this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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Auditors found tens of thousands of apparently falsified traffic stop records, many of white drivers. They suspect the officers were trying to appear more productive.

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[–] SheeEttin 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All of that is true, but even with all of of that, any traffic violations would still be a routine traffic stop, because there's always going to be people driving just a little bit outside the bounds of safety.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I disagree. Strongly.

Good road designs self-enforce safety.

There's only a short list of things that ROUTINELY get people pulled over.

Speeding, which is better enforced by cameras than cops. Relying on human enforcement means people pull the lever on the gamble. Automated enforcement means you will get caught, and there's no better deterrent to crime than that. And road design is STRONGLY correlated with prevailing speed. You can calm a road with better designs -- if a road is rife with routine dangerous speeding, most likely it's the engineer's fault for putting in a racetrack instead of a street.

Running red lights. Same as above.

Vehicles out-of-spec. Expired tags, damaged tail lights, etc.. A lot of this stuff should simply not result in a pull-over. Key in the plate then send the person notice and/or a fine in the mail.

Running stop signs/failing to yield to pedestrians. Not even that routine, but anywhere where this is a routine problem is SURELY an intersection that needs a redesign (e.g., roundabout treatment, traffic calming) to eliminate bad behavior.

DUI. This is deviant and unacceptable behavior. Cops should be enforcing this and people caught driving intoxicated should see their rights to operate motor vehicles RAPIDLY escaping them.

Using cell phones. Largely same as above.

And there's one other routine traffic stop -- the pretextual traffic stop, where the cops are just making the fuck up some bullshit reason to stop you in order to try and get you on some other crime / violate your civil rights.

There's a litany of other common and bad driver behaviors that happen routinely. Failure to yield, merging on people, pulling out without looking, et cetera... but most of these do NOT generate traffic stops because no cop sees it happening and even if they do they don't give a shit.