> The police do nothing.
> I don’t think I’ve seen somebody “pulled over” in my city in like a decade
Seems like there’s a pretty straightforward alternative here - have law enforcement enforce the law.
> I don’t think I’ve seen somebody “pulled over” in my city in like a decade
Seems like there’s a pretty straightforward alternative here - have law enforcement enforce the law.
Hell, if they handed out a $200 ticket for everyone browsing their phones while driving, they could probably fund their entire departments.
As a law-and-order kind of person, this my first reaction as well.
But it seems so obvious, I have to wonder: what's at work that prevents this solution from being enacted?
I.e., are there factors I'm not aware of that make it logistically and/or politically difficult?
When something is dangerous or unpleasant, even if we are paid to do it, we will often hesitate to do it.
In MD, however, it was a very different story. They would hide behind bushes.
Also probably they spend their budget importing fentanyl or buying office furniture from their brother or something (mostly tongue in cheek here, and I certainly haven’t done or seen an audit but unfortunately “inspired by true events”)
A friend's neighbor in wine country is an early retired officer due to injury - their benefits pretty much match many tech workers.
Looks like in San Jose police salaries start at $111k and max out at $186k, BUT additionally SJ spent $58M on overtime. _Average_ overtime pay for officer, sgt, lt and captain were $38-68k and some earned as much $200k in overtime. So the salary is probably $150-$220k on average I'd assume. Not as bad as many think.
But it's possible I'm reading some of this wrong.
[1] https://www.sjpdyou.com/for-applicants/additional-informatio... [2] https://sanjosespotlight.com/san-jose-spent-58m-on-police-ov...
One weekend after my buddy and I went down there, I saw on the news that the police intervened finally to stop the drag racing. It was a very big operation to quickly and simultaneously pull enough cops cars out to block both ends of Front Street entirely to corral all of the racers and spectators in. Helicopters were also deployed in case someone wanted to try to speed through the city to escape. In the end, all the cars they managed to corral got impounded. I don't know what the long term effect was on the drag racers.
I imagine that if you're going to do it right – and not just set up a bunch of reckless high speed chases through neighborhoods/cities – it actually has to be a fairly large operation, pulling in a lot of resources for a substantial amount of time. And I don't know if it ultimately stops drag racing or just pauses it for a while, nor do I know what the opportunity cost is of pulling all the resources away from other policing tasks.
While I'm generally for impounding drag racers and ATV swarms, I do think there are tradeoffs and risks that the police department leadership has to take into account.