Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com