The article (almost certainly inaccurately) portrays this as the police are heavily victimizing citizens of their own town. But in actual small towns, this strategy tends to only work when the police are harming only out-of-towners that are passing through. If you unfairly fine 600 people in an area with a population of 1200...anyone who had the power to prevent this will get voted out in the next election.

Jalopnik appears to have intentionally played fast and loose with language to give the wrong impression here. Example: "Or there’s [link]another resident[/link] who was one of 75 people that were given a ticket for simply using the left lane on the interstate. " That link to 'another resident' takes you to an article about Ramon Perez[0] where he's described as a "Chelsea business owner". Chelsea is 34 miles away from Brookside. Ramon is certainly a "resident" of....somewhere....but probably not Brookside.

Most likely, the police know many of the in-town vehicles and avoid pulling them over. When they do, they probably see the local address on the drivers license and let people go with a warning.

The point I'm making is that if this were as Jalopnik presents it, there is an existing remedy: the townspeople can vote out the mayor, then the new mayor would reform the 8-person police department. Instead, the people being victimized have no representation in the government that is victimizing them, so people are seeking alternative remedies (federal involvement, etc). This also probably applies when a smaller portion of a population is victimized by its government e.g. 80% of citizens unaffected, 20% experience problems.

Whats interesting about the 80/20 rule is that while classically in the US we think about racial/age/wealth divides, it also pops up in ways that aren't in people's top-3 intuition: using rarely-used government services.

- Building a house and victimized by zoning commission? 95% of the town doesn't identify with your experience and won't vote for change.

- Running a business and victimized by licensing commission? 95% of the town doesn't identify with your experience and won't vote for change.

- Can't get an obscure department to return your calls? 95% of the town doesn't identify with your experience and won't vote for change.

I see a bit of a parallel here to accessibility for disabled people. It turns out that when we build in accessibility into our physical and digital environments, it improves the experience for fully-abled people as well. Poor quality article on that here[1] but there are better ones to find, or you can imagine your own example. The usual top-1 example is closed-captioning ... even if your hearing is fine you've probably found CC/same-language subtitles useful on occasion. Perhaps there may exist a similar effect for creating systems which allow people to escape victimization. If you build it for the "obviously disadvantaged", it will create wide benefits for the "classically advantaged" classes as well.

0: https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-...

1: https://blog.ai-media.tv/blog/why-designing-for-accessibilit...