to this game. But it’s obviously just revenue generation and fishing for criminal arrests. How do I know?
Imagine gun ownership was 99% like car ownership and everyone carried a gun everywhere. And you’re at the grocery store and a guy takes out his gun and starts waving it around in the air, muzzling people not with malice intent but being a jackass. Just reckless. Would the police come and ask him to see his ID, run him for warrants and issue him a $200 fine? Or would the police arrest him for aggravated assault and lock him in prison and take away his gun?
But put the same guy behind a 2 ton vehicle that can and DOES injure more people that guns annually (when you exclude suicides) and now we’re not arresting everyone we pull over for a felony endangerment. We restrict the felony endangerment to a small subset of traffic stops, maybe less than 1%. Where’s 99%+ of jackassery with an unholstered gun in public would result in an arrest.
Why is this the case? Because 90%+ of the time when the police pull someone over, it’s not the equivalent endangerment to society as waving a gun around. It’s, “oh shit you were going a few MPH over the speed limit” which if it doesn’t meet the degree of danger to society to justify an arrest, why are armed officers effecting a traffic stop?
‘You we’re doing something so reckless and dangerous to society that we needed a trained armed person with the lawful authority to use lethal force but here’s a piece of paper telling us to send us a check, and now you can go off in your 2 ton vehicle on the public road a few minutes later and potentially keep doing the extreme danger to society you were just doing”
My theory is simple. Strip traffic laws down to a single subjective “reckless driving” felony charge. If the person is doing something so terrible that the driver is imminently putting other people’s lives at risk, like waving a loaded gun around a store, perhaps the gun is unholstered tucked under an armpit while texting at the grocery checkout line. Arrest this person immediately. Either they are such a danger that they need to be immediately locked in a cage, or leave them alone. Cops will stop 90%+ of traffic stops
I have the same argument against red flag gun seizure laws. Either this person is an imminent threat to society and we put them in a cage immediately. Or they are fully clear and free to go about their business with their guns. It’s when we start encroaching in the middle that people start to hate police, distrust the government, and disregard laws in general, even good ones.
I’m an admitted lunatic, I know it’s all crazy.
Last edited by Sanch; 07-17-2020 at 02:55 AM.
I'll just, for a variety of reasons, limit my response to ticket revenue. In many states, the agency that files summary charges for a traffic offense will only receive a percentage of the fine imposed by the court. This assumes the case results in a guilty plea or "guilty" verdict by a judge. Remember that the "fine" is a small part of the total cost noted on a citation. There are court costs, cat fund costs, computer costs, filing costs etc. Those monies do not go to the police agency. They go to the county and/or state. In most prosecutions the defendant, if found guilty, pays the costs of prosecution. Traffic is no different.
In PA, the base cost for a traffic summary offense is about $142. The "fine" portion of that is only $25. Some are higher but $25 is standard. The agency receives 50% of the fine. A net revenue of $12.50 is what comes in to the coffers pf the police agency. However, If the prosecuting officer has to go to court for a summary trial...that incoming does nothing to offset their salary. That citation is now a financial loser many times over for the police agency. Even with guilty pleas that do not require an officer to appear in court, traffic enforcement is not the revenue generator that some seem to believe.
I wish you all the luck in the world with your quest to nail your dick to a door, and encourage you to move to Berkeley in order to accomplish such.
"Are you ready? Okay. Let's roll."- Last words of Todd Beamer
Policing is regional, etc. etc.
We don't make any money as a department from traffic citations. Writing under city codes will put a portion in the general fund of the city, but most goes to the state and the courts.
You *can* be charged with a misdemeanor or felony for reckless driving, depending on context. Street racing, some number of simultaneous moving violations and speed, using the vehicle as a weapon, etc. are all criminal charges.
Some traffic enforcement is "fishing" and is called interdiction. Other traffic enforcement is exactly that. Unmarked cars in construction zones pulling over speeders, or officers working a grant for a high fatal crash intersection, for example.
Sorta around sometimes for some of your shitty mod needs.
Speed Enforcement
So let’s pretend you are a Councilmember or State Legislator. Take cops out of the enforcement equation. We will use speed as an example.
There could be a lot of tickets issued using speed cameras and with that revenue. Unlike red light cameras, where proper signal timing can work to reduce red light running, people speed. They drive what they consider safe. Speed limits are set in some states using an engineering study.
Since Berkeley is in Califorina, speeds are generally set at the 85th percentile per the vehicle code/Caltrans or in plain language the speed at which 85 percent of drivers are traveling. Adjustments downward are made with engineering justification. There are prima facia (self evident speed limits) too but not for this example.
The current law is no study, no radar tickets (speed trap).
Take a major arterial road (3 lanes each direction) with 50,000 cars a day, issuing speed camera tickets to all those at 10 percentile is 5,000 citations a day, and at 5% is 2,500 citation for just one road. Even the intentional violators at top 1% of speeds that is 500 citations per day. For example purposes say that 1% speed 62 mph and higher in a 45 mph.
Once you have taken the discretion from the police, where are you as a lawmaker going to set when the machine/computer issues tickets?
The letter of the law (speed limit)?
The top intentional violator?
What percentile in between?
What speed limit will the judges/courts accept (ie tickets are thrown out)?
What are the consequences/policy implications to the decision?
Speeding traffic is also one of the more common complaints made by residents to the PD and/or mayor’s office, so officers may be directed to focus enforcement in response to the complaints.
Since this is occurring in CA, I will answer. I do not know how policing is done in the rest of the country, but about the SF Bay Area I might even be an SME since I've been doing this since the early 1990s. I do not know a local agency that does not use video of some sort, either dash cam, BWC, or both. All of your ideas about traffic enforcement read like Penthouse Letters. CA has collected data on every reported collision and every injury collision for DECADES. Your statement about 10 over not hurting anyone is factually incorrect. You're just plain wrong. See CHP and the Office of Traffic Safety's data complied through the Statewide Integrated Traffic Reporting System (SWITRS). Primary Collision Factors are responsible for a ridiculous percentage of collisions and excessive speed for conditions is something more than 50% of the PCF in collisions.
Further, in 2015, CA made law a new reporting and tracking system to combat racial profiling because all of the previous data collected in the present showed police do not racially profile in CA. Obviously, we are really good at hiding our racism, so they needed to ferret out the closet racism we are doing, ergo the Racial Identity and Profile Act (RIPA). The act has staged implementation that started with the 8-9 departments with over 1000 officers in the state. This year it will work it's way down to agencies like mine with less than 100 officers. After collecting data for the last 2-3 years on millions of stops, it turns out that CA police are so evil and vile that we have been able to hide our racism, once again, from our dutiful news media and Democrat legislators. EVERY traffic stop and detention that occurs will require collection of data to determine what race the officer perceived the subject of the stop before the stop to be, the reason (PC/RS) for the stop, the number and identifiers of every officer at the stop, whether a search was conducted, results of search, whether a citation or warnings were issued, etc. etc, etc, etc. The format on my CAD screen for entering this, along with a short narrative I must write ON EVERY CONTACT, is four screens/pages worth of data.
So no, I will not be pulling over some chick I think is cute because WE FIRE PEOPLE that do that and if they use the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System to run out their home address, etc. to meet up with them, we PROSECUTE them. There is NO pressure to generate stats. Most agencies count a foot patrol the same as a traffic stop for self initiated activity. Fishing for warrants/parolees is what I use traffic stops for. That's how I catch burglars and keep dirtbags from breaking in to your work truck and stealing your tools you use to feed your family. I am good at it. I am good at criminal profiling. Tough shit if you don't like it. It's my job to hunt criminals that prey on innocent taxpayers. Note: criminal human denotes actions, not any race, color or national origin. I have a rainbow of dirtbags that circulate through my city that rob, steal and thieve. I'm looking at their behavior and actions, not their race, see RIPA data for confirmation.
So, this is what actually happens. I am sitting in my Watch Commander Office and a resident calls to complain that people are speeding in front of their house, or that motorists chop the stop sign at XYZ intersection and, "If you don't do anything, somebody is going to get killed and I am going to sue the City!" I calm the citizen down, and then the next morning at Briefing, I tell the beat officer about the problem, or the motor officer if one is available, and ask them to work that stop sign or street for PCF violations. I might have the CSO move our radar trailer, which doesn't have photo radar because it's illegal in CA, to the problem area for a few days. A good third of the time, the person who complained gets stopped for speeding or failing to stop at a stop sign. A few days go by and another resident calls about another "Hotspot" where, "People are going to die and it's going to be YOUR fault!" Wash, rinse, repeat.
The other scenario is that I am on my way to go get a cup of coffee or lunch, stopped at a stop sign or light patiently waiting my turn when some Adam Henry will blow the intersection at 20+ or narrowly miss a pedestrian and everyone with view will look at me and point. And, then I know my lunch is going to get cold, I will flick on the disco parade and initiate a traffic stop. The moron I stop will give a stupid excuse. I will be angry because I have no coffee, nor delicious food, and I probably left my citation computer at the station.
The final, and most common reason for me and my shift to do traffic, is that we get BOLO flyers of suspect vehicles in commercial, residential and car burglaries, plus robberies. If I see a silver Altima with two subjects on board out of Stockton cruising in my city, you're damn well right I will look for a Vehicle Code violation so that I can initiate a traffic stop to see who is who in the zoo. Whren v. United States is a thing. If they are just honest citizens making their way through the city, they get a verbal warning to fix a tail-light or use their indicator the next time they make a turn. If they are on probation and parole and give two different stories why they are 100 miles from home, yeah, there will be some investigatoring going on.
You should write scripts for Hollywood. You have no attachment to reality and your ideas are inventive.
Add when you put the speed trailer in the neighborhood and/or have the license plate recorded of violators and tell them most if not all the speeders are their neighbors ...
My post to photo enforced speed radar didn’t cover when you place in residential and the machine gives them all tickets.
I see. But I`d still rather have 100 real Cops, than 80 Cops and 40 unarmed and nonsworn enforcement employees.
If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.
Reply With Quote