Why do we have pictures of a cop when there are so many of plain clothed, mask wearing, and unidentifiable ICE guys?
For something like traffic enforcement it makes sense to hide
This is dumb, police have been hiding behind roadside billboards to catch speeders since the advent of the car. It’s nothing new.
I for one am glad for speed enforcement, I fucking hate people who race on highways or city streets, dodging between cars with half a car-length to spare in front and back. Before texting, speeding caused the majority of highway fatalities.
I don’t know who I hate more, cops or fucking asshole drivers.
Hate bad designers. US has some egregious road design.
Don’t make stroads. Either make streets with traffic calming or roads. This will reduce most of the need for speed checks.
And instead of hiding, just put that car in plain view. People will slow down automatically. You can even cheap our and out a cardboard car to fake a police car, studies have show this works😂
I live in the Netherlands with streets full of traffic calming measures people speed here all the time.
hiding and being visible are very different philosophies on speed enforcement:
hidden cars and cameras are intended to slow people down in general; marked cars and cameras are intended to slow people down in specific areas
neither are particularly right or wrong imo, and in fact where i live in australia both are used regularly
I’m with you on this one. I don’t support the corrupt/abusive actions of many police, but people who bitch and moan about being targeted for speeding and/or driving like assholes fucking deserve it. Now sure, getting popped for going just slightly over is garbage, but those aren’t the drivers or the incidents I’m talking about. There’s a weird sentiment among a lot of drivers that traffic laws are just arbritray and optional. I will always cheer for police who catch the worst of them, and I wish it happened more often.
I don’t object to speed limits in the abstract. I do object to speed limits not being set to reasonable levels, such as the 85th percentile. I definitely object to the assholes careening along at breakneck speeds, and I have no problem with police deterring them.
Now if we could just get traffic stops to stop being fishing expeditions for other stuff. The war on drugs was always made to be the war against minorities… that needs to end.
My take on this is, why hide? The mere presence of a police car typically makes people behave in traffic, and if they don’t then they can still get nabbed. Wouldn’t it be better to be visible and a looming threat without the profit incentive of just getting people for tickets?
Most of them don’t hide. Not really. That bike cop behind the bush is something I’ve never seen. They are almost always in obvious sight, doing exaxtly what you’re suggesting: deterring speeders.
As for the black-on-black markings. Yeah, I wish they were more obvious. Mostly so I can be sure I stay out of their way on the highway.
Let’s be honest, police trying to catch speeding cars or compulsive phone users with unmarked or hidden cruisers is not the reason why people don’t trust the US police.
I can only speak for myself, but I absolutely add any form of hidden speed traps to the list. Cops know they can perform “traffic calming” by parking a marked cruiser in an easily seen location, be it on a highway or a city street. People see the car and slow down. This works anywhere it’s clear they can join traffic and pull you over. The officer effortlessly achieves a local bump in traffic safety just by sitting there, and cops don’t need to do risky traffic stops unless someone is really not paying attention. So that’s gotta be the preferred method, right?
Meanwhile, hidden traps and unmarked cars have only one purpose: generate ticket revenue. The only mass “calming” that happens is kinda/sorta in the area where a cop has someone pulled over - and that’s after the car is clearly visible.
Edit: We can also solve speeding and reckless behavior by engineering calming measures into the road itself. The freaking DOT wrote a manual for it. IMO, it’s hard to view speed traps as anything more than a band-aid fix with this in mind.
Eh, if enforcement was actually consistent then traffic behavior would still change over time, even with unmarked cars. I don’t really have sympathy for drivers who disregard traffic safety rules and I’m not interested in giving folks a fair shake at evading enforcement. Driving is a privilege and speeding imposes risks to society at large.
Frankly, I’d be fine if we forced cops to fund themselves through ticket revenue, up until traffic safety stats improved.
Are the speed/ red light cameras hidden where you are.
Our red light cameras are usually at intersections and people tend to know about them because they are always trying to vandalise them.
Yes/no. I’ve seen every permutation over the years though. Some in the median or on the sidewalk with no warning signage, some with. Some just up a pole somewhere out-of-sight with no warning signage. Some big-ol trailer contraptions complete with police/county seals on the front. I’ve even seen some that were temporary tripods set up in front of unmarked cars on the shoulder, for some mobile overnight shenanigans.
I can’t say they’re all 100% bad. Just maybe some of the sneakier implementations run afoul of my thesis above.
vandalise
I don’t condone that, but that’s kind of convenient!
Meanwhile, hidden traps and unmarked cars have only one purpose: generate ticket revenue.
That’s not true - knowing that there could be a speed trap hidden anywhere makes drivers more likely to actually follow the law. Hidden traps are only an issue for people who believe that breaking the speed limit should be the norm.
I dont believe this is true in practice as much as you might like it to be, and I’d love to see any actual data you might have to support your assertion
How exactly would you collect data on this
Self reporting is going to be dubious at best when it comes to admitting breaking the law
IF there’s no data, then we don’t come to @sudoku@programming.dev’s conclusion . We don’t draw any conclusion. We admit we don’t know, and continue to try to discover a method for collecting data.
Toronto police tried to pull this crap with the cars. They got so much heat they had to cancel and repaint the cars back. Rightfully the argument is that police are supposed to be highly visible. If someone needs help, how is camouflaging the response vehicle productive?
Trick question, they’re not actually there to help
They’re not there to help us.
We can frustrate them by making them pretend they are at the very least.
If someone broke your arm, the police will show up, and they might break your arm in the process of, whatever it is you call their job… terrorism?
Visibility is like their biggest deterrent lol
At least they’re (often) required to wear high vis
me just assuming every V8 Charger less than five years old, white, red or black and clean is a cop by default
This is part of why they run undercover cars. Now you think every black charger could be a cop and thus you try to drive following the rules nearby those models, even when it isn’t a cop.
Same for black, white or red Ford Exploders.
This is why I believe people who buy white Ford Explorers are likely dicks. Don’t act like you don’t know.
They also have shit taste in cars. They don’t call them Exploders for nothing.
Define irony.
What am I looking at
A truck that’s about to gain some good ol’ American Freedom™.
In Canada police vehicles are visible as all hell. A blind person can know there is a police car there.
In my area in ontario i dont think i have seen any unmarked cars in a few years at least, but for a while about 5-10 years ago they were pulling all sorts of shit, i saw an unmarked pickup truck, like 4 different models of unmarked suvs, and at least a couple different unmarked cruiser designs. They were being sneaky as hell with it for a bit.
Also in Ontario. My local police force has unmarked cars, trucks and SUVs. I regularly see unmarked opp when traveling outside of town.
I’m in Quebec and I never saw them. Or maybe I did but never noticed. But the SPVM always seemed to have very clearly marked vehicles.
Every time I see police markings on American cars, they look to me like the cops are trying to be cool and hip with their sick fonts. But to me it just screams unprofessional.
Can confirm. I moved from the US to Canada nearly ten years ago, and it’s been approximately that long since I found a cop’s presence intimidating. I don’t ever feel like the RCs are out to get me.
They didn’t used to look like this. The shift happened sometime in the late '90s - early aughts. The fonts and designs until then were gradually modernized but it was similar to corporate letterhead. They also shifted from baby blue shirts to all black around the same time.
The image went from stressful/powerful bureaucrat in a funny uniform to GI Joe action figure.
GI Joe action figure.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Consider when Jeeps started showing up with all the off-road accessory options. I’ve seen some that were just short a Cobra/Joe logo on the side. Gen-X is has been in the management and disposable-capital age bracket for a while now, making all the decisions that drive these aesthetics, and we were all raised on that stuff.
The shift happened in direct response to the ruling of Harlow V Fitzgerald in 1982. That case fucked up a lot of things, because SCOTUS was, unknown to them, handed an illegally amended version of the law in question that was relevant to the case. The law is § 1983 of the federal code. When an unnamed secretary was tasked with copying the Congressional Record of 1871 into the Federal Register in 1874, said unnamed secretary illegally removed a 16 word clause that completely reversed the intent of the law.
I mean, I guess you can make the case that it was that one particular thing.
This is a major cultural shift away from peace officer to Judge Dredd. It’s more than just the one, admittedly terrible, court ruling. You can just as easily make the argument that right wing talk radio of the time was the major driver of the change.
late '90s - early aughts.
Around that time, the show “Cops” became one of the most popular shows on television and people believed it was real and unedited. As well as a slew of “realistic and gritty” cop shows hit the airwaves (ask your parents what an “airwave” is) and there was a wave of pro-cop sentiment after the LA riots because media selectively showed cops being “heroes against the mobs” which at the time, was very new to see playing out on live-ish television.
There was some pushback because of the Rodney King beating and others that were being caught on video, the term “police brutality” became a buzzword, but it also seemed like it was a small, isolated problem that went away because people carried cameras all the time and “a few bad apples” and all that. (Not shown before body-cams: cops beating or shooting the people carrying cameras.)
24 was another one that legitimized brutality.
I’ve occasionally seen early episodes of Cops, the difference in uniform is notable. Don’t know how you’d ever measure it, but I bet Cops is actually responsible for a lot of deaths due to the cultural shift.
“If you’re not doing anything wrong then you don’t have anything to hide!”
The USA should use the same speed traps we use in the EU, along with the draconian fines and punishments for screwing up.
Once on vacation with my wife, we were on a highway and saw a woman painting her fingernails while driving. She was doing this for a few mins and we heard a police motorcycle coming up from behind and we thought “Oh nice, go get her”… but they pulled us over instead! Apparently where the highway ends it goes from like 75mph to 30mph. Turns out cops hide in the area to catch people. It was a hefty ticket too since we were technically going “40mph” over (like everyone else). During the rest of our stay we noticed motorcycle cops everywhere! They were just camped out all over with radar guns in pairs trying to catch people. We ended up hiring a local lawyer to appear in court (since we had to appear in court for the ticket as well), since we obviously weren’t from the area. It was dismissed and we paid less for the lawyer than it would have been to pay the ticket plus insurance would have gone up each month.
In my area we often have oversized speed limit signs and maybe even a flashing light to indicate such a drastic drop in speed, did this area have similar signage?
No flashing lights or anything that stood out. I am usually the one that points that stuff out. I’ve never seen that many cops on bikes hiding around, so I have to assume it’s just how this town was setup.
Same except I paid the ticket because idk how lawyers work
My wife was very determined to not mess up her car insurance and her clean record. So she spent a while looking up and calling lawyers. It’s not time she got back, but in the grand scheme of things, very worth it.
There’s actually a neat trick to avoid traps like this, and it works anywhere in the country - what you do is: slow the fuck down and obey the fucking speed limit 🤷
You must be ignorant of the reality of speed traps. Towns where it drops from 65 to 35 and the sign is hard to see. Andy Griffith, the twilight zone version, makes his living off people not from town. Also look up sundown towns. The signs are gone but they still exist, black folks generally know about them, there are probably still guides.
In a letter to Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, Attorney General Gentner Drummond said his office and the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation had completed their investigation and found no legal grounds to dismiss McCurtain County Sheriff Kevin Clardy.
“There are countless examples of incidents from across the country where public officials make inflammatory comments that spark severe condemnation,” Drummond wrote. “Oftentimes the offending official resigns in disgrace. Sometimes the outrage fades and the matter is forgotten.
He added: “Regardless, there is no provision of law in Oklahoma to throw elected officials out of office merely for saying something offensive.”
The comments in question:
When Willingham retrieved the device, he discovered that the conversation began with a grisly conversation about a fire victim being compared to “barbecue” before the group turned to talking about his son.
“My papaw would have whipped his ass, would have wiped him and used him for toilet paper,” Manning said of the younger Willingham, according to the newspaper. “If my daddy hadn’t been run over by a vehicle, he would have been down there.”
Jennings then piped in, saying “I know where two big, deep holes are here if you ever need them.”
“I’ve got an excavator,” Clardy chimed in, according to the newspaper.
Jennings, according to the newspaper, then said he knew “two or three hit men” who belong to the Louisiana mafia.
You can also get a ticket for impeding the flow of traffic even if you obey the fucking speed limit depending on the state and mood of the pig.
You can get tickets for lots things, but we’re not talking about them, we’re talking about driving faster than the legal speed limit.
No you were talking about avoiding the traps. If the same cop can pull you over for impeding traffic, “just slow down” doesn’t avoid the trap.
He can’t pull you over for speeding if you’re not speeding. All these wankers crying about speed traps are basically saying ‘it’s not fair, the rules shouldn’t apply to me. I’m so special, it’s not fair I can’t drive everywhere at 100mph.wha wha wha’
I am a stickler for going to speed limit everywhere, which drives my wife crazy, but being out of town there is no way to know some local things, so you just follow the flow of traffic. We were even going slower than some people around us, we were just the lucky ones the cop picked out. Those areas are created to be speed traps on purpose.
Or if you had an out-of-state plate, they may have seen you as an easier target (for just paying the ticket instead of fighting it in a town you don’t live).
Y’know, no matter how much you love and lick them boots, they’ll never love you back.
Not a fan of the boot. Also not a fan of having my family killed in a RTA caused by some entitled wanker who feels speed limits shouldn’t apply to them.
It really depends on the area and execution. Though this has been abused heavily by money-hungry police departments, if they solely set their sights on stopping the pieces of shit who weave wildly between cars while going 40+ kph faster than the flow of traffic, which is going 30+ kph faster than the speed limit, I’d welcome the stealthy police presence.
I’d like to go a week without nearly being run off the road by some fucker with a death wish, but the police have decided their priorities.
Recent 2hr drive in California: five or six cars were an order of magnitude more dangerous than any of the other thousands of vehicles. Incredible.
Speeding? Okay yeah people are gonna speed.
Racing at 90MPH for a quarter mile in the right lane to cut off a truck and get one car ahead, then tailgating until you can cut another big rig off? That has to be the cause of a decent number of crashes we see on the shoulder.
I’d try leaving speeders alone a while if it meant catching more of the tailgate->cut off->speed->tailgate->cut off drivers. (I know this is all been studied, just complaining)
See, I don’t even understand tailgating. How’re you supposed to see far enough ahead to cut off the next person if your view is exclusively the trunk of an over-tall SUV? It’s just poorly thought out from beginning to end.
We should tell the people who write tickets to go and enforce safe roads instead.
We still need both. Even the safest design of a road could still let someone drive recklessly and dangerously.
If the roads were designed with traffic calming in mind you wouldn’t need stealth vehicles to enforce the law. The law would be intuitive and you would feel unsafe breaking it regardless of police presence, meaning there would be a lot more things on your mind than looking out for obvious police vehicles. A clearly marked vehicle would do the job.
People feel unsafe doing double the limit on a highway. The unsafe feeling is thrilling for some.
That just proves my point that they aren’t on the lookout for cops and the stealth vehicles aren’t solving any real problem.
There is no safe road if someone decides that the red line is the target.
I propose a new law where in order for a speeding ticket to stick, the cop has to document that the violation happened within proximity of another driver. That other driver can be the cop when they are traveling along the roadway, but not when they are hidden and nobody is around.
We would never actually do it, both because it’s still dangerous to speed on your own and because money.
But I figure that there are so many cases of speeding every day that the cops won’t even be aware of 1% of violations. Why not focus on the most dangerous ones?
Yeah, that hiding in the bushes bullshit is some wil-e-coyote nonsense.
There’s a spot by me that has a tiny dirt path leading into a small crop of bushes and trees that the fuckers cut a portion out of so it will cover everything but their window lol it’s absurd…
Reminds of the kind of place I’d probably spread a bunch of nails… wouldn’t want people to be without building supplies near those bushes.
And as soon as you found out about it you littered the area with nails and broken glass, right? …right?
How could he? The police were already there!
Lock eyes, assert dominance. What are they going to do, chase you with flat tires? Jump out of the car and step on rusty nails? You’ve got them right where you want them. 😎
That’s when you light the bushes on fire.
Drivers will slow down an behave when they see a marked cruiser. For traffic enforcement i don’t mind undercover cruisers.
Getting people to slow down and behave is the entire point though?
If that only works when they see a police cruiser then we are going to need a lot more cops. Like, a lot.
I didn’t say anything like that, though. You’re attacking a position that hasn’t been argued.
If public safety is the goal, maximizing the number of drivers that are driving an appropriate speed and following the rules of the road is the pathway to success. Utilizing marked cars on patrol accomplishes this, as already noted earlier. Having varied patrol routes would keep reasonable people from assuming there were “safe” speeding areas, so reasonable people would choose not to risk speeding in order to avoid consequences.
If punishment and money extraction is the goal, sure, unmarked cars are the best bet. I would argue that public safety should be the goal, though.
Public safety is the goal. Some people don’t learn to follow speed limits and do full stops at reds or other road rules until they have had a consequence from it. I’d rather they learn that lesson through a speeding ticket than accidental manslaughter of a pedestrian.
Unmarked cruisers gives a cop a more unbiased view of the reality of traffic flow/conditions than a marked cruiser cause most drivers will notice a marked cruiser and drive accordingly. Ultimately road safety is many many factors, but i believe enforcement of the rules is one of them.
Just look at the pushback against automated speed cameras, even the ones in school zones often get vanadalized. Many drivers only give a shit about a speed limit because of fines and their insurance costs.
Automated speed cameras are also bullshit though… How much of a police state are people actually on board with? Holy moly… I really don’t think we need, nor should we accept, robots policing us.
Actual good patrolling along varied or semi-random routes is the way you illustrate to the public that you are watching for people to be on their best behavior, not playing “gotcha” style entrapment games. Show people you are there and actually interested in their safety.
Yea the whole “gotcha” of exceeding a posted speed limit in area where a sign often warns you a camera is checking your speed in a position the municipality will often publicly announce its presence. Real gotcha moment.
I feel like the people doing traffic enforcement should be different than the police. Like, they shouldn’t have guns and authority to search and murder. Just, like, a radar gun. and the authority to issue tickets and direct traffic.
It’s a thought, but unfortunately any member of an ‘authority’ is going to be in harm’s way with a real criminal. Remember that (as an example) the son of sam and the oklahoma city bomber were both caught because of ticketing, and that a great many felons (like, actual felons that we care about, not the ‘felons’ of trump gang ™ that have the wrong skin color) are encountered on traffic stops. I wouldn’t want kindly and vulnerable meter maids to be expected to interact with people who have everything to lose, or hostile sovereign citizen types.
If a traffic enforcement type were to work, they’d have to have the authority to detain, and that inevitably means conflict with someone. I’d rather it not be with meter maid sally, and rather with officer dickstain, where I’m happy if either or both party gets hurt.
I don’t think the average person is so dangerous that it justifies having driving infractions be handled with firearms by default.
I don’t think you even need to force a stop. If they don’t stop when asked to pull over, you have the license plate. That’s registered. Send them a ticket or court summons. If they refuse to come to court, then you can have some muscular folks go resolve the issue.
Granted, I’m just spitballing. But I don’t think the current system works at all.
I agree with you. ACAB. In the future I want, I’m sure there will be a need for some form of law enforcement, but right now it’s beyond fucked.
I just want to acknowledge that while the system needs to be torn down, I also don’t think we can implement a ‘nice face’ traffic enforcement without consequences right now. I don’t know. I’m just some idiot spitballing as well. Hopefully iron sharpens iron.
This is the biggest point. There are countless bodycam footage available of some crazy shit going down at traffic stops. Someone with an active warrant is going to resist being IDd. Someone high on cocaine in a stolen car may not act rationally.
Behave? Causing people to suddenly slow down or slam on their brakes, and go 5-10 mph under the speed limit is infinitely more dangerous
Drivers need to be ready to stop or swerve for any reason at any time. A dog crossing a road, an accident in front of them, an emergency vehicle passing. If you slam into the car in front of you because they slowed down to the speed limit, that is your fault.
Well if you get rear ended at least you can take solace in it being the other person’s fault.
So is your solution to someone following too closely to just speed up?
Is that what I said?
I love that you are voted negative on this. You’re absolutely correct, but people don’t want to hear it.
Had a long argument with someone a few months back where they insisted if they come around a curve and a tree is laying across the road, and they can’t stop in time, the tree is at fault…
Shouldn’t that be the whole point? Get people to slow down and behave? Or is punishment the entire purpose?
I think the aim is to get people to slow down even when there isn’t a cop, since one could always be around. It doesn’t really work that well and is a poor substitute for good road design, but still.
I’m pretty sure some places use the traffic ticketing as income, which is a huge perverse incentive. Or maybe they just have quotas. Or benefit from seizing property from people. The police are a problem, but i’m sure this community is aware.
My “favorite” are those ghost cars where you only see the police markings if light hits it the right way. “Protect and serve” my ass.
Honestly I’ll take that over unmarked anyway. It can be impossible to tell an unmarked police car from any random government fleet vehicle
The spot lights are sometimes a good clue
