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Comment by mcpackieh | Hacker News Reader

When a landscaping company uses a gas leaf blower, enforcement of the ban should be targeted at the property owner instead of the landscaping company. Most cops aren't particularly excited about bullying a hardworking landscaping worker so if you call them they won't even show up in time to give the landscaping company a ticket. On the other hand, if you could simply submit a video of the offense to local officials they could easily tie the offense to the property itself, and fine the property owner. No cops necessary.

Then property owners could weigh the cost of eating these fines against simply raking their yard themselves.

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It sounds like the root cause of the issue you describe is cops not doing their job. Perhaps the efforts of the city can be better targeted to the root cause, rather than creating additional bureaucracy, or engaging in collective punishment because it's more convenient.

It also doesn't seem like it would work because most property owners are even less excited than cops about confronting a hardworking landscaping worker, particularly given that it's the cops' job to do so, not theirs.

You actually want cops to police leaf blowers? Are you joking? We won’t even hire enough so they can police petty crime.

> You actually want [police] to police [law breaking]? Are you joking?

If this is what you meant to ask, the answer is obviously yes.

Do you actually want homeowners to police law breaking? Are you joking? It's not even their job, and enforcing the law is literally what we pay police to do, that's why their job is called "policing" and their employer is the "police".

You want to talk about hiring budgets, what's the government-provided officer hiring budget for homeowners? Or do you expect homeowners to solve the problem with $0 while the police receive significantly more than $0 to ignore the problem? I mean, if the police abdicate their responsibilities and burden private citizens with them instead, obviously those citizens should receive the money the police were receiving.

Meanwhile, I see a lot of police sitting around in cars, at speed traps, etc. Are we sure they're doing as much as they can with the resources they have? Are we sure they're directing resources to where we want them to (in terms of both geographical areas and types of crimes)? I think it's fair for them to be able to present a request for more staffing budget, along with reports on their progress using existing resources, on current deployment of resources, on progress towards having public disciplinary hearings and publicly closing out IA complaints, etc.

Siccing police on landscapers using leaf blowers is like trying to get rid of a hornet nest with a napalm bomb. Fining the property owner is far more appropriate.

> Siccing police on landscapers using leaf blowers

Rephrased it in a straightforward, non-melodramatic way: "asking *police* to *police* people who break the law"

What a difference an honest phrasing makes: that's not so outrageous, is it? If we didn't want police to police illegal stuff, we wouldn't have made it their job. If we didn't want the illegal stuff to be illegal, and thus policed, we wouldn't have made it illegal.

Asking the police to do the job they're paid to do is more appropriate than siccing governments on homeowners and siccing homeowners on landscapers without paying any of them.

> "asking police to police people who break the law"

That would be one way to get many laws changed in a hurry. As well as slashing the funding for police. I expect most people don't realize how often they break the law.

Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. Point is, some places voted for them to do it for 2-stroke leafblowers, so if you think they shouldn't have, convince them to change their mind and hold a new vote.

Until then, we still expect police to do their job, which, again, is what we tell them to do, not what they feel like doing.

Even if the police make an earnest attempt to do their jobs well (which is a pipe dream) coming to the scene of a lawn worker using a gas blower will be very low on their priority queue and is unlikely to happen most of the time.

If the homeowners don't like being fined and don't want to do the lawn work themselves, they can specifically hire lawn companies that use electric tools. You still haven't given me any reason why my proposal isn't a good one. The homeowners are the ones paying for these gas tools to be used, so they should be the ones fined for it.

The answer to why people wouldn't accept your proposal is simple: that is part of the job that we pay the police to do, and they aren't paying us to do that part of their job.

You keep falling back to the excuse 'well, the police won't do their job'. If that's the case, that's the root cause of the lack of enforcement, and we need to address it. Who knows what other crimes they won't feel like investigating tomorrow? Domestic violence? Murder? Obviously we can't leave such discretion in their hands, rather than the hands of the people.

The excuses about police workload always inspire skepticism given their petulant tantrums and refusals to do their job in retaliation for being criticized for their wrongdoing.

Honestly, though, I'm just not convinced they're using the available person hours and budget in the most optimal way to achieve what the people want. If the police feel like they truly do need more people to do their job, however: like I said, they can submit themselves to civilian review to determine if they're meeting enough civilian goals to justify increased budget.

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