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Comment by pton_xd | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't pay. Pulling over a citizen with a job and citing them for speeding is a much more lucrative use of their time. Both are against the law, so they're doing their job either way. Kind of.

Although as another commenter noted, I've noticed they've become strangely lax about even citing moving violations since Covid. Makes you wonder what they are even doing, then.

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I don't even think that it's lucrative per se, but rather that it's straightforward. Cop sits there playing candy crush, magical radar artifact makes a noise, they look up, chase down that car, then check a box on a pre-printed citation where they don't even have to think about which law to cite. But (real example) same road, clearly marked as trucks prohibited from left two lanes - a shed larger than many houses meanders by in the third lane, hanging well over into both the second and leftmost lanes - where do they even start? If the cop even happened to look up from their phone at the right time, they'd have to figure out which specific laws are being broken, how to cite them, what to take down as evidence, probably show up to the court date themselves, etc. So the actual hazardous moving violation goes unpoliced meanwhile every driver merely going the prevailing speed of the road has to spend a large part of their attention looking out for highway robbers laying in wait.

Traffic tickets also nicely fit quotas. Even while they don't exist. While it might take a while until a package actually gets stolen under while they look. And they can't look while they are filling out paperwork (about traffic tickets :-)

> Pulling over a citizen with a job and citing them for speeding is a much more lucrative use of their time

The solution may be in segregating the police from the traffic cops.

Policework is dangerous and specialised. Its officers need a lot of training and good pay. Traffic cops are basically humans trained to be cameras, inasmuchas 90% of what they do can be automated.

The US is strangely staunchly opposed to traffic cameras, whereas you barely ever see cops on the roads in many EU countries, and yet traffic tickets flow abundantly.

If you eliminate the need for traffic cops, you need to accept that the "important" police work of criminal investigation and civil protection requires specialized training and skills (and probably more pay). American police departments aren't that; they're jobs programs with badges and guns.

It's not strange at all.

Driving is dangerous enough as it is. Adding the extra anxiety of getting lit up by a speed-limit camera for accidentally exceeding the speed limit does not make it safer.

Plus, we Americans are inventive. If there were no traffic cops, the wealthy and mischievous would simply modify their cars to hide their license plates when driving past speeding cameras on their normal route.

> the wealthy and mischievous would simply modify their cars to hide their license plates when driving past speeding cameras on their normal route

This is a good way to meet the local police in any jurisdiction with cameras.

We hate speed cameras because Americans like to speed. There is a minority that is privacy focussed. But the majority hate it because most we drive unsafely [1].

[1] https://newsroom.aaa.com/2016/02/87-percent-of-drivers-engag...

We "speed" because speed limits are used not as a tool for defining normative behavior and policing rare outliers, but rather as feel good social engineering - similar to the war on drug users. Note how that AAA's article definition of unsafe wholly depends on what roads have been signed.

There's a stretch of through road around me that had been signed a low 30 my whole life - straight with perfect visibility, sidewalks, decent house setbacks, backyards for most activities, etc. The prevailing speed is 40 (adding 10 is standard and accepted around here). I've never seen or heard of any kind of crash on it.

I tended to keep it to 35 because my parents were always complaining about getting tickets on it [0], and as I got older I decided it wasn't worth worrying about (I would generally end up being tailgated for this). But recently, the city ratcheted it down further to a ridiculous 25 [1]. Since the customary speed is now so far over the sign I've just given up and go 40-45 now while spending the effort to scan for cops.

[0] in retrospect I think they were just unobservant, since there's nowhere really for a cop to hide. I've only ever seen cops sit in one place, and it might as well have a big red arrow pointing at it

[1] along with a lot of other roads, I think they must have gotten a quantity break on the signs. Or maybe just a bad case of affluenza.

If DOTs really cared about safety, they would label persistent dangers explicitly rather than attempt to encapsulate the signaling of dangers by a single variable.

That "minority" has noticed that if it's there, it will be abused. No if or when. No prize for guessing by whom.

They already do that. Seattle at least is populated by expensive cars with rounded semi-transparent plastic covers over the plate that are intended to block camera capture.

this is a good thing, I think. Traffic safety is about feedback that changes behaviour - immediate feedback. Traffic cameras and photo radar are about revenue generation.

Imagine if you pull aside your toddler tonight and take away their ice cream cone, because they sad a bad word 2 weeks ago.

I like how you compared car drivers to toddlers in terms of behaviour change

Seattle thought about doing that but reactionaries framed it as defunding the police department so they elected a more conservative council who moved it back.

> reactionaries framed it as defunding the police department

Couldn't one hit back by increasing funding for the resulting police and traffic enforcement departments?

They're millions of dollars in the hole already, and the problem was that low information voters read "police department budget: 2020, 100 million. 2021, 80 million" and no farther.

Do you have any sources to this? I've long thought traffic cops should be their own separate entity, and would like to know how this played out

I wasn't even aware Seattle pulled people over for speeding much at all. WSP on the highways yes, but on the city streets there is not really any traffic enforcement by cops (outside of parking).

Seattle went from like 40k/yr moving violation tickets to 3k/yr over the last decade-ish.

I think GP might have been talking about the proposal to split parking enforcement out of the police department: https://mynorthwest.com/3093949/seattle-council-votes-move-p...

Which yes, was undone: https://www.theurbanist.org/2022/11/23/council-returns-parki...

But also only tangentially related to speeding enforcement.

Yes, I did mean parking, oops.

> Policework is dangerous

Not nearly as much as people believe. Most lists of dangerous jobs in the US have police below jobs most people consider to be pretty mundane. For instance, this list [1] ranks it at #22. Below occupations like "garbage collector" and "crossing guard"

[1] https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-j...

> Not nearly as much as people believe

The point is a lot of what police in our country do is not police work. It's traffic copping and meter maiding.

garbage collectors and crossing guard are out there in traffic all day, and don't have the benefit of being near something people are afraid of (a police car). If that is your standard to cite it isn't very safe. Let me know how it compares to a more generic office worker.

What I would rather see is a 4th branch (police/fire/emr) added that focuses on drugs. Sending police for a drug OD or psychotic episode is gas on the fire; an ambulance can't respond to a potentially dangerous situation without security.

Yes, also because (at least where I live in NYC) cops are flagrant violators of both traffic and parking laws. Follow a random cop car for a few minutes and you will undoubtedly see them run a red light. Walk to ANY precinct in the city and you will see the cops' personal cars parked all over the surrounding sidewalks. Reporting these issues, no surprise, accomplishes nothing--the cops simply close the ticket with the notice, "no action necessary".

My understanding is that moving violations are perceived as high risk, low reward.

(1) The stop is dangerous because you don't know who the vehicle occupants are. If the driver is medium bad and runs, the public has low appetite for high speed pursuits that may cause collateral damage or put the public in danger. There's also the chance it's a very bad guy... someone in a stolen vehicle with a warrant out for a murder charge. Are they going to just give up and come quietly? Probably not.

(2) For a given region there is a list of things that the DA and/or judges are perceived as being soft on. There's little/no appetite from LEO to apprehend bad guy who is just going to be back out on the street a short time later.

So to the LEO, you want me to pull people over for speeding, but if it's a medium bad person they flee -> no pursuit allowed, and if it's a very bad person maybe they attack me? No thx, I'll wait for dispatch to call.

https://www.police1.com/traffic-patrol/articles/police-resea...

https://www.wcax.com/2022/01/13/prosecutor-takes-aim-chitten...

https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2021/06/stop-start-or-c...

> the public has low appetite for high speed pursuits

Police officers should be training in high speed pursuits. This training exists and means they never happen (there are a number of things that if the police know mean there are no high speed chases - but they need a lot of training)

They're also not doing that either. Something else is going on

https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/11nbnxw/san_f...

They realized that solving crimes pays just as well as playing candy crush, and the latter is less effort and more fun

And in some places, even traffic is too much (possibly prompted by "but covid" at some point and working out just fine for some.) https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/11nbnxw/san_f...

There was / is also the effective strike against DAs and courts.

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