I think this is in part an incomplete or inaccurate understanding of the history of police. It’s not a conversion, this is who they’ve always been. The antecedents of the police in America were early and mid 19th century slave patrols and private security forces organized to subjugate the working class while protecting and enforcing the property rights of the owning class. The “Serve & Protect” stuff is mostly copaganda.
When we review the past couple centuries of struggle for human rights: workers’ rights, ending child labor, civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, immigrants’ rights, indigenous rights, etc. The police have been on the wrong side of history in every one of those struggles. It was not an accident that they were on the wrong side then, and it is not an accident that they continue to be on the wrong side now.
When our ancestors struggled for dignity, equity, and freedom via abolition of chattel slavery, union organizing, anti-war mass demonstrations and civil disobedience, & when we continue in our struggle for a better world now, the cops don’t arrive on the scene and just flip a coin to see which side they should beat, and which side they should protect. They don’t have to flip that coin because the police are controlled by the people who claim to own our communities, our nation, and our world.
The primary function of the police is social control and the preservation of privilege for the owning class. In many communities, the police are an occupying force, which is why they are militarized and using the same anti-insurgency tactics in our neighborhoods that the military uses in their occupations of foreign lands. Police:Capitalism::Military:Imperialism. This connects to your point about the police seeming to be more interested in fining us than making us safe. Part of what is being done both domestically and abroad is making the locals pay for their own subjugation.
h/t to @microbet who has brought this Orwell quote to my attention before:
I don’t think we need to police people’s driving habits as closely as we already do. Doing 75 in a 65 is just generally not really an issue. If there were aggressive camera enforcement, that’d make it miserable to drive anywhere.
Also cameras make mistakes quite frequently, I think.
Moderate speeding isn’t the only issue though. Its the related stuff like tailgating and passing on the right aggressively that is meaningfully dangerous and is a constant feature of highway driving.
I appreciate this thoughtful response. I must admit it doesn’t fully jive with my sensibilities (“The primary function of the police is social control and the preservation of privilege for the owning class”), but I can pick up what you’re putting down.
I’d probably say that the primary function of police is the enforcement of the status quo and that I suspect they wouldn’t be so bad if we had a better status quo that didn’t value property rights as much.
I mean yea I’m biased as hell because maybe I just bought a sports car and radar detector so I can avoid getting pulled over… but I’m generally a very safe driver. Not aggressive, usually hug the right-most lane or second right-most lane, the worst speeding I do even in this car is 10-15mph over the speed limit.
So there’s that aspect of it sure but I’m generally against a surveillance state and traffic cameras everywhere definitely starts sounding pretty orwellian. And if cops can find a way to abuse it, they will. For sure.
Well, as noted up thread these traffic stops can escalate into police violence. So we probably don’t want cops interacting with people if they don’t have to.
In theory, the speed limit is meant more to protect (and protect us from) the less safe drivers in the same way that a mask mandate might be more for the benefit of those not yet vaccinated.
The point is that police presence obviously results in safer driving, because most people are not idiots. And the ones who remain dangerous idiots are more likely to get caught if there are more police and/or traffic cameras.
Anyone that doesn’t want cameras and complains about bad dangerous drivers is a hypocrite. I see a better argument against reducing police presence because there are lots of negative possibilities from increasing traffic stops that could counteract the benefit of fewer maniacs on the road.
The cost benefit analysis here is a major factor. Cops roaming the streets are expensive and their effectiveness is curtailed by their own behavioral biases. Speed cameras are good on the sense that they’re relatively efficient but they are stationary and only capture one offense.
I dont think it would be possible to have meaningful scalable improvement unless you car was transmitting data constantly to a central processor that would more or less monitor driving constantly. But then you’re getting into state surveillance issues.