
A Traffic Cop’s Ticket Bonanza in a Poor Texas Town - colinprince
http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexcampbell/the-ticket-machine#.akZrRROqd
======
warmwaffles
> Councilman Felix Barker pointed out that the extra cash the city had brought
> in far exceeded the cost of jailing all those people. “We increased the
> profits,” he said.

Uh, that's not what police are supposed to be. They are not supposed to be a
revenue source.

> “You have a heart and you feel for those people,” he said. “The judge could
> charge a dollar. I don’t care.”

Except he can't, there are minimum fines and they will only go down to that
level. Other times it could be a dismissal fee, but other than that, no.

~~~
tfinniga
Reminds me of this article about the link between excessive policing of
traffic offenses, police as a profit center, and getting a huge chunk of your
budget from your poorest citizens:

[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/police-
shootings...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/police-shootings-
traffic-stops-excessive-fines)

Once you lose sight of 'Protect and serve', things can go very wrong.

~~~
Aloha
It really depends on the nature of the fines levied, on its face, you'd not
convince me that speed enforcement alone is disproportionately levied on the
poor.

There is another class of fines, like Failure to Appear, fix it tickets
resulting in a warrant (warrants shouldn't be issued for non-moving violations
ever), unable to provide proof of insurance, and failure to pay fines - that
are very likely levied excessively on the poor.

------
whack
The real problem is not with the cops doing their jobs and enforcing the law.
The real problem is that the laws are so dysfunctional to begin with. For
decades, stupid laws were patched up by a police system that simply chose not
to enforce them widely. This is of course as ugly a "hack" as you can possibly
get. People lose respect for the laws, and it gives the police immense
discretionary power that they can wield on the basis of their subjective
whims. But the system chugged along like a 20 year old computer valiantly
running Windows 95... until one day, a cop shows up who decides that his job
is to enforce the law, and that's when the sheets come off and people realize
just how stupid the laws really are.

If you find yourself shaking your head when reading the article, and are
looking for someone to blame, don't blame the cops. Don't blame the police
commissioner. They are simply doing their jobs, and that's a good thing. Blame
your lawmakers for writing into law, or not repealing, absolutely idiotic
laws. This problem does indeed need to be fixed, and we need to fix it by
actually changing the law so that it makes sense.

1) The speed limit should be set at a level that people are actually expected
to follow. If you don't mind people driving 70mph on the freeways, change the
speed limit to 70.

2) Traffic fines are not meant to be a revenue source for the government. They
are meant to be a form of punitive punishment and deterrent. A $400 fine is
overly punitive for an unemployed person, but it's also too lenient for a
millionaire. If the goal is for the fine to be punitive, it needs to be
indexed to the person's income.

3) People shouldn't have to leave their jobs and go to court, and sit around
for hours, just to have 5 minutes in front of a judge to ask for a payment
plan. This sort of thing should be completely automated and doable online.
Judge appearances should be reserved for special cases, not for rubber
stamping.

The sooner the police start enforcing the laws strictly, the sooner people
will realize how broken the laws are, and the sooner we can get to making real
fixes like described above.

------
bryanlarsen
Traffic fines are set high based on the assumption that enforcement will be
light. The canonical example is a $500 fine for littering. Because your
chances of getting caught are so low, a high fine is needed to provide an
incentive. If your chances of getting caught were 100%, a $5 fine would
probably be sufficient.

If you're going to increase enforcement you should probably lower the fines.

~~~
Aloha
I'd have no problem with aggressive enforcement so long as the fines and
consequences were light - as you noted, both the fine structure and the way
external agencies (insurance companies for one) treat moving violations assume
for light enforcement

------
overdrivetg
I'm curious how is it legal to pull over a vehicle based on the license plate
without knowing who is actually driving the car?

On a related note, my driving school teacher told us if we're married register
your spouse's car in your name and _your_ car in theirs.

The logic being that spousal privilege prevents you from testifying against
them if you ever get a red light/speeding or other automated ticket in the
mail, and it seems like a good defense for these kind of plate-reader
shenanigans as well - unless you are both wanted scofflaws, of course.

~~~
DrScump
<the logic being that spousal privilege prevents you from testifying against
them>

In certain limited circumstances, a spouse cannot be _compelled_ to testify
against a spouse... but in what jurisdiction are witnesses being called by the
prosecution for traffic infractions in the first place??

~~~
overdrivetg
As he explained it, they will only dismiss the ticket against you (the
registered owner receiving the ticket in the mail) if you identify the actual
driver - so _you_ have to go in and roll over on the driver if you want to get
out of the ticket.

But if the driver is your spouse you can invoke spousal privilege and you both
get off, IIRC. I'm not sure of the legal convolutions that lets you say "I
can't identify that person due to spousal privilege" and _not_ identify that
person as your spouse but there it is.

------
jfoutz
Don't let the buzzfeed source put you off of the article, it's pretty good.

I really like the day fine idea, seems like it would lessen the incentive to
ticket to generate lots of revenue. An obvious fix for the overworked courts
is simply bring in a pay stub or tax return. If you don't you get the max
fine. (Perhaps a week or two to bring in the documentation and revise the fine
down)

~~~
fr0sty
>seems like it would lessen the incentive to ticket to generate lots of
revenue.

That still doesn't align the incentives. It just shifts the focus from
quantity of stops to quality of stops (the correlation between vehicle cost
and yearly income is very stong).

Law enforcement should not be about generating revenue. Full stop.

~~~
jfoutz
This feels like the "Perfect solution fallacy".

Fines are effective. Governments are going to do something with the money.
Picking a price curve that closely matches actual cost of running the
department seems better than what we do now. Yes, officers will have a
preference for pulling over a ferarri instead of some beat up old honda, but
with all of the automation the article talked about, it seems like the times
an officer has a choice between the two are rare. If the policy is pull over
everyone breaking the law, officers would have to account for not pulling over
cheap cars.

Now, i could see a good argument for simply requiring public service from
everyone. The thing we're all limited by is time. 10 hours of a rich guy's
time is just as valuable as 10 hours of a poor guy's time (to them at least).
Of course, you're not really proposing this as an alternative, you appear to
be saying because it's not perfect, it's not worth doing.

~~~
fr0sty
I guess my point is that unless you change the monetary beneficiary of the
traffic fines you retain perverse incentives even if you try to make the costs
more equitable.

------
wahsd
I like how they provide the cost of jailing people and the revenue, but no
mention of the administrative cost and the "expensive" cost of the system. I
have a suspicion that if you did the accounting properly, you would probably
come up with a net decrease in income, not to mention the economic impact of
debtor prison.

~~~
ajmurmann
It also might deter people from doing business in that town. If I have the
choice to get a coffee I this town or a neighboring town that's not known for
hyper active ticketing, I'd rather avoid this place.

~~~
warmwaffles
I live in Texas, and used to love going to Port A as a kid. Now, I will not
even give it a second thought to avoid the city entirely.

------
soneil
As much as the article makes this sound horrendous .. I'm not sure.

"Back in 2007, his bosses at the Port Arthur Police Department tapped him for
a brand-new kind of job: writing up driving infractions full-time"

[http://www.city-data.com/accidents/acc-Port-Arthur-
Texas.htm...](http://www.city-data.com/accidents/acc-Port-Arthur-Texas.html)

It's interesting to compare the actual data from the 5 years before, and the 5
years following 2007. It may be a coincidence, but .. something has changed.
Something that's roughly halved their fatal accidents.

------
skorecky
> Police higher-ups say the traffic unit has made Port Arthur a safer place to
> drive

They don't show any data to back up this claim that they make throughout the
story. IMO part of the problem is that the speed limits are far too low for
modern vehicles. They keep them low so they can continue to collect.

It's not about safety it's about money. How is going around with plate readers
making anyone safer? Unless they were using that technology to find a
fugitive, but they're not they're using it to collect.

~~~
bryanlarsen
The article links to a study[1] in the Lancet that says that aggressive
traffic policing results in fewer car accidents and fewer deaths.

1:
[http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673...](http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673603137701/abstract)

~~~
skorecky
Ah, I missed that. However that doesn't mean increasing the speed limit would
be bad. Instead of speeding tickets they could focus on aggressive drivers
constantly changing lanes and other more serious maneuvers that could cause
more danger.

~~~
bryanlarsen
There are hundreds of studies on increasing the speed limit. Most say
increasing the limit causes increased fatalities, others say the effect is
negligible. Most of these studies focus on highway speeds, though.

But lowering street level speed limits has a dramatic effect on fatalities.
Sweden reduced their street speed limits to 15-20mph and strictly enforced
them.[1] This dropped their fatality rate to essentially zero. It didn't
reduce accidents significantly, but reduced their severity massively.

1:
[http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/](http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/)

------
derobert
_" Traffic safety is equally important for poor people and for people with
money. But traffic fines, as they are typically imposed, inflict far more pain
on poor people."_

The first part of that is quite an assertion. Richer people probably have
newer cars (thus benefiting from newer safety features), better maintained
cars, bigger cars, live in areas with less traffic, have better access to
healthcare, and can afford to take time off due to injury. In addition, their
jobs overall are probably less physically demanding.

I wonder if that's a good part of why they aren't doing things that would cost
taxpayers money, like re-engineering roads to improve safety and lower speeds?

------
outworlder
> License plate recognition software is often touted as a way to catch
> terrorists

Huh? How does that work?

------
anon987
Off-topic and not appropriate for HN.

If you want to circle jerk about how terrible the police can be, do it
somewhere else - this isn't the place.

Flagged.

~~~
Aloha
I've concluded there is very little off-topic for HN - and if you'd read the
article, it actually paints the police in a fairly positive light - aggressive
enforcement is not the same a zealous enforcement.

