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Comment by jere | Hacker News Reader

>The reporters found nearly 800 officers who reached speeds of 90-130 mph, many of them while off duty. The accidents caused by officers driving at high speeds had caused at least 320 crashes since 2004, killing or maiming 21 people.

That's such a horrifying statistic if true. Even at their peak, homicide offending rates in the US were at around 20 per 100,000; assault rates about 10 times as high: http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf

Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way, but in my mind I'm comparing 20 homicides per 100,000 citizens to to 21 people killed/maimed by a group that is orders of magnitude smaller: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Police_Department

I think this is just another reminder that Bruce Schneier is right when he says we should be more worried about car accidents than terrorism.

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Frustrating? Yes. Shocking? No.

Did anyone really believe that taking a job as a police officer somehow suppressed these people's natural desire to drive fast? Hell, that's probably what make them join the force in the first place. Sure, it's irresponsible and illegal for off-duty officers to speed, but it's also irresponsible and illegal for regular citizens to speed, and yet that doesn't seem to stop them from doing it. Why would you expect the cops to be any different? Do you hold them to a higher level of moral responsibility during their off time because of what they do for a living?

Being a police officer is a job. Unless you wanna have robots do it instead, people are going to do what people are going to do.

Do you hold them to a higher level of moral responsibility during their off time because of what they do for a living?

Yes! Of course! Being an officer may be 'just a job', but in practice the hat doesn't come off. Which is the entire point - police officers occupy a particular position in society regardless of whether or not they're wearing a badge at the moment.

That's not the same thing as saying that I'm surprised that they're still human, though.

I agree. An off-duty cop is just off the clock. By the way the news reads there really is no such thing as an off-duty cop. A cop is always on the job. Describing a cop as off-duty suggests that he suddenly becomes a normal citizen like everyone else once the clock is punched at the end of the shift. But I'm willing to bet an off-duty cop has no issues with using police powers, if necessary, while off the clock.

>Sure, it's irresponsible and illegal for off-duty officers to speed, but it's also irresponsible and illegal for regular citizens to speed, and yet that doesn't seem to stop them from doing it. Why would you expect the cops to be any different? Do you hold them to a higher level of moral responsibility during their off time because of what they do for a living?

a) A higher standard? Sure. I suppose I'm extremely naive, but if you spend your day punishing people for doing X, I think you should have an appreciation for why you shouldn't be doing X or at least be a role model for not doing X.

b) I actually wouldn't guess that, among the general populace, the majority of people regularly speed at 90-130. Again, that's probably naive. I drive like an elderly person, so I may be biased.

Regarding a (at least in the US) I think a big part of the problem is a system of laws that people generally agree is unjust (i.e. the drug laws)

In my mostly uninformed opinion, drug laws are a huge part of the problem in terms of public interfacing with the police.

That said, while people may complain about particular speed limits, I don't think very many would call a cap somewhere below 120mph "unjust".

The maximum safe speed really depends on the road, current traffic, weather, and the capabilities of the car. I could imagine some locations permitting safe travel at 120+. Maybe the revenue currently earned from speeding tickets can be gained by offering a "license to speed" instead, with increased driver training, insurance, and vehicle inspection requirements.

You can't go by the capabilities of the individual car. You have to also account for the capabilities of the other cars on the road. If a Ferrari is speeding along at 120 MPH, which might be easily within its capabilities, there will be problems when it encounters the small Hyundai that can only achieve 90 comfortably.

Plus there's the issue of driver's ability as well. Can you look in your side mirror and successfully gauge the speed of the car that's a good distance behind you to know whether you can safely change lanes? If the car is going at a known max speed, of which you are probably aware of as you are likely at that speed yourself, then you can change but if the car is going two to three times faster than you I would imagine changing lanes would be a bad idea.

Also, how would the police be able to judge the things you describe looking at your car driving by at 120 MPH while everyone else is driving in the 80s? The officer would have to constantly be pulling these people over to check their "licensed to speed" status. How would the officer be able to judge the conditions of your car as you breeze by? Sticker on the bumper? Better be a huge freaking sticker when you are flying through traffic.

Speed limits are decided upon on the safety of most cars for the general area and expectations of traffic conditions, not the capabilities of the cars or drivers on the road.

I agree with you in general. There needs to be a common speed for all cars because difference in speed is, I believe, the real cause of danger.

However, there is one common case where the speeding law seems unnecessary at best. I live in Texas. Florida is similar in that there can be large stretches of empty highway. When I travel outside the city there is often very little traffic and very open country. If I can see for a mile and I am the only one out there, why shouldn't I travel at the fastest speed I can manage safely? In the city speeding rarely pays off, what with traffic and traffic controls. On a trip of 200 miles (Austin to Dallas for example) the difference between an average speed of 60 m/hr and 90 m/hr is an hour of travel. It seems wrong that I should be limited in this situation because an 18-wheeler cannot handle more than 60 or 70 safely. Worse is when you have small towns that drop the speed limit to 55 or 45 for a tiny stretch of road when the road does not even go through the town. That kind of speed trap is what angers people, especially when you see an officer blow through with impunity.

I-35 between Austin and Dallas is a spectacularly bad example, give that the traffic is routinely congested.

http://cbsdallas.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/i-35-texas_6713...

(Ok, that's downtown Austin; how about this one:

http://www.bartcop.com/Austin-Garbage-09.jpg )

You make good points, but I'll say first your example of the obvious speed trap is a different problem of which I agree with you.

There are examples of US interstates with no speed limits within, to some people, reasonable limits:

http://www.motorists.org/press/montana-no-speed-limit-safety...

They even discuss how in some cases fatalities go up with new road laws and speed limits.

I have driven that stretch of road between Austin and Dallas as I live in the Dallas area. I have also lived in Florida with it's stretches of long, boring roads. Plus, I've lived in Vegas with that incredibly boring route into Los Angeles. In every case I would agree with you that the idea of being able to go a bit faster would have been nice.

But the question that will come up is how do you determine the maximum speed that you can safely manage? What if your assessment of your max speed differs with that of the police officer who witnesses what he feels is a dangerous amount of speed? What about other people on the road that you will eventually come across that can't handle the situation that you present if you decide that the person can handle a speed that in truth they cannot? I'm sure you're thinking you'll just slow down when you see someone but you cannot foresee the possibilities plus your reaction time dwindles quite effectively the faster you go. A mile at 60 MPH is one thing, a mile at 120 MPH is another.

My example against this, which is interesting considering the topic of this thread, is when I was in Vegas an off-duty cop was speeding (I forget how much but in excess of 100 MPH) on one of the interstates outside of the main part of town and rear-ended a family in their car. The resulting accident killed a number of them including children. Therefore, I personally don't like the idea of a free-for-all on the interstate where different cars can drive at different speeds based on criteria that will be different for each individual driver and car. I would rather we all agree on a maximum speed that makes sense for the conditions of the road and expected traffic. Now if a road has too slow of a speed limit for the typical conditions of that road, then that is a different discussion.

I find it strange that the US has laws that many people break and the law is only enforced sporadically. Some examples in California are speeding, missing front license plate, age of consent laws, use tax on out-of-state/internet purchases, and illegal immigration. Having a bunch of laws that people break with impunity has a "broken window" effect, leading to less respect for the law overall. (Whether or not these laws are just is an orthogonal issue, which I won't get in to.)

Regarding speeding, I don't see how the current system can hold up under technological advances. There are a dozen trivial ways to tell if someone is speeding, from the toll booth data of the original article to cell phone GPS to computer vision to road sensors to smart cars. It doesn't make sense for the police to perform inefficient, dangerous traffic stops when all this data is available, but the system would collapse if everyone received 10 traffic tickets a day.

There is absolutely nothing new in tech advances that makes it easier to enforce speeding laws. In the 80s I read some book about beating speeding tickets, and they did the math about the profit margin on a radar gun. It turned out that the average radar gun generated a net profit on the order of $1000/day/gun. The obvious question is why aren't there radar guns on every police car? The answer is obvious: local politicians don't like to get tickets, either.

> It turned out that the average radar gun generated a net profit on the order of $1000/day/gun. The obvious question is why aren't there radar guns on every police car?

I agree with your sentiment. But please bear in mind, that the profit per radar gun would probably go down, if enforcement was less sporadic.

Regarding CA, the vehicle code says something to the effect that the ticket a). must be given by an officer b). must no have financial incentive attached. Just ask the court that dismissed my red light camera ticket for "lack of prosecution". On that note: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/feb/01/san-diego-red-lig....

One of the problems is that the US has so many laws on the books that law enforcement has no choice but to enforce it sporadically. If every law was enforced as written then I would imagine about 80% of the US population would be in the justice system in one form or another at any given moment.

But it does provide a way to pick-and-choose when enforcing laws.

This makes it easier to target enemies.

Not all cars are required to have a front license plate, just FYI. For example, when I got the license for my MINI, they only sent me one, and said that I didn't need to have one on the front.

Sort of ironic. When I bought my mini, it only had one license plate, and I've since received several tickets for that reason. #california

Hmm. I might be wrong! Everything I'm looking at online seems to suggest I should have one. But they only sent me one!? I dunno.

I think the issue here is that off-duty police officers speed aggressively with the knowledge that, if caught, they will be almost certainly let off the hook due to their job. That makes the situation completely different than people with any other "just a job" job.

Or analogous to any other abuse of position.

As gate-keepers to the law the police are in a very special position.

How can we expect them to investigate abuse of position if they are abusing their position?

Well then, let them stop pretending that they're looking out for our safety when they put up a speed trap. If you want to talk about having more reasonable road markings, speed limits, and fines for speeding that's great. It's a conversation that we need to have. But to have a bunch of guys driving around like jerks, on and off duty, extracting a tax from the working stiffs is an insult, and nobody should be surprised that the cops get little sympathy.

> Unless you wanna have robots do it instead

Not really. It's been shown time and again that greedy authorities will compromise on public safety to optimize profit. And, machines tend to have no discretion. Nor is any applied by the authorities. If you show up to an intersection at two am, with nobody in sight, stop, look and proceed safely through a red light, you get the same citation that some jerk gets who blows through on a busy day.

> And, machines tend to have no discretion.

This a feature, that protects and racism and classism.

> that protects and racism

You've got a point.

>and classism.

Meh, I'm not so sure about that one, and really, in both cases it depends where the machines are sited.

By that logic it doesn't protect against racism either.

My reasoning in that speed traps are for revenue generation instead of safety is over the thought that a visible police presence on the road would more likely cause people to slow down and obey traffic laws. Hiding to ambush a speeder is the same tactic used by a highwayman out for money.

I agree. You might also consider the fact that any machinery capable of selectively recording red-light violators, is also capable of warning other drivers, yet such a feature is absent from any that I have seen.

I would have thought dealing with the consequences of speeding in their jobs (notifying families of the death of loved ones, seeing the terrible injuries caused) would have stopped them. I know a few people who work in that area and that stuff stays with them. For example - they've assured me I should never buy a motor bike.

(Shrug) There aren't any "consequences of speeding." If you hit something or kill somebody, you were doing something wrong besides speeding.

People are making small mistakes all the time. Lower speed gives you more time to correct your own and other people's mistakes.

Hiring a professional driver would increase safety a bit. Even better, hire a professional driver and pay him/her to drive slowly.

Yes, you were doing something wrong like not understanding physics involving the coefficient of friction, acceleration formulas, and the inability to see through solid objects to know that a child is about to step out on the road in front of your car at a distance where you could have stopped had you not been speeding.

Also, even if the kid (or someone else) is completely at fault, they shouldn't have to die for their mistakes.

So how does a number on a sign at the side of the road have anything to do with any of those things?

It's typically an estimation based on 85th percentile speed for a given road derived from engineering considerations like grade, curvature, pedestrian access, presence of divider for opposing traffic, and so on. The limit is generally pegged to specific values and modified for certain scenarios (school, construction, playground, etc.) assuming that roads of most types have similar characteristics. While this can vary from region to region for the same type of road, it generally indicates a reasonable estimate of a safe driving speed for the typical driver and typical vehicle.

That's how the number on the sign relates.

The parent comment was aiming at the fact that speed is rarely a cause of an accident, it is often a condition. The difference is small but relevant, as law enforcement focuses on speed as a cause, ignoring the real causes (e.g. Car parked before crosswalk preventing visibility of child that is crossing the road)

Speed - its not the cause of an accident. It's the cause of death.

That's dumb. As dumb as saying that the cause of death is the dashboard your head bumps onto. Or that the cause of death is being alive.

If you can't tell the difference between cause and condition, you may keep silent. No one is forcing you to participate in the discussion.

It wasn't dumb, perhaps I wasn't clear. As a former Police officer I've been to many car crashes and understand the difference between what causes the accident and what kills people.

My point was, that in a large proportion of the accidents where people are killed and where drivers are speeding, people state that that it was the drivers inattention that caused the accident, and not the speed they were going. They use this to suggest that we should not prosecute speeding.

While this is technically true, (one of) the reason that we impose speed limits is that an accident caused by, e.g., inattention or mistake is turned from a fender-bender into a fatal accident by high speed.

Even the best drivers make mistakes from time to time, we have a right not to have that mistake turn into a fatal accident by someone speeding.

Point taken, you are right. However, on the other hand, the ease with which speed becomes the culprit often precludes better solutions. Two examples:

A particular crosswalk in my city was a dark spot, accident wise. A common accident spot, resulting in deaths. Speed traps were, for years, commonly placed in the street, treating, I assume, the perceived cause of the accidents. Speed bumps followed. Years go by, accident rates don't go down. Then, finally specific street lighting is setup on the crosswalk: problem solved. The cause was not excess speed, but night visibility of the crosswalk.

One of the worst mountain roads in Portugal, IP4, was for years considered plagued by speeding. Lots of police cruisers, both marked and stealth, patrolled the road, enforcing limits. Static speed traps the ensued. Accident rates stubbornly wouldn't go down. Then, finally, a brilliant mind decided to place plastic lane barriers preventing overtaking in prohibited zones. Problem solved! Speed was not the cause, dangerous overtake maneuvers were.

Speed is an easy target. As such, it's a dangerous default as accident cause.

Right, so there aren't any consequences of smoking, but only consequences of inhaling tar?

> Do you hold them to a higher level of moral responsibility during their off time because of what they do for a living?

Only if they get "professional courtesy" every time they get pulled over, unlike the rest of us that get traffic tickets.

> Hell, that's probably what make them join the force in the first place.

This. If we believe that people will tend to behave in accordance with their incentives (and we all do, because we're all good capitalists here) then this is a virtual certainty.

Cops get paid X per year. So, all things being equal, some number of people who think it is worthwhile to do the job for X per year will sign up. A few will take the job because they want to help people, so they are willing to work for less than they would at some other job. At the same time, and in the same vein, a few will take the job because it allows them "perks" like hurting people and generally breaking the law without consequence. This is why it is so, so important to hold police to a higher standard, because in the long run we want more of the "want to help people" type and fewer of the "want to break the law" type.

> Do you hold them to a higher level of moral responsibility during their off time because of what they do for a living?

In a word, yes! I expect a judge to engage in ethical behaviour when not behind the bench, a politician to tell the truth (as laughable as that is) and so on. Sure, cops are human but they should also know that by virtue of their position they are much more visible than the ordinary citizen and act accordingly. Surely you can see the hypocrisy of a cop giving tickets for speeding when they get away with the very same behaviour. Maybe I'm old fashioned, I think cops should not be able to say "Do as I say, not as I do."

  Do you hold them to a higher level of moral responsibility during their off time because of what they do for a living?

Absolutely.

I believe in the old lead by example. As a police officer they are obligated to follow the very laws they enforce. If they cannot do that then they should not be a officer in the first place.

I wouldn't go for "higher standard" but I would say they should be "better informed" about the consequences of driving recklessly.

I have talked to a lot of state patrolmen in CA and WA (USA) and they were cured of using their awesome driving schools for personal advantage after coming up on their first gruesome accident. Especially if said involved children.

People tend to think they're "exceptional" in some way, though, and will dismiss the risk by thinking that they are better trained and more aware of the factors that lead to accidents.

Over the period of 2004-2011. So divide by 7.

You should also try to find the vehicular death per 100k statistic.

Exactly. Per Wikipedia it is about 12 deaths per 100k on average from the period of 2004-2012. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_...

Huh! So we're at 3 deaths/maims per year for X number of cops, vs. 12 deaths per 100k for the general populace.

It's all about the division at this point. How many cops were there in that region? If it's just Miami-Dade: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami-Dade_Police_Department Officers 3,034

soooo.... 3 * (100/3) = 100 deaths per 100k of police population.

Which is 8x the normal rate. It's bad, but it's not too outrageous.

Apples and oranges. The number in the article is 'crashes caused by officers driving at high speed', the general pop statistic is all vehicular deaths.

Similarly, deaths per 100k is the rate of victimisation amongst the population. Deaths per number of officers is a rate of offending, not victimisation.

Right. There are a lot of improvements to be made, but I'm just trying to make a quick estimate to compare to.

> That's such a horrifying statistic if true.

What more evidence do you want of it's truth? The story's right there. you can see how they reported it. The data is searchable.

The speeding data, yes. I don't know where I'd get access to the 21 killed or maimed though beyond the story. But sure, I probably don't have a good reason to believe the numbers are inaccurate.

They didn't just reach speeds of 130mph, but average speeds of 130mph over a distance of several miles. Their maximum speed was probably closer to 150-180.

I want to know what cars these officers are driving that are capable of 150-180mph, or capable of sustaining speeds of 130mph over a significant distance. From my knowledge, 150 is a fairly exclusive club limited to not-inexpensive performance cars, and 180 is a very hard target to meet, mostly at the feet of German luxury cars. I know police officers don't make six figures, so the question is what car are they in that can hit 130 sustained, and 150-180 max?

Florida Highway Patrol has some seriously beefed up vehicles. As someone who used to run from the cops on my motorcycle semi-frequently I do have to say that I'm not aware of any that could get up to 180 though.

There are a police versions of the Dodge Charger Dodge Challenger and a new police version of the Chevy Caprice. When I recently drove across the south I saw many highway patrols had the Challenger. That said, nobody is driving 180mph in a sedan on American roads.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/21/nyregion/21cars.html

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-19/chevy-s-cop-cruiser...

http://www.allpar.com/squads/police-cars/challenger.html

> "800 officers who reached speeds of 90-130 mph"

Technically, couldn't this be 799 guys who meant to go 85 but drifted up to 90 and one jerk who went 130?

Technically, the data is there to answer this question.

I don't think the accidents and deaths are limited to the 800 officers they identified. The set of officers speeding is certainly greater than the set of officers identified as speeding, and the accidents would probably be from the former set.

> we should be more worried about car accidents than terrorism.

And we should be more worried about the "watchers" than the "watched".

> we should be more worried about car accidents than terrorism

doesn't terrorism scale better, though?

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