A Traffic Cop’s Ticket Bonanza in a Poor Texas Town | Hacker News Reader

A Traffic Cop’s Ticket Bonanza in a Poor Texas Town

buzzfeed.com

31 pointscolinprince44 comments

> Councilman Felix Barker pointed out that the extra cash the city had brought in far exceeded the cost of jailing all those people. “We increased the profits,” he said.

Uh, that's not what police are supposed to be. They are not supposed to be a revenue source.

> “You have a heart and you feel for those people,” he said. “The judge could charge a dollar. I don’t care.”

Except he can't, there are minimum fines and they will only go down to that level. Other times it could be a dismissal fee, but other than that, no.

Reminds me of this article about the link between excessive policing of traffic offenses, police as a profit center, and getting a huge chunk of your budget from your poorest citizens:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/police-shootings...

Once you lose sight of 'Protect and serve', things can go very wrong.

It really depends on the nature of the fines levied, on its face, you'd not convince me that speed enforcement alone is disproportionately levied on the poor.

There is another class of fines, like Failure to Appear, fix it tickets resulting in a warrant (warrants shouldn't be issued for non-moving violations ever), unable to provide proof of insurance, and failure to pay fines - that are very likely levied excessively on the poor.

Simply require local police/court systems to turn fine money over to the state, which will move the incentive for abuse from the local level to the state. Or, require that it is sent to the Federal government. Better yet, burn the money (but that is still akin to giving it to the money printers).

The real problem is not with the cops doing their jobs and enforcing the law. The real problem is that the laws are so dysfunctional to begin with. For decades, stupid laws were patched up by a police system that simply chose not to enforce them widely. This is of course as ugly a "hack" as you can possibly get. People lose respect for the laws, and it gives the police immense discretionary power that they can wield on the basis of their subjective whims. But the system chugged along like a 20 year old computer valiantly running Windows 95... until one day, a cop shows up who decides that his job is to enforce the law, and that's when the sheets come off and people realize just how stupid the laws really are.

If you find yourself shaking your head when reading the article, and are looking for someone to blame, don't blame the cops. Don't blame the police commissioner. They are simply doing their jobs, and that's a good thing. Blame your lawmakers for writing into law, or not repealing, absolutely idiotic laws. This problem does indeed need to be fixed, and we need to fix it by actually changing the law so that it makes sense.

1) The speed limit should be set at a level that people are actually expected to follow. If you don't mind people driving 70mph on the freeways, change the speed limit to 70.

2) Traffic fines are not meant to be a revenue source for the government. They are meant to be a form of punitive punishment and deterrent. A $400 fine is overly punitive for an unemployed person, but it's also too lenient for a millionaire. If the goal is for the fine to be punitive, it needs to be indexed to the person's income.

3) People shouldn't have to leave their jobs and go to court, and sit around for hours, just to have 5 minutes in front of a judge to ask for a payment plan. This sort of thing should be completely automated and doable online. Judge appearances should be reserved for special cases, not for rubber stamping.

The sooner the police start enforcing the laws strictly, the sooner people will realize how broken the laws are, and the sooner we can get to making real fixes like described above.

Traffic fines are set high based on the assumption that enforcement will be light. The canonical example is a $500 fine for littering. Because your chances of getting caught are so low, a high fine is needed to provide an incentive. If your chances of getting caught were 100%, a $5 fine would probably be sufficient.

If you're going to increase enforcement you should probably lower the fines.

I'd have no problem with aggressive enforcement so long as the fines and consequences were light - as you noted, both the fine structure and the way external agencies (insurance companies for one) treat moving violations assume for light enforcement

I'm curious how is it legal to pull over a vehicle based on the license plate without knowing who is actually driving the car?

On a related note, my driving school teacher told us if we're married register your spouse's car in your name and your car in theirs.

The logic being that spousal privilege prevents you from testifying against them if you ever get a red light/speeding or other automated ticket in the mail, and it seems like a good defense for these kind of plate-reader shenanigans as well - unless you are both wanted scofflaws, of course.

In certain limited circumstances, a spouse cannot be compelled to testify against a spouse... but in what jurisdiction are witnesses being called by the prosecution for traffic infractions in the first place??

As he explained it, they will only dismiss the ticket against you (the registered owner receiving the ticket in the mail) if you identify the actual driver - so you have to go in and roll over on the driver if you want to get out of the ticket.

But if the driver is your spouse you can invoke spousal privilege and you both get off, IIRC. I'm not sure of the legal convolutions that lets you say "I can't identify that person due to spousal privilege" and not identify that person as your spouse but there it is.

Don't let the buzzfeed source put you off of the article, it's pretty good.

I really like the day fine idea, seems like it would lessen the incentive to ticket to generate lots of revenue. An obvious fix for the overworked courts is simply bring in a pay stub or tax return. If you don't you get the max fine. (Perhaps a week or two to bring in the documentation and revise the fine down)

>seems like it would lessen the incentive to ticket to generate lots of revenue.

That still doesn't align the incentives. It just shifts the focus from quantity of stops to quality of stops (the correlation between vehicle cost and yearly income is very stong).

Law enforcement should not be about generating revenue. Full stop.

This feels like the "Perfect solution fallacy".

Fines are effective. Governments are going to do something with the money. Picking a price curve that closely matches actual cost of running the department seems better than what we do now. Yes, officers will have a preference for pulling over a ferarri instead of some beat up old honda, but with all of the automation the article talked about, it seems like the times an officer has a choice between the two are rare. If the policy is pull over everyone breaking the law, officers would have to account for not pulling over cheap cars.

Now, i could see a good argument for simply requiring public service from everyone. The thing we're all limited by is time. 10 hours of a rich guy's time is just as valuable as 10 hours of a poor guy's time (to them at least). Of course, you're not really proposing this as an alternative, you appear to be saying because it's not perfect, it's not worth doing.

I guess my point is that unless you change the monetary beneficiary of the traffic fines you retain perverse incentives even if you try to make the costs more equitable.

Yeah, it is, it also tries to paint it in a positive light, and makes it clear that while perhaps what Port Arthur is doing may be unsavory to some, its not illegal, and its certainly no Ferguson, MO either.

I like how they provide the cost of jailing people and the revenue, but no mention of the administrative cost and the "expensive" cost of the system. I have a suspicion that if you did the accounting properly, you would probably come up with a net decrease in income, not to mention the economic impact of debtor prison.

I'll try to find the source, but from another story I've read they are being issued the plate scanners for free in exchange for a percentage of the collections they make from using the scanner.

It also might deter people from doing business in that town. If I have the choice to get a coffee I this town or a neighboring town that's not known for hyper active ticketing, I'd rather avoid this place.

I live in Texas, and used to love going to Port A as a kid. Now, I will not even give it a second thought to avoid the city entirely.

As much as the article makes this sound horrendous .. I'm not sure.

"Back in 2007, his bosses at the Port Arthur Police Department tapped him for a brand-new kind of job: writing up driving infractions full-time"

http://www.city-data.com/accidents/acc-Port-Arthur-Texas.htm...

It's interesting to compare the actual data from the 5 years before, and the 5 years following 2007. It may be a coincidence, but .. something has changed. Something that's roughly halved their fatal accidents.

> Police higher-ups say the traffic unit has made Port Arthur a safer place to drive

They don't show any data to back up this claim that they make throughout the story. IMO part of the problem is that the speed limits are far too low for modern vehicles. They keep them low so they can continue to collect.

It's not about safety it's about money. How is going around with plate readers making anyone safer? Unless they were using that technology to find a fugitive, but they're not they're using it to collect.

Speed limits have a long history that is largely unrelated to ticketing. The do seem slow today but they made sense only a few years ago, before the magic that is modern rubber tires. Road noise, fuel efficiency and the prevention of congestion have also been factors.

The recent rise in for-profit ticketing has less to do with low speed limits than the steady increase in penalties. The decriminalization of speeding has also increased the incentives for cops to ticket quickly and often.

The article links to a study[1] in the Lancet that says that aggressive traffic policing results in fewer car accidents and fewer deaths.

1: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673...

Ah, I missed that. However that doesn't mean increasing the speed limit would be bad. Instead of speeding tickets they could focus on aggressive drivers constantly changing lanes and other more serious maneuvers that could cause more danger.

There are hundreds of studies on increasing the speed limit. Most say increasing the limit causes increased fatalities, others say the effect is negligible. Most of these studies focus on highway speeds, though.

But lowering street level speed limits has a dramatic effect on fatalities. Sweden reduced their street speed limits to 15-20mph and strictly enforced them.[1] This dropped their fatality rate to essentially zero. It didn't reduce accidents significantly, but reduced their severity massively.

1: http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/

Like cameras on the street that capture aggressive lane changing coupled with license plate readers?

What's next - thought crime?

Increased speed saves time only linearly but requires a with the square increase in power to overcome wind resistance, the major factor. With the power increase comes a similarly large increase in crash damage and mortality particularly for pedestrians. This is in addition to the increased crash risk simply due to the increase in speed while mental capabilities of drivers remain constant(ly poor).

See the data here:

http://humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm

As this makes clear, even 30mph is too fast for a residential area in the sense that the tradeoff makes no sense; 20mph brings a massive reduction in deaths but only a comparatively much smaller increase in travel time (in a grid city with constant lights anyway).

And having speed limits set too low for the road leads to a mismatch between posted risk (the speed limit) and actual risk (the actual speed of cars) to pedestrians. There's evidence that speed limits have no impact on how fast people actually drive[0], so posting a lower speed limit is less likely to have an impact than designing roadways for a certain speed in the first place.

[0]: https://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel.html

Hence the need for speed enforcement. We've come full circle.

Designing roads properly for the desired speed removes the need for enforcement. And enforcement doesn't mean that people go the posted limit, it just means more tickets.

Nope. All sorts of vehicles drive on roads. A motorcycle will always be able to navigate a road far faster than anyone intended. Roads need some sort of speed limit to specify unseen dangers, to communicate to the motorcycle that there is a reason the designer doesn't want him moving at the speed of which he is physically capable.

Yes, there will still need to be speed limits. But if, say, the roads are designed with a 12' lane, the people will tend to drive faster than on a 10' lane. (See http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/10/why-12-foot-traffic-la... .)

I believe vcarl's point is to design the roads for the speed limit, so the speed limit matches what people will perceive to be the right speed for the road. Don't have speed limits which are lower than the perceived limit.

The clumsy way to do this is to put in traffic calming devices. Narrowing the streets is less in-your-face, and comes with other advantages, like cheaper road maintenance. Both are also ways to communicate the appropriate speed limit, in addition to a sign which says the same thing.

But setting a limit based on roads doesn't work once we realize that every road is different. We'd need signs everywhere. So we set standard measurements (50kph cities/ 80-highways, special signing for anything else) and build to those standards where practical. So a few roads get slower speeds than perhaps they should, but the standardization brings advantages. Imho good cops should then take it upon themselves to enforce those standards where most appropriate.

Traffic calming isn't about slowing people down. It's about making driving on street-A so painful that people go to street-B. I really like those little roundabouts they use instead of 4-way stops. A motorcycle can basically take a strait line from one side to the other without slowing down. Far easier than a stop sign.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand your comment.

Yes, every road is different. So pay careful attention to the design of every road, rather than following a standard (eg, 12') plan, so people naturally want to drive at the safe speed limit. Design the roads for the speed limit. Don't overdesign the roads, then use signs to force everyone to slow down from what they naturally want to do.

That's still standardization, but based around people rather than a Platonic street design. And it brings its own advantages.

Regarding traffic calming, and quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming :

> Traffic calming consists of physical design and other measures, including narrowed roads and speed humps, put in place on roads for the intention of slowing down or reducing motor-vehicle traffic as well as to improve safety for pedestrians and cyclists.

So yes, it's partially about reducing traffic, but it's definitely also about slowing people down.

Well, to be fair, if you are jailing people you are taking drivers off the road and thus making them safer. And considering they seem to be jailing people with driving related offenses, it's probably a true statement. Whether it is a morally defensible course of action is a totally different story though.

What if the tickets are for parking or other infractions that have no real bearing on safety? If you think this is about safety then you are sadly mistaken.

That depends on the specifics of each parking tickets. Tickets for parking in places where cars are supposed to be (fire lanes etc) are safety related. City parking policies are also generally tied to preventing congestion and dissuading people from driving, both of which are safety-related.

Are you serious or just being punctilious? At this point I'm taking you to be proposing that throwing people in jail for unpaid parking tickets is in the interest of public safety?

By your own logic public safety is served if you park anywhere you want (including fire lanes) but can afford to pay the tickets.

I'll try to keep civil here, but your attitude reflects an utter lack of compassion.

They would usually get towed for that

"Traffic safety is equally important for poor people and for people with money. But traffic fines, as they are typically imposed, inflict far more pain on poor people."

The first part of that is quite an assertion. Richer people probably have newer cars (thus benefiting from newer safety features), better maintained cars, bigger cars, live in areas with less traffic, have better access to healthcare, and can afford to take time off due to injury. In addition, their jobs overall are probably less physically demanding.

I wonder if that's a good part of why they aren't doing things that would cost taxpayers money, like re-engineering roads to improve safety and lower speeds?

> License plate recognition software is often touted as a way to catch terrorists

Huh? How does that work?

Off-topic and not appropriate for HN.

If you want to circle jerk about how terrible the police can be, do it somewhere else - this isn't the place.

Flagged.

I've concluded there is very little off-topic for HN - and if you'd read the article, it actually paints the police in a fairly positive light - aggressive enforcement is not the same a zealous enforcement.

It's technology related

Reply on news.ycombinator.com