But…but…
Catching criminals doesn’t bring in revenue!
I don’t think there us a fallacy here but a genuine observation.
The argument of total bullshit?
It’s not like a bunch of murderers and rapists go free because all the cops are manning speed traps. Besides, detectives go around investigating crimes, not patrol cops. Patrols cops’ job is to walk/drive a beat, write speeding tickets, intervene in any criminal activity they witness and in general, provide a police presence in the community.
So in other words, going around writing speeding tickets IS acting as a deterrent to more serious crimes.
It is an argument about priorities and values. In such cases there can be lots of room for legitimate disagreement without any logical fallacies being involved on either side.
That said, I do not think it is a very good argument, for the reasons that others have given. There are good reasons why society has decided that there ought to be speeding laws, and if they were not enforced, at least to some extent, they would not be obeyed at all, and would be quite useless. What is actually most annoying about speeding laws is that they are inconsistently enforced, so 99 times out of 100 you get away with it, and it is very upsetting when your luck runs out and you get caught. Enforcing them consistently, however, would indeed take much more police time and manpower than it would be worth.
I also doubt whether the argument is very often made in good faith. I think people rarely say this except when they have recently been issued a speeding ticket. Probably, in their heart of hearts, most of them know they are talking nonsense, but it helps to blow off steam.
Not necessarily a fallacy but there is an important distinction between catching speeders and murderers. Catching speeders is a theoretic preventative measure (although many jurisdictions use it as a revenue stream) whereas until Minrity Report becomes reality, catching murderers is after-the-fact. Moving police from traffic enforcement to homicide would probably not prevent more murders.
Logical fallacies are not opinionated in any way. They describe different ways in which faulty conclusions can be drawn from stated postulates. They say absolutely nothing about the truth or falsehood of those postulates or conclusions. They only focus on the connections between the statements.
There can be no logical fallacy in the OP because there is no argument in the OP. There are no assertions made and no conclusions drawn from them, so there can’t be any logic connecting them, so there can be no logical fallacies.
In several towns (one which only recently started a police department, previously they paid for state police patrol) near where I live, there is a fairly lonely 4 lane highway where many people travel 15-25 mph over the limit. If you were a cop, it would be a sure bet you’d issue a $180+ ticket at LEAST once an hour without trying at all.
However the towns have given strict instructions, unless they are responding to an accident or in pursuit, that they are NOT to routinely patrol the highway and they should leave it to the state police because they are supposed to be patrolling the community.
I think these are the same people that bitch about speed traps. And by that I mean the ones where the cops (gasp) have the balls to HIDE along a stretch of highway that has the same speed limit for miles and miles and not the ones that somehow trick the responsible driver. Don’t want a speeding ticket? Don’t speed, its not that complicated.
In addition to this excellent point, it seems that a fair number of real criminals are apprehended at traffic stops of one sort or another. I suppose those who break the law in serious ways also break it in less serious ways. Plus new technology which scans and looks up license plates is most effective when cops are out there on patrol, not back at the station.
Cops around here not only do speeding work, they enforce car pool rules, cell phone rules, and sometimes are stationed at places where people do illegal merges.
I think this is a better argument than the one about solving murders.
- There’s a very real difference in value and benefit to the community between a cop who has been trained to have the mindset that he’s out to “gotcha!” technical violations, and make ticket quotas; and one with the mindset that he’s truly there to protect and serve.
I’d rather have cops that stop people, give them a warning, and remind them that say, it’s a blind corner so they need to be careful, than ones who just say, caught you fucker, 5 miles above the limit, $150 penalty kthanxbye.
I’d rather have the cop that says, hey good for you, you slept it off in the back seat rather than driving drunk, let me give you a ride home, than the one that says you are technically in your vehicle, therefore DWI.
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People are lazy, and cops are people. It’s easy to write a ticket or cite some technical violation with a person who is unthreatening. It’s hard to be creative and aware and proactive in protecting a community and in investigating actual crimes against persons or property. I’ve seen lots of cops respond to real crimes with apathy and indifference, the attitude that they probably can’t solve the crime, so they won’t even try. It might be nice not to have the easy gotcha meaningless tasks to fall back on as a measurement of job performance.
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It makes no sense allocating resources to selectively enforce badly written laws or harmless technical violations while ignoring the spirit and intent of the law, or allocating resources based on what’s easiest to do rather than what’s most important.
I am completely, absolutely in favor of strict enforcement of traffic laws, especially
for speeding and DUI/DWI.
However, the conclusions cited by Lancet seem to me to confirm only trivial effect
of present enforcement practices on traffic accident fatality rates, at least in Ontario:
It takes 80,000 citations to save one life?
The total societal cost saving per conviction is a mere $77?
The reduction in risk of driver being in a fatal accident becomes insignificant
only 3-4 months after a conviction?
The data cited does more harm than good in making the case for enforcement in general.
It seems that at least in Ontario enforcement defenders must rely on the following arguments:
(1) the situation would be even worse with less enforcement.
(2) enforcement should be stricter.
(3) the laws should be stricter.
Any one of which is enough to convince me.
In my actual town, some cops had nick names among their fellow officers, prosecutors and judges, like (I’m changing them up here a bit so they won’t be Google hits) UTurn Richie (picks the spot where out of towners will realize they made a wrong turn and do a u-ey) or 30 Dave (gives 30 in a 25 zone tickets). Why were they known like ths? while most of the cops were out there keeping the peace, and writing a few tickets here and there on their shift these guys would write 8-12 tickets on their shift for exactly the same violation in exactly the same location, every shift and never actually patrolled.
There are 2 assumptions in the OP that don’t bear out under examination.
1 the LEO is citing a speeder and nothing else.
2 LEOs are equivilant, interchangeable units.
In fact, a patrol officer is checking to see if the driver is impaired, has a body in the back seat, matches the description of someone fleeing the scene of a nearby crime, and a murder investigation may well be hampered by too many patrol officers.
I think he meant that people get opinionated about whether or not a logical fallacy has been committed, or which one it might have been.
Sure there is an argument:
Cops shouldn’t be “wasting their time” writing people speeding tickets, because there are other, more serious criminals that they should be spending their time on.
That is a very minimally altered quote from the OP, and it is most certainly an argument. It may not be a very good one, but it has an explicit conclusion and an explicit premise (as well as one or more implicit premises, but that is par for the course for informal argumentation). I do not think it is fallacious, either. However, I doubt that it is sound, because some of the implicit premises are probably not true (as other posters have pointed out).
I think there’s a bit of a false dichotomy in that line of reasoning. They’re sort of assuming that at any point in time, there are murders/rapists running rampant and that having extra men on the case will hasten their capture/demise. In my town anyway, this is not the case. The second a murder/robbery/rape/some other horrible crime is reported, the cop sitting at the speed trap outside town can flick on his lights and be there in 60 seconds. But there aren’t horrible crimes being committed every day in my town, and when there are they don’t necessarily require every cop on the force to respond.
Not to mention the fact that an enormous amount of other crimes are uncovered during traffic stops: drug trafficking, apprehending people with outstanding warrants, drunk drivers, etc.
Sure, pulling over speeders is a waste of time. It’s better to concentrate on real crimes, like the bombing of a federal building that resulted in ~170 deaths and ~700 injuries (Timothy McVeigh was apprehended during a routine traffic stop).
I, for myself wasn’t trying to say enforcing traffic violations is a waste of time, and in fact is one of the most dangerous activities for a police officer to do. My point in my post was that if you have 10ish officers on duty at any given time and 100s of miles of neighborhood to patrol, many towns feel that their officers should be patrolling the neighborhood rather than a 5 mile stretch of highway which doesn’t even have a gas station on it.
Now I was talking about nearby small (population density wise) towns who enforce that, where I live there are 25-40 (depending on the shift) on duty and multiple highways crisscross the area, and are integral parts of the traffic, so the local police patrol them. However, for example the state medical school here has it’s own police force and their supervisor had to read them the riot act to get them to patrol the medical school campus and NOT give out overdue inspection citations on the highways.
I tried reporting this earlier, but so far haven’t gotten a moderator response. Not sure if it was ignored or just not gotten to yet, but if this is going to be a debate/discussion about speeding tickets in general, then maybe we should get it moved or locked.
My original factual question has been answered satisfactorily anyhow. It seems there is no logical fallacy in the argument.
Thanks all for the input and the discussion!
I know it is favorable among the fashionable intellectuals on this board to call the people saying communities use traffic tickets as a revenue stream are idiots but I have to call male bovine manure. Ever since I can remember one always had to be careful about ‘speed traps’. I grew up in a rural area and they do exist. A ‘speed trap’ by my definition is an attempt by a LEO to write up a much more expensive ticket than the violation would warrant just a tiny bit down the road or maybe not even be a violation at all.
I remember as a kid watching cops hide and wait for speeders. They never seemed to hide and catch speeders that were speeding normally down the road but always seem to hang around where the speed limit is lowered and playing ‘gotcha’. When I started to drive I was warned and personally saw many communities that were notorious for using speeding tickets as a source of revenue.
When I moved into a urban area that behavior pretty much went away. I seldom saw cops hiding and looking for speeders and the ones that did were looking for genuine speeders. It was refreshing.
However, the Great Recession happened. Law enforcement budgets were impacted and communities were hurting. It used to be that I would see one car pulled over by a LEO maybe once every 2 weeks. Last 3 years I have usually seen one EVERY commute to work and one EVERY commute back from work. Sometimes more than once and sometimes not at all but usually about 2 a day.
It happens guys. It’s a nice revenue stream and LEOs/communities being human will use it as a substitute tax.
I don’t know that there is a specific fallacy for the argument made by the speeder, but it’s the same sort of bull spouted by people who don’t like attention being paid to a certain issue, and say “You should be focusing on X instead”.
Just as it is highly debatable whether society is better off having everyone concentrate on solving one or a few serious problems (and ignoring the rest), it is questionable whether ordering police to concentrate solely on apprehending killers (and other violent criminals) will do more good than spreading out resources to cover other crimes as well.
It has been suggested for instance that New York City became more livable when authorities began paying additional attention to “quality of life” crimes.
I’m not sure you are thinking the implications of the numbers through.
80,000 citations per life sounds like a skewed ratio. However each citation probably costs little or nothing financially; many say that fines make speeding citations profitable. And particularly with speed cameras, you can crank out citations at little time cost. So 80,000 citations per life may well amount to a very economically viable proposition.
Similarly, $77 saved per conviction may sound small on its own, but if you can crank out convictions cheaply (see above) that can be a massive saving. There are people who have got very very rich selling things into a mass market at a $77 profit. The same applies in reverse for savings.
The fact is that where I live, most cops who are not traffic cops will not waste their time going after someone who’s going a few miles over the limit, or committing other non-egregious traffic offenses (such as turning out of the wrong lane, rolling a stop, etc.). Because they do have more serious things to do. However, if they see somebody doing something that looks potentially harmful, such as impaired driving, they’ll do the stop or call it in so a traffic cop can do the stop.
Traffic cops have nothing to do. That is their beat. They will come after you for anything.
The cars look just the same, so don’t start feeling cocky. Also, towns with known speed traps will have a higher percentage of traffic cops–they may ALL be traffic cops. There is no quota (at least so they say), but if the number of offenses start dropping there might be layoffs, and everybody wants job security.