
Be Safe, Break the Law - cwan
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/09/be-safe-break-the-law.html
======
InclinedPlane
One of the biggest problems with the war on drugs and with traffic fines is
that they create perverse incentives for law enforcement and for local
governments, because revenue generation then becomes coupled to the way laws
are written and enforced. Everybody knows how this works with traffic
"offenses", local governments use red light cameras, speed traps, and speeding
ticket quotas as a source of income. This then converts a significant portion
of the resources that should be used for keeping people safe into effective
tax collection.

The same thing happens with the war on drugs due to asset forfeiture laws. On
the one hand you have a police officer tasked with the hard and often
thankless job of enforcing the law, investigating unsolved crimes,
meticulously sorting through evidence, walking a beat, etc, etc. On the other
hand you have a police officer tasked with the comparatively simple jobs of,
say, pulling over "suspicious" looking drivers on the highway and looking for
pot in their car, or executing exciting no-knock raids on, in the average
case, un-armed drug dealer's houses. In the process generating enough revenue
through the seizure and auction of vehicles and houses to pay for raises, more
officers, new guns, helicopters, swat teams, armored personnel carriers, etc.
The natural equilibrium is going to be that as many officers as possible spend
as much time as possible in those typically easier and more glamorous and
exciting jobs that generate revenue. This is hardly hypothetical, as over the
course of the war on drugs we've seen a dramatic shift in the amount of effort
the legal system puts forth in enforcing drug laws and prosecuting drug crimes
and we've also seen a dramatic increase in the militarization of even small-
town police departments. Assault rifles are more common. No-knock raids are
more common. SWAT teams are more common. Use of APCs is more common. And this
despite no significant increase in drug dealers becoming more heavily armed or
more violent over that time period (except in Mexico which is in a drug-gang
induced civil war).

The law should be pragmatic not dogmatic. The law should be molded to aid
society not to mold society into some perfect, moral vision. Whenever the law
tries to overstep those boundaries the result has always been strife and
disaster.

~~~
sliverstorm
Combating drugs is not _just_ about a perfect moral vision of society. Getting
rid of meth, for example, would be a big aid to society. (As best I understand
it)

If there is a problem with drug laws and enforcement, I would hazard that it
is with classification of certain drugs and the incentives for pursuing
different classifications. For example, as best I understand, marijuanna does
not have nearly the negative social consequences of meth, yet marijuanna was
schedule I for a time and meth is schedule II.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Getting everyone to learn algebra would be a big aid to society, should we
throw everyone who fails algebra in prison until they start passing?

In the US alone there are over 70,000 alcohol related deaths per year. That's
nearly a million people a decade, dead because of alcohol. And that doesn't
even begin to account for the vastly greater incidence of lesser problems such
as abusive, absent, or non-supportive husbands, fathers, mothers; or families
in financial ruin due to having to support the expenses and consequences of a
severe alcohol habit, etc.

Some people see an activity that causes problems and they think "I know how to
solve this, I'll make that activity illegal", now they have two problems. We
tried alcohol prohibition, it was far, far worse. We are currently living
through the misery of prohibition of some drugs, and it's almost certainly not
helping.

You can't get rid of meth by making it illegal, that should be obvious to
anybody. And by making it, and so many other drugs, illegal you bring on a
whole host of other problems. You weaken the criminal justice system by adding
a huge burden to it. You increase corruption of law enforcement officials. You
create an easy source of funding for the most ruthless criminals. You degrade
respect in the rule of law by outlawing behaviors that a significant fraction
of citizens don't believe should be illegal. You put a huge fraction of
citizens outside the law by making them criminals, and thus less willing and
able to cooperate with law enforcement (to report other crimes, for example).
You degrade the justice system by creating these perverse incentives for law
enforcement (e.g. due to asset forfeiture).

From a pragmatic standpoint prohibition of drugs makes no sense, it is not a
big aid to society it is a huge, huge loss verging on a catastrophe. The
problem is that there are a great many people who believe that a good use of
the law is to prevent people from doing bad things to themselves. Whether or
not that ideology is seated in the firmament of organized religion it works
out to just another form of puritanism. And we've seen the problems that law
founded in puritan values brings: repression, subjugation, corruption, abuse
of power, witch trials, etc. We're already there today but it's harder to make
out the shape of things because we are so thoroughly immersed in it.

~~~
shin_lao
Perhaps there is the notion that as a society you want to marginalize drug
consumption - whatever the cost. You might want to send the message that doing
drugs for entertainment purposes isn't a "normal" activity and you prefer to
have citizens that look for something else than "having fun".

But there's more to the story...

It's over simplification to say that puritanism is behind entertainment drugs
prohibition.

Endemic and widespread drug usage is a real possibility and generally results
in a society coming to a halt. A contemporary example is Djibouti and its
widespread Khat consumption problem. France, early XXth century had a major
issue with Absinthe as well. Older example is China and Opium.

Most of the drugs that are illegal were legal at some point. In the early XXth
century you could purchase heroin at the apothecary. This is no longer the
case, and that's not just because "doing drugs is bad m'k".

Having drugs illegal makes sure it cannot go beyond a certain point, with
counterproductive effects, that's true. But even if it were legal you would
have a black market for cheaper/stronger drugs.

No silver bullet...

~~~
dalore
Treating drug users as criminals is definitely wrong. They should be treated
like mental patients, but only if their drug use is causing a problem.

~~~
shin_lao
They're not treated as criminals, worst case scenario they are treated as
felons.

------
spenrose
I'm a daily MR reader, so I like them, but this is classic Libertarian
exercise in manipulative framing. Gasoline consumption does, in fact, increase
non-linearly with speed at highway speeds. Police departments do have to pay
their officers salaries. He could just as easily have written it this way: \-
the real cost of gasoline is about $10/G. when you count pollution, military
expenditures to protect supply, etc. \- Big Government and lying politicians
bring that down to $4 to curry favor with voters \- that means voters drive
bigger cars faster than they otherwise would \- that leads to an ethos of
unlimited speed \- all of the above leads to highway casualties \- drivers who
try to drive responsibly risk being run over by maniacs driving 4K lb
behemoths at 80 mph.

Note that the above does not represent my views, but it fits the evidence as
well as Tabarrok's take.

~~~
Zak
_Police departments do have to pay their officers salaries_

Yes, but it isn't ethical or good for society to do so by making a law just so
that people will break it and get fined. Tying police pay to enforcement
actions at any level will result in overzealous enforcement instead of the
objectivity we should want from our police.

You're also implying that raising the speed limit in the case being discussed
would lead to a higher rate of crashes or injuries but you haven't provided
any evidence for that claim. The author did provide evidence showing the
opposite.

~~~
thefreehunter
My biggest problem isn't with paying the fine (for example, associated with
speeding), it's with the other penalties that come with it. If it was just a
fine, I would pay it and be done. I fight every ticket I've gotten because of
the increase of the cost of insurance that is associated with it. I got a
ticket for 75 in a 70 on the freeway, ticket was $137 (the judge upheld the
ticket...), no points but I still got an increase of $30/mo on my insurance
for the next 2 years. That's much more than the cost of the ticket.

As for the other point you make, in my state (Michigan), the courts ruled that
jurisdictions need to provide a good case for having the speed limit lower
than the standard. As soon as that ruling went into effect, most all the
streets in town raised their limit to 45mph.

~~~
Zak
It seems to me that jurisdictions should be able to provide a good reason for
having the speed limit at all. "It's the 85th percentile speed" is a good
reason but simply being "standard" doesn't seem like one to me.

------
bryanlarsen
My pet peeve is the inverse: it seems that police regularly ticket on the
freeway where high speeds are safe, but rarely ticket in the city core where
speeding is much more dangerous. The difference between a 25mph and a 35mph
collision with a pedestrian is that the former probably isn't fatal and the
latter probably is.

~~~
stephen_g
I totally agree. We have the opposite problem as well where I live - around
schools there are zones that are 40km/h (25mph) at certain times in the day,
and you see cops around there all the time, nabbing people going 45km/h at
2:02pm, an hour before any school kids will be in the area... If the periods
were more sensible (say, spanning the 30 or 45 minutes when kids are being set
down and picked up, not two hours on either side) it would make it a lot
better, but as it is, it feels more like revenue raising than anything else.

~~~
jtbigwoo
The saddest part about school zone enforcement is that the police almost never
enforce the speed limit during pick-up and drop-off times because it'd cause
traffic tie-ups.

------
heyrhett
"The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.
Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many
things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without
breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in
that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed
nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-
breakers – and then you cash in on guilt." --Ayn Rand

~~~
VladRussian
>you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt.

actual modern implementations aren't about guilt, they are more practical - by
selectively enforcing these laws government can target anybody at any moment.
There is a saying in Russia - "Given a man, it is always possible to find a
law [he's broken]." ("Byl by chelovek, a statya naydettsya" :)

------
fleitz
Another great example of money trumping public safety is red light cameras,
it's well known that the best way to reduce intersection fatalities is to
increase the time length of the amber light. However if you take the average
amber length of a red light camera intersection it is below the average length
of non-red light camera intersections.

~~~
Permit
I'd be hesitant to imply causality like that. Red light cameras could be very
well placed at high accident intersections as an attempt to reduce accidents.
(I'm not claiming their effective at it, but that could be one of many reasons
they're placed there.)

~~~
watchandwait
Several studies show causation.

[http://beta2.tbo.com/news/nation-world/2008/mar/12/na-red-
li...](http://beta2.tbo.com/news/nation-world/2008/mar/12/na-red-light-
cameras-increase-accidents-usf-study--ar-142340/)

------
TamDenholm
I'm behind this. I'm one of those people that believe an unjust law should be
ignored. Its clear that in this instance there is a legitimate reason to
ignore this law and a (bad) reason to enforce it (money). However, what
baffles me is when there doesn't even seem to be any benefit, and in fact is
major liabilities to keeping an unjust law for no real reason other than
principle, the example i'm referring to being the "war on drugs".

Sadly, civil disobedience doesn't work any more, remember, if you break the
law, hell even if you just disagree with it, you're not a patriot, you're a
traitor.

------
bryanlarsen
My biggest beef with poor speed limits is that we end up teaching our children
that "breaking the law is OK." I will eventually teach my children that, but
only when they're older and can understand the nuances. I DO NOT want to teach
it to a six year old, but that's about the time that they notice that Daddy
always breaks the law by driving above the speed limit.

~~~
Symmetry
"To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into
contempt." -Elizabeth Cady Stanton

------
jisaacstone
ticket revenue does not go to the police department == solved problem

~~~
qq66
Ticket revenue does not, in general, go to the police department, it goes to
the municipality (although the police department is a good chunk of the
municipal budget).

There was one case a few years back where a police department stopped writing
tickets because the town didn't approve their pay increase. When the town sued
they said, "Nobody's speeding!"

------
rosser
I've argued for a long time now that, regardless of the posted speed limit,
driving at a speed lower than the rate at which traffic is flowing —
particularly in an "inside lane" — should be a primary offense (that is,
behavior that's probable cause for an officer to pull you over). While you may
think you're making traffic "safer" by observing the posted speed limit,
you're actually increasing the risk to yourself and everyone around you by
causing eddies in the flow of traffic as people merge into normally slower-
traveling lanes to pass you on the "wrong" side. Those local instabilities in
traffic flow significantly increase the likelihood of an accident because they
engender unpredictable (or at least less predictable) behavior in your fellow
drivers. Yes, traffic probably would be safer if everyone drove at the posted
limit, but so long as a significant enough number of people aren't, behavior
that complicates traffic flow increases risk for everyone.

(Then again, some of the worst offenders in that regard tend to be the police,
themselves, in my experience. I can't count the number of times I've been
caught in some huge knot of traffic pacing a cop who's driving two or three
MPH _under_ the posted limit, as if he's daring people to pass him...)

Of course, I've also argued for just as long if not longer that one should
have to pass a university-level course in fluid dynamics in order to get a
driver's license, and I don't see that happening any time soon, either.

~~~
zeteo
> regardless of the posted speed limit, driving at a speed lower than the rate
> at which traffic is flowing should be a primary offense

One gets tailgated often enough for driving "only" 10 mph over the speed
limit. I can only begin to imagine the extremes to which such a short-sighted
rule would lead.

~~~
rosser
I can't speak for anyone else, but I use the following rules of thumb to
monitor my participation in traffic:

1\. If you have more car-lengths of empty lane in front of you than you do
cars backed up behind you, you're impeding the flow of traffic.

2\. If you have no room in front of you and some asshole is tailgating you,
he's an asshole.

Exceptions apply, of course — they're only rules of thumb, after all — but
they've served me well enough.

~~~
jemfinch
_If you have more car-lengths of empty lane in front of you than you do cars
backed up behind you, you're impeding the flow of traffic._

Bad rule. You're actually _smoothing_ traffic by creating anti-traffic in
front of you to absorb minor slowdowns. Drivers who keep distance in front of
them are essential to dissolving traffic jams. See
<http://trafficwaves.org/trafexp.html> for more details.

~~~
ericd
Thanks for that link - besides potential mass transit solutions, waves are all
I think about when stuck in traffic. One thing to note, though, the linked
page is wrong on the point that outflow can't be changed from a jam - if
everyone in the jam accelerated as quickly as possible with almost no lag
between each other, the entire jam point could move and eventually disperse.
This would probably take coordination from networked robot drivers to pull
off, though :-) since one slow driver could ruin the whole thing.

