Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

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Police ignore crime that's happening on the roads right now.

Drive around Kansas City sometime, particularly on the Missouri side. Tons of temporary paper license plates that are a year past expiration. Any member of law enforcement could pull the person over and enforce a penalty for it.

They just... don't. I don't know exactly why that is. Are they afraid that doing so opens them up to the chance of being shot or engaging in a high-speed pursuit? The former definitely happened in North Kansas City a few years ago (not to be confused with KC North) but having a massive network of cameras tracking license plates and how they move across town doesn't help. At the end of the day, you have to send someone a fine, and if they don't pay it and don't show up for court, you are again faced with having a police officer try to interact with them one-on-one, this time to enforce a bench warrant for their arrest.

In the meantime, you now have an absolutely massive data set of citizen movements being collected without a warrant by an increasingly authoritarian American government.

I can confirm that they are not shy about pulling over people with regular plates that have just expired, however. They’re on top of that. N = 3, 100% enforcement within a month.

But long-expired temps are everywhere. So confusing. How?

People with barely expired plates are normies who made a mistake. Safe. People with temps expired a year ago aren't making a mistake, they're willfully and openly displaying defiance of the law. That makes them scarier.

I'd also add that there's a socioeconomic component. In Missouri, at least up until 2025, you'd get your temp tags when you buy the car, and your actual metal plates once you paid sales and property tax and registered the vehicle with the DMV. This recently changed to make the sales and property tax apply at the time of the purchase so that you'd get your plates much more quickly after.

A car is a necessity in most of Missouri. Kansas City has more highway miles per capita than any other major city in the country (and maybe in the world); IIRC St. Louis is fourth-most highway miles per capita. Public transit has major gaps. Inability to drive is such an encumbrance that those convicted of DUI are allowed to petition courts for a hardship license allowing them to drive to work and other essential places because not allowing for this could fail under the Eighth Amendment.

All of this is to say that if you are able to pay for a car, but not the sales tax for the car, and you get pulled over for not registering after your temp tags expire, you are essentially under house arrest until you can put together the money to both pay the fine and to pay the tax on the car, which is now exponentially harder since you can't drive anywhere. Since that'd put disadvantaged people at an even greater disadvantage, it might be a "community relations" move by the PD to look the other way on these cases, at least until another blatant violation occurs.

This is basically a description of police in a nutshell. They are just ordinary civil servants, plus a gun, plus maybe a little less accountability if they mess up. People who get scared like you and me. People who are lazy like you and me. Imagine the clerk at the motor vehicle office or the secretary at the welfare office but asked to do something different today.

Do you, reader, want to have to confront a bunch of scary people for a $? Oh, you think having a gun makes it a bit less scary?

Almost no one wants to confront dangerous people day in and day out. Once in a while to flex the hero complex, maybe. But a few times of that will cure you of any particular desire to seek it out.

The people that want to do that are one in a thousand types. Basically criminals themselves, just on the right side of the law who use the 'criminal' mentality for good. Most police are not that.

They want to do a job, collect a paycheck, and do it in an easy way. Like how I like to drive to work rather than do a handstand and walk 5 miles on my hands and wrists. They get little to nothing for making their job harder.

The people with the most motivation to stop the criminal is the victim themselves. You are pretty much on your own. The state won't be coming to save you.

I think you have hit the nail on the head why more police funding, more surveillance tech, more dystopian BS that looks more like PreCrime every single day, is only going to get us so far.

I'm sure there are exceptions, but I think most folks (including criminals) believe crime is, generally speaking, bad. Folks commit crimes to survive, to enrich themselves, out of retribution, out of lapse of judgment, or lack of self control. Almost all some flavor of unmet needs. You put money into tackling those challenges, address why people are stealing, why turf wars break out, why addiction ruins lives and puts people in terrible positions, why poor nutrition and family support and mental health care lead to so many folks slipping through the cracks.

School quality’s largely in the same place. You’re not going to make much of a dent without fixing social support, the social safety net, healthcare, mental healthcare, and generally greatly improving stability for the economically bottom third or so of families.

In other words, the main problems with schools have little to do with schools. But they’re complicated and expensive problems with distant payoff, so we keep monkeying around with schools instead.

In some places where I’ve lived, local LE mounts ALPR systems atop most of their fleet. Those read “formal” plates as vehicles pass near the cruiser, and they proactively alert against a watchlist. Which presumably somebody’s hooked up to periodically ingest lists of recent lapses alongside the usual stolen/wanted/pile-of-unpaid-tickets sorts of stuff.

My sense is that such systems are rather less consistent at reading temp tags, and that temp tag issuance tends to be decentralized/dealer-based, rather more ad hoc, and thus rather less legible for semi-automated enforcement purposes.

Absolutely. Turns out policing actually requires real police work.

These cameras only punish law-abiding citizens. Fake plates and out-of-date temp tags effectively render these people invisible to the ALPRs.

Yeah, this is a major problem, and it obviously is not just Kansas City. In San Francisco the useless SFPD completely stopped writing traffic tickets, gradually over the last 20 years. They were writing > 14000 per month as recently as 2014 and this was below 500 per month for years until recent reforms brought it up slightly. The problem is that the police are self-selecting members of the tinted-dodge-charger club and do not perceive traffic laws as real laws. This ties in more generally to the fact that every single individual member of law enforcement throughout the United States needs to be closely scrutinized by psychologists.

Uh, no. They stopped because they were being punished for pulling over ethnically disproportionate numbers of drivers. This is likely due to several factors but the end result was making traffic stops a politically sensitive area, so they just pulled back.

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