45 SF traffic cops issue just 10 citations combined a day
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
At the end of the day traffic enforcement via fine hardly ever does anything to improve actual safety, it is a revenue generator and a pretense for other police investigation but has never and can never be about safety
If you want to improve road safety you must increase licensing requirements, require more testing, and have an actual mechanism to revoke licenses for people that cause accidents. Sadly many states (including CA) are "no fault" states where the police do not even try to figure out who caused the accident, and very rarely is there any consequences to actual unsafe driving so because of that I fail to see how forcing someone to pay some fines for speeding will improve safety. That is a joke.
NYC's red-light violation fining program (which was just expanded this year) is substantively responsible for a 70% decline in right-angle crashes, as well as a 40% decline in rear-end crashes[1]. Drivers who are fined for driving unsafely learn that there's a cost, and drive more safely as a result.
I agree with the rest (including the concerning pretext aspect!). But fines do play a critical role in road safety.
[1]: https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/nyc-red-light-ca...
So I have no doubt that automated enforcement will change behavior, I still opposed automated enforcement on a number of grounds, privacy / constitutional / abuse concerns / etc.
Further I would have to look deeper into the implantation, but I know more than a few studies on Red Light cams have shown that while they will reduce intersection crashed, often then INCREASE rear end crashes as people slam on the breaks when the yellow comes on making the intersection not really "safer" it just changes the location of the wreck.
Now for a city like NYC rear end may be safer over all given the high levels of pedestrians I dont know...
I've heard just about every driver I've ever talked to repeat the "red light cameras cause rear-ends" claim, but the only evidence I've seen shows that they decrease rear-ends. That makes more intuitive sense to me: most people have regular commutes, and you learn to follow the traffic laws after the first handful of tickets.
edit: removed snark.
Higher or lower than speeding?
because many of the "defund police" were a direct result of police enforcement actual violent crime.... not them attempting to enforce "sleeping in the park" laws
Also as a side note, overly tinted windows (speaking as someone that drives a car with overly tinted windows) can be dangerous at night, more so than speeding.
It’s about accountability and not treating everything as a problem for law enforcement.
If SF is like NYC in this regard, it's because the police there have been on an unofficial and illegal work strike for years (long predating COVID). Municipalities have lost (or willfully ceded) their ability to oversee their police departments and, lacking any real consequences, the police are more than happy to sit on their thumbs.
Some road signs have been changed (which turns are illegal, etc.) without considering how go some direction legally. Sunset neighborhood around 19th is mind numbing. Exceptionally few permitted left turns, random surface streets you'd otherwise use closed off except for residents of the street, etc.
Not to mention that pulling over a car on an SF street will most likely start a traffic jam..
People should not just stop in the road. I've heard officers use the megaphone (or walk up to the driver) to tell the person to pull into a parking lot. Otherwise, officers can just follow the driver until they're in a position that they can pull over somewhere and park safely.
It creates traffic jams and is dangerous for both driver and officer
Camping out in the left lane clogging up half the capacity of the street while you wait for a gap in the oncoming direction is psychopathic behavior.
For anyone else who didn't know that term
On the other hand, do you really want cops to have traffic ticket quotas?
I don't know what the answer is, but I doubt it's "hire 500 more traffic cops."
Automated enforcement? Cameras checking for speeding, red light running, etc. are trivial and already existant. That makes enforcement better, with more coverage, faster, cheaper and removes any selection bias (that looks like my friend's car, I'll not stop them to write a ticket for speeding).
A lot of people probably don't give a damn about surveillance, but think about all the future politicians who are having their entire lives recorded.
"I know where you were on August 6th. You might want to vote X unless you want everyone else to know."
The more we build, the easier it is to press further with it.
Deploy it in one city, and soon everywhere else will follow.
I don't trust those in power not to abuse this.
It’s quite annoying as they’d save so many lives because speeding is the primary factor in most accidents (and makes any accidents worse).
>That makes enforcement better
No it does not, it has problems with constitutional issues (being able to face your accuser) and owner of the vehicle is not always the driver, and under an innocent until proven guilty system it is on the state of PROVE you were the driver, many automated systems flip this and assume the owner is the driver and if you were not you are liable until you inform the state who was the driver.
None of that should be allowed in a free society,and I am not willing to give up essential liberty for traffic safety
That is all with out going into the innumerable ways traffic systems are already abused for other purposes than just traffic enforcement
If they're "understaffed" how many traffic cops do we need? How many citations will they write at that number? Even the old citation number cited in the article sounds incredibly low given how many traffic cops there are.
What are some examples of non-ticket based traffic safety, and how will they help reduce dangerous behavior?
Or just, instead of traffic specific police, put them back on beat patrols where they walk around and interact with the community in positive, peace and order, encouraging ways.
Managing traffic at distinct locations - especially if it’s known that violations aren’t enforced elsewhere - will have minimal impacts on overall driving habits. It’s the specter of omnipresent monitoring that will change behavior (to say nothing, of course, about actual engineering solutions). But that specter has to be grounded in reality, which right now it isn’t. The cops have given up, and people are starting to catch on.
It makes some sense: if a cop is at a corner directing traffic, people aren’t going to flagrantly break the law, and the cop probably can’t really leave their post to deal with whatever does occur.
Even the time spent on traffic enforcement is not spent wisely. Is SFPD this inept? Are there perverse incentives? I don't get it.
I'm on the other coast, but there's been a marked increase in aggressive and illegal driving here over the past two years, coinciding with a marked decrease in traffic law enforcement.
"Good drivers will drive well" is not sufficient. Driving is not a right; it's a privilege that's meant to be afforded based on the driver's ability to drive safely.
I'm hoping this is just some silly and normative libertarian take, because it's otherwise laughably wrong: driving, as a matter of settled law, is not a right in the US. It's not a right anywhere in the world.
Governments can indeed infringe upon rights, and they can also infringe upon plenty of things that are not rights. Like driving.
First off, as we have seen "settled law" is never really settled
Secondly, the common justification that it is a privilege and not a right is the fact you must pass a skills challenge to be licensed, and then it could be revoked if you abuse the "privilege", neither of which would be the case if were a "right"
But it is now "settled law" as you call it that the 2nd amendment is an indivual right, but in order to bear arms in many many states you must pass a skills challenge to be licensed, and then it could be revoked if you abuse the "privilege????"... so if logic on why driving is not a right holds then logically all licensing and regulation around gun ownership and carrying are de-facto unconstitutional
However if instead the public can put reasonable limits for public safety on both gun ownership and driving, both driving and gun ownership would be rights... as they should be considered.
Driving is a right because we have the right to travel, and government can only under very limited circumstances limit that right to travel.
Sure. I naturally await the day that any of our 50 beautiful states, much less the federal government, decides that driving is a fundamental right!
Insofar as law can be settled, the absence of a right to drive is settled.
> However if instead the public can put reasonable limits for public safety on both gun ownership and driving, both driving and gun ownership would be rights... as they should be considered.
This is affirming the consequent: the fact we put reasonable limits on a government-recognized right and a non-right does not imply that the non-right is somehow a right. The government puts limits on hunting on federal lands; that does not imply a right to hunt (either on those lands or at all).
You have a right to free movement. The government is not required to respect any particular instantiation of your movement as a pure right in itself. Put another way: you right to travel does not give you a free pass to fly a plane without licensing and safety training.
It kind of reminds me of the states where you need a license/permit to acquire a gun, "but you could acquire an antique muzzleloader without one" so the mental gymnastics justify it as not an infringement.
I get libertarian values, but arguing against licenses and registration and calling it tyranny and kowtowing is strange.
> To use the shared resource, you need to do so safely.
You can do things safely without being licensed or registered. In fact I'd argue having a driver license is almost "proof" you'll be unsafe by your standards, since the majority of licensed drivers are batshit insane on the road (and you made the statement about "the group" aka majority being the decider of the state of something)
>The group decided to have agents verify you know how to do them safely.
I did not elect any of those "agents." And I'm pretty sure the "group" that voted for licensing of vehicles in my state is dead and in the ground, like the guys who voted to keep slaves. Also not a fan of the idea 4 guys of the 5 vote to break their own legs, so all 5 have to do it. I see public roads as breaking my own leg, by busting the free market for roads by creating a violence imposed subsidized government system. You create this subsidized system that destroys the market for private market roads where a license wouldn't be required, and then you say "well see, you don't need a license on private property but we destroyed through subsidies the market that would allow those roads to freely compete HA HA!"
It is actually not. It is a privilege. You have to earn it and you can lose it. In some states (maybe all?) you agree to this FACT when you get your license.
https://driversed.com/driving-information/the-driving-privil...
> An unlicensed unregistered driver who drives responsibly has done nothing wrong, and anyone stopping that person is a tyrant who has no place in our society.
They're unlicensed because they either didn't take the required training, or lost their license, or perhaps lost significant vision. It is irresponsible for others (such as family) to let them drive.
And regarding the tyrant thing. hyperbole? are you trolling?
>They're unlicensed because they either didn't take the required training, or lost their license, or perhaps lost significant vision.
Or they're unlicensed because they meet the standards and more, perhaps even trained as professional drivers. They may be far more safe than others but merely believe driving is a right, and thus do not submit to infringements. If you've been on the road, you can see having a license has little bearing on whether you are a safe driver.
>In some states (maybe all?) you agree to this FACT when you get your license
Those who haven't gotten a license haven't agreed with that "fact."
>https://driversed.com/driving-information/the-driving-privil...
I thought you would enjoy one quote from the website you cited: "No one has more right to the road than anyone else." That is, their statement necessarily agrees those with a license have no more right to use the road than anyone else such as those who don't.
Clearly they should re-assign 40 of these officers elsewhere in the department where they could be utilized. This is a management failure.
The error here is in assuming that SF's traffic enforcement is uniquely incompetent, rather than uniquely visible in its incompetence.
https://transparentcalifornia.com/pensions/sfers-san-francis...
https://sfgov.org/scorecards/transportation/traffic-fataliti...
I don't really see any significant changes there.
Perhaps there should be other metrics, but number of citations would create perverse incentives.
> In 2014, the city adopted a Vision Zero pledge to eliminate traffic fatalities within a decade. The Police Department was a key part of that commitment, pledging that half its traffic citations would be for the five behaviors that are most likely to result in crashes: speeding, running red lights, blowing through stop signs, failing to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks, and failing to yield while making a left turn or U-turn.
> But just 35% of the paltry number of citations issued in San Francisco since 2018 were for those five violations, while the majority were for behaviors unlikely to injure anyone else — like expired tags, suspended licenses, tinted windows and broken tail lights, the analysis found.
> In neighborhoods with lower incomes and more diversity — including the Tenderloin, Chinatown and Bayview-Hunters Point — an even higher share of citations were for these relatively minor infractions. It seems people of color always bear the brunt of enforcement, even the thin gruel served by San Francisco.
> Meanwhile, just 32% of citations citywide are issued on the “high injury network” — the 13% of city streets where 75% of fatalities and major injuries take place. These include busy thoroughfares such as Geary Boulevard, Van Ness Avenue and 19th Avenue, as well as almost every street in the Tenderloin.
> Braitsch and Bornheimer argue that the department’s 45 traffic officers would be far more effective if they aimed their citations at the five bad driving behaviors taking place on the high injury network.
> But that’s not happening, and the outcome is predictable. Already this year, 19 people have died in traffic collisions on San Francisco streets, a figure that puts the city on target to match the 31 deaths in 2014 that prompted the Vision Zero commitment in the first place. Hundreds more people are severely injured on San Francisco streets each year but survive.
> expired tags, suspended licenses, tinted windows and broken tail lights
It is unsurprising that the majority of tickets are for objective facts that can be observed at any time rather than things which must be witnessed.
We ultimately left that otherwise nice apartment, because of this situation combined with the landlord not caring about a new bedbug infestation. SF could be a wonderful place if they built more middle density housing and improved city institutions.
I'm not sure what it would take to get there in the US, but whatever obstacles are in the way to true reform are not only the fault of police, but are pretty deep-seated social issues.
Particularly, the US has a political legacy of expediency being successful and popularly supported, while adhering to principles is seen as pointy-headed pedantry. When it comes to the portrayal of law enforcement and criminal defense in popular tv shows and movies, more often than not, protagonists bend the rules to catch criminals who otherwise use procedural loopholes to evade justice. So, the people that adhere to principles are the villains, and the people who bend the rules are heroes. This social current manifests in real, actual political life when partisans promote or cherry-pick gossip and news that they themselves know are false, but if widely believed will harm their political opponents.
This trend hits US cops specifically in two ways. The first is that bending the rules is expected and sticking to principle is not rewarded. And that's not by "the leadership" but by you, you reading this - if you have ever thrilled to a hero bending the rules. The second is that even cops who do stick to principles can be savaged in the media with a presumption of guilt because everyone knows ACAB.
How do we fix all of that?
Is that a thing that happens?
Anyway, I have lots of friends in the law enforcement world, and almost all of them are happy with their careers.
In reality, “death is around every corner” is an intentional training method pushed by the police themselves. Evidence-based training would likely go a long way to making police public servants again, and improve community relations a great deal.
Also: on average, being a cop is just not that dangerous, and it gets less so every year as crime rates drop. These are just the facts. In the vast majority of situations police will be the better armed and trained party. Much different than other public servants, who often have to deal with the same public and the same scrutiny for less pay and with worse protection…
I'll buy they're busy all day just responding to accidents.