I’m using the word “evidence” somewhat loosely but in context.
Tripolar said:
A simple accusation is not probable cause. There has to be some evidence to back up your claim.
I’m following Tripolar’s use of “evidence.” I did not say that evidence is probable cause, I said that eyewitness testimony is evidence, which admittedly was phrased rather sloppily. I’ll amend that to: Eyewitness testimony is often sufficient to constitute probable casue.
I’m still not too clear on how this works.
If I’m a credible witness (a sober passer-by) and I see an attempted murder (somebody shoots somebody on the street) and record it on my dashcam, that’s something the police would surely pursue based on the evidence of my testimony and my recording, even if the victim disappears (no body).
But you’re saying there is a legal (rather than policy) difference with less serious offenses. What is the distinction, exactly? Is it a question of whether it’s a criminal offense? Or non-criminal traffic offenses in particular?
Based on the phrasing used by someone claiming to be a Deputy sheriff in Illinois in the quote below, eyewitness testimony in his jurisdiction is enough for a cop to issue a citation. He says the complaint must be “specific enough to serve as the basis for a citation” and doesn’t mention any other evidence needed for the summons to be issued and is based on the complainant’s word.
Loach, I’ve got an idea. How about we make it so that autonomous cars rat out everyone on the road they see breaking the law, automatically? There would be this auto-generated set of reports on each driver, sent automatically to your department. You could then sort by worst driver. Once there are enough autonomous vehicles on the road, they would be able to observe every single violation a human driven vehicle makes, tracking them by license plate. And then all the autonomous cars running autonomy software from the same manufacturer could upload reports and their evidence to a server when the car is parked in wifi range, and the server could collate the reports by license plate and state of registration.
So you could find that “Joe Smoe” was seen speeding 1503 times, he was seen changing lanes without signaling 103 times, making dangerous maneuvers that could cause a collision 53 times, his left tailight is out, and so on. And each of these reports there is a small video, available both raw and with onscreen graphics auto-generated by the autonomous car where the machine shows why it thinks a violation happened. Some reports, multiple autonomous cars would have seen the same incident from multiple angles.
The reason autononous car manufacturers would do this is to get as many licenses revoked as possible, which makes things safer for occupants of their cars, as well as increases the demand for autonomy. It lets them show just how bad human drivers really are. There would probably be thousands of people who have been seen making thousands of violations.
The problem I forsee with this is dash cams usually point forward so your far more likely to record yourself rear ending someone than to catch someone rear ending you.
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True, but getting rear ended is usually more straight forward than other types of accidents, so having video evidence of getting rear ended isn’t as helpful as accidents from the front and sides. Like this:
But getting multiple angles that include the rear is cheap enough now.