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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

> Cops ignore loud honking and loud cars when its right in front of them.

It allows for discretionary law enforcement. Cops love it.

They can ignore it you if they like you, or fine you if they don't.

But, this system does kinda work and allows for police to charge antisocial assholes with a crime while letting normal, reasonable people who made a simple mistake off with a warning.

And to charge black people and not charge white people.

Noise is noise. There's no need to be discretionary.

Ugh. This is so tiresome

Why do some people find it necessary to turn every discussion into some racism witch-hunt?

The Stop and Frisk policy was a racist witch hunt. This isn't a hypothetical about policing in general, or even NYC cops in specific. And yeah, I'm sick of racism too. But blaming the messengers isn't doing any good.

Unfortunately its the lens many people have been conditioned to see everything through.

Who defines what a "normal, reasonable" person looks like?

At some point you have to let people make decisions. You can't "logic" your way out of everything.

But... the mistakes! Yeah, so what? What about the mistakes of the rules that a human at the scene is not allowed to overrule?

We have that at quite a few workplaces, where employees are not allowed to make any decisions, only work through an algorithm. It's not pretty. Think customer support of very large companies. Or the mistakes of algorithms and "AI", which we already have too, e.g. when we read stories about insurance "automating" decisions with ML?

Except it's usually not "mistakes", it's intentional bias. A "normal, reasonable" person is someone who has a "donated to the police officer's association" sticker in their car window, and "assholes" are everyone else.

To be clear, what is the advantage of discretionary enforcement for traffic offenses? Letting certain people off with a warning even though they broke the law? Why is that a feature and not a bug?

Anyway, we do have a way to let humans make these decisions. You can go to court and challenge the ticket.

>Why is that a feature and not a bug?

Because the law and the punishments for breaking it do not reflect how socially acceptable breaking said law tastefully is.

It's easier to just randomly hand out small tickets a few people who are egregious and a few who are unlucky than it is to amass the political capital to find a more consistent solution.

The problem is that to a cop, "normal" and "reasonable" is code for anyone with a police placard [1]. And if you give them discretion, "antisocial assholes" will end up largely meaning Black people.

Why not have the automated system issue a warning instead of a citation for the first offense?

[1] Check out this Twitter account, which documents NYPD traffic lawbreaking https://twitter.com/placardabuse. It's often really egregious stuff, like parking right in front of a fire hydrant or ticketing every illegally parked car on a street except for one with a police placard.

placardabuse really shows you how many of the most egregious traffic violations are done by unrepentant, repeat offenders. I think there was a story recently about an SUV who ran the curb and killed an 18-month old in Manhattan -- the driver had thousands of dollars of unpaid fines for blowing red lights, speeding, double-parking etc.

I think people should be at a much higher risk of losing their license or driving privileges permanently for this stuff, not to mention offenses like repeat DUIs.

Most interesting to me are how many tickets police and politicians rack up with traffic enforcement cameras. "Do you know who I am!?" works on people, but doesn't work on robots. That's a good thing.

In Australia, rich people have their cars registered to companies so they are not responsible for the demerit points.

If the only punishment is a fine then it's only a rule for poor people.

edit: Just googled and they may have closed that loophole, I have no idea if any of it is actually enforced though. My point about fines only affecting poor people still stands.

Given how prevalent and regressive fines are I really don't understand why there isn't more noise about changing them. A $350 fine could be trivial for one person and life crushing for another. Something like mandatory community service would actually cause rich assholes some pain.

Of course there are probably plenty of ways to game community service so there would need to be strict requirments, or maybe there's a totally different system that would be more fair.

Some countries use day fines, which are proportional to one’s income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine

As to why we don’t switch to a system like that: the people with the power to change it are the ones who benefit from the inequitable status quo.

While I agree with the premise of discouraging people from being antisocial assholes, that sort of system is built for bias. Discouraging antisocial behavior is one thing, but other biases might be more destructive then helpful. I think maybe the job of discouraging antisocial behavior might be more suited to something else than law enforcement, where it's more likely to actually work without becoming destructive. I couldn't give you a specific shape of what I mean, because it's a hard problem and I don't have a solution (otherwise I'd be campaigning for it).

Discretion can be abused. "Normal, reasonable people," can be anyone with an 11-99 Foundation license plate holder. Apparently those things actually work, at least in the Bay Area. Otherwise there wouldn't be fakes and people wouldn't "donate" $500+ in order to acquire a real one.

>They can ignore it you if they like you, or fine you if they don't

Or ignore everyone if their approval rating is in the toilet, which is what they're doing as much as they can right now.

HN screeches a lot about it but the meatspace people I talk to don't seem to mind.

Good ol American rule by law

It's single-handedly the best perk of being white in the US. I hate it, it's straight up dystopian, but you can't argue with the benefits of being above the law for anything less than like murder. Being white means I do things like speed, do drugs at parties and concerts, jaywalk, be drunk in public, trespass -- err sorry urban explore, set of fireworks on the 4th without so much as a second glance.

Go on a ridealong. You'll be arresting white people all day.

Yeah it's certainly more nuanced than just race. There has to be the right intersection of race, class, and social network to be above the law in the United States. But I'd essentially guarantee those white people being arrested all day are poor white people and generally not middle- or upper-class white people.

Exactly this. Obama's kid isn't being arrested when she drives through Martha's Vinyard in her Mercedes. Your chance of being arrested and spending time in prison is far more closely correlated with your income (or lack thereof) than your skin tone.

This is an incredibly ignorant statement. Why does everything need to be about race all day?

I think it would be pretty weird if comments about race didn't come up in a post about policing. Scanning through things, clearly it's not "everything" either. Maybe dial down your knee-jerk sensitivity a notch?

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