this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
428 points (98.4% liked)

News

22869 readers
4312 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Auditors found tens of thousands of apparently falsified traffic stop records, many of white drivers. They suspect the officers were trying to appear more productive.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

There should be no such thing as a routine traffic stop. That kind of adversarial police interaction should NOT be happening to citizens behaving normally. It should be reserved only for people behaving in a truly deviant way, which modest speeding is not. Normalizing this kind of interaction is part of what it means to be in a police state.

You can automate highway speed enforcement for a lot cheaper than the wage of police officers sitting and waiting at a trap all day, and will catch everyone instead of just a bunch of arbitrarily (or worse) chosen randos from the pack.

For outside of highways, you can still automate speed enforcement, but you also need to be designing roads that discourage speeding. Current ASHTO/MUDCD rules do the opposite, constantly pushing roads to have higher speeds in pursuit of better letter grades even though this represents a constant one-way ratchetting of road danger.

The purpose of road rules, including speed limits, needs to be SAFETY, not funding. Pretty much every municipality outside of the US that pursues vision zero programs does so primarily with engineering rather than enforcement, and when enforcement is used, camera-based enforcement is more effective and less likely to murder some random person of color.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All of that is true, but even with all of of that, any traffic violations would still be a routine traffic stop, because there's always going to be people driving just a little bit outside the bounds of safety.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I disagree. Strongly.

Good road designs self-enforce safety.

There's only a short list of things that ROUTINELY get people pulled over.

Speeding, which is better enforced by cameras than cops. Relying on human enforcement means people pull the lever on the gamble. Automated enforcement means you will get caught, and there's no better deterrent to crime than that. And road design is STRONGLY correlated with prevailing speed. You can calm a road with better designs -- if a road is rife with routine dangerous speeding, most likely it's the engineer's fault for putting in a racetrack instead of a street.

Running red lights. Same as above.

Vehicles out-of-spec. Expired tags, damaged tail lights, etc.. A lot of this stuff should simply not result in a pull-over. Key in the plate then send the person notice and/or a fine in the mail.

Running stop signs/failing to yield to pedestrians. Not even that routine, but anywhere where this is a routine problem is SURELY an intersection that needs a redesign (e.g., roundabout treatment, traffic calming) to eliminate bad behavior.

DUI. This is deviant and unacceptable behavior. Cops should be enforcing this and people caught driving intoxicated should see their rights to operate motor vehicles RAPIDLY escaping them.

Using cell phones. Largely same as above.

And there's one other routine traffic stop -- the pretextual traffic stop, where the cops are just making the fuck up some bullshit reason to stop you in order to try and get you on some other crime / violate your civil rights.

There's a litany of other common and bad driver behaviors that happen routinely. Failure to yield, merging on people, pulling out without looking, et cetera... but most of these do NOT generate traffic stops because no cop sees it happening and even if they do they don't give a shit.