Picking up on this point which seems to have been glossed over - are there consistent rules about when an officer can draw or shoot their gun? Investigations into all police firearms incidents? I mean, I hope so, but all these stories we hear seem to say otherwise.
I do appreciate that, with the prevalence of firearms in the US, then traffic police probably do need to carry them too, I just wonder what the rules are.
FWIW, the meter maids don’t carry guns, because there’s no need. Traffic stops are often when cops find people with warrants, and get shot or people get otherwise violent, so it makes sense for the cops to be armed.
What we need are some sort of prohibitions against revenue generation through tickets - like no speed traps and no quotas. Not necessarily eliminating traffic enforcement though, just disincentivizing departments from making it a major activity for any other reason than public safety. I mean, if people drive like maniacs on a stretch of road and it’s unsafe, by all means go ticket them to reduce that. But no more of this sending a lot of cops out with the expectation that they find a certain number of people to ticket either.
You’re absolutely right though this tends to be a more serious problem in municipalities that are smaller and poorer than the larger cities. I live in Arkansas and we’ve been identified as one of the states with a relatively high rate of fines and I can tell you there are a lot of places outside of Little Rock where speed traps exist.
A judge banned the police officers of Damascus from patrolling US 65 after he found the city in violation of the state’s speed trap law which says a city can’t generate more than 30% of their revenue from fines. The speed limit on US 65 is 60 mph, but going through Damascus it suddenly drops to 45 mph with very little warning. i.e. Even when you see the sign you can get busted for because you couldn’t slow down quick enough to comply. The city protested saying the law was unconstitutional, but the judge laughed at them and banned the city police from patrolling the highway on account that they were doing it to generate revenue rather than provide for the public safety.
And some cities have abandoned traffic light cameras because they’re no longer profitable. They were sold to us under the guise of public safety but it was all about revenue generation the entire time.
New York City uses brown-uniformed parking enforcement officers. They are unarmed. Seems to me having a highly-trained armed policemen writing parking tickets is a waste.
I’ve been caught in a speed trap or two in my day, and it’s absolutely infuriating. I got ticketed one time in Frisco, Texas for going about 45 in a 40 mph zone on a road that was straight for 2 miles, flat as a board, and had like 3 other roads/parking lots that intersected it. On a day that was bright, sunny and had high visibility. And I was the only car on the road at that time.
I posed NO threat to myself or other drivers- I could see them coming, there weren’t any weird curves, the weather was fantastic, and I wasn’t going all that fast either.
So there I was, coming back from class, windows down, playing the radio a bit loud (but not so loud it was audible at any distance), and generally enjoying the day, when some cop literally walks out from behind a bush and waves me down to give me a ticket.
That’s the kind of BS they need to get rid of- make that guy go do some useful policing, not pester people on straight, flat roads in fantastic weather with no traffic.
I think this speaks to the issue pretty well:
Lake Mary, Florida resident Ryan Kintner inadvertently brought national attention to a common issue that many drivers have faced over the years. In August 2012, Kintner was ticketed by a Seminole County deputy for violating a state traffic law defining the appropriate use of car headlights. The deputy told Kintner that he violated the law by flashing his headlights to warn other drivers of a speed trap ahead.
{…}
As Judge Dickey explained, “If the goal of the traffic law is to promote safety and not to raise revenue, then why wouldn’t we want everyone who sees a law enforcement officer with a radar gun in his hand, blinking his lights to slow down all those other cars?”
Yeah. Why, indeed.
And what tool is that kids? That’s right, a fishing pole!
Just like illegal marijuana, it’s a tool to allow cops to fish around in your business with no actual evidence of you being a hardened criminal. They don’t know or have cause to believe you have illegal guns or illegal drugs, or a warrant, they just give themselves an excuse to check you out to see if you do.
Remove that, make traffic enforcement about traffic enforcement (rather than about finding people with warrants), and it stops being more dangerous than writing parking tickets. Give them a can of mace and off they go.
If we tasked meter maids with looking inside cars for contraband and/or running plates for warrants, they’d eventually probably want to be armed as well.
Getting a parking ticket and getting a speeding ticket are both boring administrative fines, but for some reason we’ve decided that one should always be a boring administrative process and the other is an opportunity to haul felons off to jail, which has turned the boring act of administering a small fine into a potential life-or-death situation. It’s insane. Imagine every time you went to mail something the postal clerk ran your ID for warrants and had the power to arrest you then in there.
No, neither the government nor the police see the driving public as “meal tickets”. I chose that term very deliberately - there do not exist the financial incentives (or endemic corruption so entailed) in road policing in Ireland as in the USA, where many (most?) municipalities depend upon traffic fines to constitute significant portions of their operating budgets. Police departments in Ireland are funded from general revenues as directed by the central government; unlike many of his American compatriots, the Irish cop does not get so much as €1 from any citations issued. The American system can be characterized as a quasi-feudal situation whereby the local gang constabulary perpetuates itself through the fleecing of passersby.
But don’t just take my word for it - you know how you can kind of tell that the point of speed vans here isn’t to garner revenue? The fact that before you even encounter one you’ll see a road sign warning you that you are approaching a zone likely to contain one.
As far as limiting the damage done by drunk or reckless drivers, the Irish non-confrontational approach appears to be quite successful relative to the USA, as American general road deaths per billion km are nearly double the Irish rate, whereas DUI deaths specifically also occur at roughly twice the rate in the USA as in Ireland.
I really don’t get an expired tag pull over. Or a broken tail light. This is the 21st century - record the infraction, send warning. Second infraction, send a ticket. If Heck, for tags, just send out the warning and ticket based off the databases. Collect too many unpaid tickets, you get a court date. There is no reason to pull someone over for tags UNLESS you want to see if there is something more nefarious going on than “gee, I forgot to order new tags.”
But WHY are we doing this? If you are running plates for warrants, presumably you have an address, you don’t need to luck out on finding the guy in a random traffic stop. And if the plates don’t match the driver - if the guy with a warrant says “gee, there is a warrant out for me, maybe I’ll sell my car and won’t bother to change the title” Or the title doesn’t get updated properly. Or his kid borrowed the car? Traffic stops seem like a really inefficient way to arrest people with warrants out.
And why, after a traffic stop, do you get to search the car for contraband? Is it reasonable to expect that most drivers have a kilo of cocaine in their trunk? What’s the probable cause, you were driving ten miles over the speed limit and only drug dealers and rapists do that?
Well… given that we do, in fact, want driving rules enforced, it’s a catch two birds with one stone type of deal. You put on a show of enforcing driving rules, and get to “interact” with a bunch of randos to see if a warrant or something else pops up.
But then we are back to what traffic rules are worthy of a stop - when you can just mail a ticket and not get out of the car. And to the “but they won’t pay the ticket” line of logic - it isn’t like you hand your credit card to the cop.
Let’s be clear, I’m not defending the practice, it is just convenient for the police.
I had an Asst Dist. Atty tell me straight up that legalizing weed was bad because cops wouldn’t be able to search cars for illegal weapons. Traffic rules give police an excuse to “interact” which means they get to look at your stuff, run you through the system, maybe make you step out for a pat down, and car search. They also get to generate revenue helping to fund their toys.
Which IS the problem here. Because whose cars are they searching for illegal weapons - and if you are a gang banger whose car smells like the inside of a bong, are you leaving that gun in your glovebox or beneath the seat while the cop moseys his way forward? That isn’t a safe way to do this for the police or for the kid whose car smells like weed because they only illegal thing he does is hotbox in he car and drink beer while underage and black.
I could see that. In fact, we’re probably headed to a future where police cruisers automatically scan license plates and report whether or not the owner has warrants issued for them.
Racism surely plays a role here, but there is another reason so many appalling police shootings involve motorists: Law enforcement officers are taught that routine traffic stops pose extreme danger to their own lives. Courts have seized upon this idea to water down the constitutional rights of drivers, justifying police brutality on the grounds that officers must act quickly to protect themselves against the random violence that always lurks just around the corner.
This theory has pervaded American law and law enforcement for decades. It is also untrue. In a 2019 article published in the Michigan Law Review, Jordan Blair Woods demonstrated that violence during traffic stops is, in fact, extremely rare. Woods, a professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law, also found that it is officers, not drivers, who frequently escalate those few stops that lead to actual violence. In a forthcoming article in the Stanford Law Review, Woods proposes removing police from traffic enforcement altogether to prevent more violence against motorists, especially Black civilians, during traffic stops.
Usual caveats (particularly about ‘I know this is a single incident’), but …
Just today:
I’m politically moderate, but think this should be tried — first in a low gun ownership state, like Hawaii.
About 5 percent of police officers murdered on duty are shot with their own gun. Those lives would be saved.
In Ireland, while most police do not have guns, a lot do. This allows them to limit guns to police who have personalities best suited. If someone is pulled over whose plate lookup indicates elevated risk, call for armed backup.
I do think that speeders need to be pulled over for positive ID. You can’t fairly, I think, give points, leading to possible license suspension, to a whole family.
I’m wondering if it is safer to have a taser, or no gun.