Wasn't SF one of the "defund the police" city just 2 years ago? I find the mix messaging odd, It seems law enforcement is both a problem when they enforce the law, and a problem when they do not enforce the law.
At the end of the day traffic enforcement via fine hardly ever does anything to improve actual safety, it is a revenue generator and a pretense for other police investigation but has never and can never be about safety
If you want to improve road safety you must increase licensing requirements, require more testing, and have an actual mechanism to revoke licenses for people that cause accidents. Sadly many states (including CA) are "no fault" states where the police do not even try to figure out who caused the accident, and very rarely is there any consequences to actual unsafe driving so because of that I fail to see how forcing someone to pay some fines for speeding will improve safety. That is a joke.
> At the end of the day traffic enforcement via fine hardly ever does anything to improve actual safety, it is a revenue generator and a pretense for other police investigation but has never and can never be about safety
NYC's red-light violation fining program (which was just expanded this year) is substantively responsible for a 70% decline in right-angle crashes, as well as a 40% decline in rear-end crashes[1]. Drivers who are fined for driving unsafely learn that there's a cost, and drive more safely as a result.
I agree with the rest (including the concerning pretext aspect!). But fines do play a critical role in road safety.
Automated, i.e constant monitoring, is slightly different than ad-hoc police enforcement, as drivers learn which lights are continually monitored will change behavior, in those locations. Just like known "speed traps" cause people to slow down, or if you use Waze you will slow down if police are reported on the app.
So I have no doubt that automated enforcement will change behavior, I still opposed automated enforcement on a number of grounds, privacy / constitutional / abuse concerns / etc.
Further I would have to look deeper into the implantation, but I know more than a few studies on Red Light cams have shown that while they will reduce intersection crashed, often then INCREASE rear end crashes as people slam on the breaks when the yellow comes on making the intersection not really "safer" it just changes the location of the wreck.
Now for a city like NYC rear end may be safer over all given the high levels of pedestrians I dont know...
Sure, it's different. The claim was that traffic enforcement via fine doesn't improve safety; I've shown that a form of traffic enforcement via fine does.
I've heard just about every driver I've ever talked to repeat the "red light cameras cause rear-ends" claim, but the only evidence I've seen shows that they decrease rear-ends. That makes more intuitive sense to me: most people have regular commutes, and you learn to follow the traffic laws after the first handful of tickets.
I appreciate the links. It looks like red light cameras are indeed much less effective (and maybe even counterproductive) in the rest of the US. As a pedestrian, I consider them a blessing in NYC.
There are speed traps on some neighborhood streets in Chicago that are so hair trigger sensitive (or maybe just miscalibrated?) that locals just don't drive down that street. They go a block out of their way to not pass that camera. Even some people who live on that block do this.
The messaging isn't really that mixed. Folks mostly want the police to enforce and investigate more important matters than they do now (speeding vs overly tinted windows, for example, or home invasions vs sleeping in a park).
Ok, where does theft, assault, property crime, shoplifting, and trespassing fit in our hierarchy of enforcement?
Higher or lower than speeding?
because many of the "defund police" were a direct result of police enforcement actual violent crime.... not them attempting to enforce "sleeping in the park" laws
Also as a side note, overly tinted windows (speaking as someone that drives a car with overly tinted windows) can be dangerous at night, more so than speeding.
Was in SF a week ago and my Uber driver took an illegal u-turn. He noticed me being quizzical and said that police don’t enforce anything anymore. He said a few years ago they had a big push to enforce traffic laws to the letter and everyone got a lot of tickets but it’s now totally different. Kind of weird to have big swings on enforcement of things like that. It’s like there is a broken control algorithm somewhere.
Living in SF, I feel that some of the lack of enforcement has been that a bunch of our traffic flows have been completely broken. Feels that the powers that be are more happy to just leave things as they are with lax enforcement than fixing the routing.
Some road signs have been changed (which turns are illegal, etc.) without considering how go some direction legally. Sunset neighborhood around 19th is mind numbing. Exceptionally few permitted left turns, random surface streets you'd otherwise use closed off except for residents of the street, etc.
Not to mention that pulling over a car on an SF street will most likely start a traffic jam..
> Not to mention that pulling over a car on an SF street will most likely start a traffic jam..
People should not just stop in the road. I've heard officers use the megaphone (or walk up to the driver) to tell the person to pull into a parking lot. Otherwise, officers can just follow the driver until they're in a position that they can pull over somewhere and park safely.
It creates traffic jams and is dangerous for both driver and officer
Left turns off 19th should be banned throughout. If you want to cross that flow of traffic you need to pull out of it to the right, into any working street and then come back at it perpendicular and wait for a traffic light to create a gap for you.
Camping out in the left lane clogging up half the capacity of the street while you wait for a gap in the oncoming direction is psychopathic behavior.
> It’s like there is a broken control algorithm somewhere.
If SF is like NYC in this regard, it's because the police there have been on an unofficial and illegal work strike for years (long predating COVID). Municipalities have lost (or willfully ceded) their ability to oversee their police departments and, lacking any real consequences, the police are more than happy to sit on their thumbs.
The one thing I’d like SF’s traffic cops to do more of: ticket drivers who block the box. This action needs to be seriously penalized so even the most selfish drivers won’t take the risk.
Automated enforcement? Cameras checking for speeding, red light running, etc. are trivial and already existant. That makes enforcement better, with more coverage, faster, cheaper and removes any selection bias (that looks like my friend's car, I'll not stop them to write a ticket for speeding).
No it does not, it has problems with constitutional issues (being able to face your accuser) and owner of the vehicle is not always the driver, and under an innocent until proven guilty system it is on the state of PROVE you were the driver, many automated systems flip this and assume the owner is the driver and if you were not you are liable until you inform the state who was the driver.
None of that should be allowed in a free society,and I am not willing to give up essential liberty for traffic safety
That is all with out going into the innumerable ways traffic systems are already abused for other purposes than just traffic enforcement
Better enforcement gets abused for revenue. Limits get slower than the consensus speed causing lane changes. Yellow lights get shortened causing panic stops.
So, what did they do the rest of the day? Did they stop 500 drivers and just gave them verbal warnings? Or did they sleep in their police cars? Maybe just having them write a short report on their daily activities would change they way they do their jobs.
Really makes you wonder what they're actually doing. The claim that they're busy doing stuff like directing traffic for parades makes some amount of sense, but can that really account for the workload of 45 traffic cops? Averaged out this would mean each cop maybe writes one citation every five days. Are there that many parades in San Francisco?
If they're "understaffed" how many traffic cops do we need? How many citations will they write at that number? Even the old citation number cited in the article sounds incredibly low given how many traffic cops there are.
If they have 45 cops helping with NON-ticket based traffic safety I'm happy with that. The citations really should be reserved for when harm has been proven to have taken place, not just speed or anything else similarly minor.
Station a police officer to direct traffic. To lead a procession. To hang out in a school zone. As a strong deterrence only. No intent to hand out tickets for minor infractions rather than literal crimes. Maybe also look for anyone on today's BOLO lists.
Or just, instead of traffic specific police, put them back on beat patrols where they walk around and interact with the community in positive, peace and order, encouraging ways.
Good ideas. Though I’d argue that some CVC violations can only be addressed through tickets. Window tint violations, for example, produce a dangerous situation the entire time that vehicle is in operation. No amount of traffic direction and whatnot can fix that - only a ticket to remove the illegal tint.
Furthermore, I’d also argue that “fear of a ticket” is a very important deterrent to dangerous behavior. At present, the fear of a ticket is largely unfounded because cops do not seem to enforce traffic violations aside from using them as pretexts to stop and frisk (my experience is in LA).
Managing traffic at distinct locations - especially if it’s known that violations aren’t enforced elsewhere - will have minimal impacts on overall driving habits. It’s the specter of omnipresent monitoring that will change behavior (to say nothing, of course, about actual engineering solutions). But that specter has to be grounded in reality, which right now it isn’t. The cops have given up, and people are starting to catch on.
> But just 35% of the paltry number of citations issued in San Francisco since 2018 were for those five violations [most likely to result in crashes], while the majority were for behaviors unlikely to injure anyone else — like expired tags, suspended licenses, tinted windows and broken tail lights, the analysis found.
Even the time spent on traffic enforcement is not spent wisely. Is SFPD this inept? Are there perverse incentives? I don't get it.
Yeah, it sounds like patrolling for violations isn’t really the core of their job, so they probably only issue a ticket when someone does something egregious in front of them.
It makes some sense: if a cop is at a corner directing traffic, people aren’t going to flagrantly break the law, and the cop probably can’t really leave their post to deal with whatever does occur.
If the cops don’t set a floor of acceptable behavior, the public will not decide, we’ve taken enough liberties, let’s enjoy this amount of laissez-faire and not overdue it. Nope, good drivers will drive well and the others will act like it’s Mad Max time to the detriment of public safety and good citizenship.
Where is the "laissez-faire" in negligent homicide? That's what this essentially boils down to.
I'm on the other coast, but there's been a marked increase in aggressive and illegal driving here over the past two years, coinciding with a marked decrease in traffic law enforcement.
"Good drivers will drive well" is not sufficient. Driving is not a right; it's a privilege that's meant to be afforded based on the driver's ability to drive safely.
Driving without harming others is a "right." An unlicensed unregistered driver who drives responsibly has done nothing wrong, and anyone stopping that person is a tyrant who has no place in our society.
It is actually not. It is a privilege. You have to earn it and you can lose it. In some states (maybe all?) you agree to this FACT when you get your license.
> An unlicensed unregistered driver who drives responsibly has done nothing wrong, and anyone stopping that person is a tyrant who has no place in our society.
They're unlicensed because they either didn't take the required training, or lost their license, or perhaps lost significant vision. It is irresponsible for others (such as family) to let them drive.
And regarding the tyrant thing. hyperbole? are you trolling?
Rights don't come from the government. The government can only infringe upon rights. The fact that tyrants will try to stop you does not mean it isn't a right.
>They're unlicensed because they either didn't take the required training, or lost their license, or perhaps lost significant vision.
Or they're unlicensed because they meet the standards and more, perhaps even trained as professional drivers. They may be far more safe than others but merely believe driving is a right, and thus do not submit to infringements. If you've been on the road, you can see having a license has little bearing on whether you are a safe driver.
>In some states (maybe all?) you agree to this FACT when you get your license
Those who haven't gotten a license haven't agreed with that "fact."
I thought you would enjoy one quote from the website you cited: "No one has more right to the road than anyone else." That is, their statement necessarily agrees those with a license have no more right to use the road than anyone else such as those who don't.
Except that you should demonstrate your responsibility in order to qualify to drive, first, before you start driving around. That's what the license and registration do, they constitute a couple of very easy "hoops" to jump through to show that you are at least responsible enough to write down your name and address and have it tied to your vehicle's license plate.
Why is it kowtowing? Past taxpayers paid for the roads. The roads are a group thing and have group rules. To use the shared resource, you need to do so safely. The group decided to have agents verify you know how to do them safely. They use licenses and registration as the mechanisms. If you don't agree with the group rules, buy some land and an ATV and drive alone on your own resources without endangering others.
I get libertarian values, but arguing against licenses and registration and calling it tyranny and kowtowing is strange.
Roads should all be privatized and paid for by tolls (or whatever private mechanism), not registration. Registration costs have little bearing on how much you actually use the road and are about the worst example of measuring how much is owed for wear etc; I'd argue your very argument is about why registration is the worst possible way to pay for roads and needs abolished.
> To use the shared resource, you need to do so safely.
You can do things safely without being licensed or registered. In fact I'd argue having a driver license is almost "proof" you'll be unsafe by your standards, since the majority of licensed drivers are batshit insane on the road (and you made the statement about "the group" aka majority being the decider of the state of something)
>The group decided to have agents verify you know how to do them safely.
I did not elect any of those "agents." And I'm pretty sure the "group" that voted for licensing of vehicles in my state is dead and in the ground, like the guys who voted to keep slaves. Also not a fan of the idea 4 guys of the 5 vote to break their own legs, so all 5 have to do it. I see public roads as breaking my own leg, by busting the free market for roads by creating a violence imposed subsidized government system. You create this subsidized system that destroys the market for private market roads where a license wouldn't be required, and then you say "well see, you don't need a license on private property but we destroyed through subsidies the market that would allow those roads to freely compete HA HA!"
...except made themselves unaccountable to our legal system.
I'm hoping this is just some silly and normative libertarian take, because it's otherwise laughably wrong: driving, as a matter of settled law, is not a right in the US. It's not a right anywhere in the world.
There is some problems with the common statement that "driving, as a matter of settled law, is not a right"
First off, as we have seen "settled law" is never really settled
Secondly, the common justification that it is a privilege and not a right is the fact you must pass a skills challenge to be licensed, and then it could be revoked if you abuse the "privilege", neither of which would be the case if were a "right"
But it is now "settled law" as you call it that the 2nd amendment is an indivual right, but in order to bear arms in many many states you must pass a skills challenge to be licensed, and then it could be revoked if you abuse the "privilege????"... so if logic on why driving is not a right holds then logically all licensing and regulation around gun ownership and carrying are de-facto unconstitutional
However if instead the public can put reasonable limits for public safety on both gun ownership and driving, both driving and gun ownership would be rights... as they should be considered.
Driving is a right because we have the right to travel, and government can only under very limited circumstances limit that right to travel.
> First off, as we have seen "settled law" is never really settled
Sure. I naturally await the day that any of our 50 beautiful states, much less the federal government, decides that driving is a fundamental right!
Insofar as law can be settled, the absence of a right to drive is settled.
> However if instead the public can put reasonable limits for public safety on both gun ownership and driving, both driving and gun ownership would be rights... as they should be considered.
This is affirming the consequent: the fact we put reasonable limits on a government-recognized right and a non-right does not imply that the non-right is somehow a right. The government puts limits on hunting on federal lands; that does not imply a right to hunt (either on those lands or at all).
You have a right to free movement. The government is not required to respect any particular instantiation of your movement as a pure right in itself. Put another way: you right to travel does not give you a free pass to fly a plane without licensing and safety training.
If you have the right to free movement but the government requires someone licensed to operate for the vast majority of ways of efficient free movement, that's just infringing on the right to free movement in a clever and devious way while saying "well you could walk!"
It kind of reminds me of the states where you need a license/permit to acquire a gun, "but you could acquire an antique muzzleloader without one" so the mental gymnastics justify it as not an infringement.
Then you understand your argument that your opinion coincides with settled law lends no credence one way or another to your argument. We have a simple difference of opinion, and the fact that government infringes on the ability to drive is not evidence that driving isn't a right is fact.
Sure it does. The US government has correctly and as a matter of settled law determined that driving is not a right. Their decision to infringe on this non-right, if it can even be called infringement, is entirely a regulatory concern.
This is one of those situations where the metric is very important. Vision Zero uses the number of traffic accidents or fatalities. There's a dashboard here:
You say that exaggerating, but I was recently in Caracas in, and there they really mean nothing. At night or when the traffic is light, cars slow down but continue straight through red lights and stop streets. It freaked me out at first, but you get used to it. The reason is it go so dangerous at one point that it was to risky to stop the car at an intersection at night. It's not as bad now, but the habit remains.
For those that are not reading the article, this is an important section. SFPD know what's needed, promise to do it, and then... just don't.
> In 2014, the city adopted a Vision Zero pledge to eliminate traffic fatalities within a decade. The Police Department was a key part of that commitment, pledging that half its traffic citations would be for the five behaviors that are most likely to result in crashes: speeding, running red lights, blowing through stop signs, failing to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks, and failing to yield while making a left turn or U-turn.
> But just 35% of the paltry number of citations issued in San Francisco since 2018 were for those five violations, while the majority were for behaviors unlikely to injure anyone else — like expired tags, suspended licenses, tinted windows and broken tail lights, the analysis found.
> In neighborhoods with lower incomes and more diversity — including the Tenderloin, Chinatown and Bayview-Hunters Point — an even higher share of citations were for these relatively minor infractions. It seems people of color always bear the brunt of enforcement, even the thin gruel served by San Francisco.
> Meanwhile, just 32% of citations citywide are issued on the “high injury network” — the 13% of city streets where 75% of fatalities and major injuries take place. These include busy thoroughfares such as Geary Boulevard, Van Ness Avenue and 19th Avenue, as well as almost every street in the Tenderloin.
> Braitsch and Bornheimer argue that the department’s 45 traffic officers would be far more effective if they aimed their citations at the five bad driving behaviors taking place on the high injury network.
> But that’s not happening, and the outcome is predictable. Already this year, 19 people have died in traffic collisions on San Francisco streets, a figure that puts the city on target to match the 31 deaths in 2014 that prompted the Vision Zero commitment in the first place. Hundreds more people are severely injured on San Francisco streets each year but survive.
> speeding, running red lights, blowing through stop signs, failing to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks, and failing to yield while making a left turn or U-turn
> expired tags, suspended licenses, tinted windows and broken tail lights
It is unsurprising that the majority of tickets are for objective facts that can be observed at any time rather than things which must be witnessed.
I lived in tenderloin about 6 years ago, and the police really don't care. For example, every Sunday at 11pm a rival gang would throw explosives from their cars at rival street dealers. We called the police many times, and we where told more than once that "these things usual sort themselves out between these gangs." Meanwhile we wanted as an ambulance took our corner dealer after having an explosive thrown in their face.
We ultimately left that otherwise nice apartment, because of this situation combined with the landlord not caring about a new bedbug infestation. SF could be a wonderful place if they built more middle density housing and improved city institutions.
Why would anyone except those with some innate and exceptional passion for law enforcement ever choose to become a cop? The politicians, media, and a good chunk of society hates you. The hours are strange. You have to put yourself in dangerous situations often. Every action you take is judged, and severe mistakes go viral instantly and destroy your life. No one is ever happy.
Statistically speaking, police work is safer than logging, farming, roofing, garbage collecting, and tons of other jobs out there. It’s riskier than my job, sure, but not nearly as risky as many think.
In reality, “death is around every corner” is an intentional training method pushed by the police themselves. Evidence-based training would likely go a long way to making police public servants again, and improve community relations a great deal.
This seems to be an "internet bubble" take. Politicians campaign on supporting law enforcement. I travel a lot, both rural and urban, and I see far more thin-blue-line flag stickers than anti-police stickers around the country. (The media hates everyone, eventually.) Police work is like service work in that as you gain seniority you get more control over your hours, so that's not a permanent problem. While there's an element of danger, law enforcement isn't even in the top ten most dangerous jobs in America, a list dominated by tradespeople and truck drivers. As for viral media destroying your life, I've never seen it happen. Sure the occasional officer goes to jail for committing a crime, but I've never seen an officer who had to give up his or her career because of viral social media nonsense. Many of the officers who are "convicted in the court of twitter" wind up compensated for the trauma of going through that experience, which is about the best you can hope for, since anyone (cop or not) is subject to a viral tarring-and-feathering these days. But they're not prohibited from continuing in their career because of the experience.
Anyway, I have lots of friends in the law enforcement world, and almost all of them are happy with their careers.
The same reason anybody takes any job? Money. And in many states they are paid quite well… I know quite a few people who became police, only a few of them had any sort of fervor for policing before they were indoctrinated during basic training. It’s like an easier and better paid version of going into the armed services.
Also: on average, being a cop is just not that dangerous, and it gets less so every year as crime rates drop. These are just the facts. In the vast majority of situations police will be the better armed and trained party. Much different than other public servants, who often have to deal with the same public and the same scrutiny for less pay and with worse protection…
Wow, you have some weird view of cops over whereever in the world you live. Here, the media doesn't hate them, I don't know about strange hours but I can't imagine it's too crazy without benefits to balance it out, and you'd do it to help your country or community stay safe.
Some people like to be in a position of power over other people. Some people see it as military-lite. Some people like guns. Some people her off on hurting other people. Some people are not smart enough to do any kind of job that requires a smidgen of intelligence, so they go into police work (it has even been shown that you will be rejected from becoming a police officer if you are intelligent - at least in the US). Etc.
My university best friend's dad was a cop. They were a middle class family and it was a relatively good paying / benefits job. He was a really nice guy. I never had the impression he was passionate about law enforcement, nor on a power trip, just a normal guy who got a job after high school. He would have become a cop in the 70s - what you say may be more relevant now.
One reason is devotion to the rule of law. Another is you get to boss people around. And given that "qualified immunity" is still a thing, most serious mistakes - or even outright criminal actions - go unpunished or punished by administrative means like demotions or firing - a luxury that a common citizen is never allowed. Hopefully, the majority is in the former category - but let's not close our eyes to the fact the latter category exists too.
That's reflected in the article's tone. I might characterize it as Although cops are terrible at their job, this time, they're terrible because they aren't doing their job and some experts say maybe that's because they're underfunded, but other experts say it's probably because they're just terrible.
I honestly dont know which one I prefer at this point: police who spend their time beating protestors, profiling black people and shooting family dogs, or police who simply don’t do anything. Seems like many are responding to recent widespread calls for accountability by just not doing their jobs.
I can't say, either. I moved from the US to a country where police training takes 4 years and cops generally are, and are perceived as, a force for good. Everything is much more relaxed. My friend and I even had a drunken rager of an evening with a pair of off-duty cops and it was a lot of fun.
I'm not sure what it would take to get there in the US, but whatever obstacles are in the way to true reform are not only the fault of police, but are pretty deep-seated social issues.
Particularly, the US has a political legacy of expediency being successful and popularly supported, while adhering to principles is seen as pointy-headed pedantry. When it comes to the portrayal of law enforcement and criminal defense in popular tv shows and movies, more often than not, protagonists bend the rules to catch criminals who otherwise use procedural loopholes to evade justice. So, the people that adhere to principles are the villains, and the people who bend the rules are heroes. This social current manifests in real, actual political life when partisans promote or cherry-pick gossip and news that they themselves know are false, but if widely believed will harm their political opponents.
This trend hits US cops specifically in two ways. The first is that bending the rules is expected and sticking to principle is not rewarded. And that's not by "the leadership" but by you, you reading this - if you have ever thrilled to a hero bending the rules. The second is that even cops who do stick to principles can be savaged in the media with a presumption of guilt because everyone knows ACAB.
I agree that the whole “Jack Bauer bends the rules and the terrorists are thwarted—therefore the end justifies the means” trope is harmful. But this isn’t what’s wrong with general day-to-day policing today. Focusing enforcement on (profiling) black people and shooting everything in sight without accountability aren’t examples of bending the rules. They are standard procedure, sanctioned and supported by police chiefs, DA’s and judges. This isn’t cops taking shortcuts like Jack Bauer, it’s cops doing exactly what is encouraged and rewarded.
Power fantasies... I had a shitty acquaintance in my 20s who horrifyingly pondered aloud and with alarming detail about how he wished he was an off duty cop in that moment so he could intimidate and punish a loud group in the next hotel room over after telling them to keep it down and not getting the result he wanted. He was too busy freeloading off inheritance and offering nothing of value to society at the time, but he was open about his ambition to become a cop some day if/when his nest egg was depleted.
At the end of the day traffic enforcement via fine hardly ever does anything to improve actual safety, it is a revenue generator and a pretense for other police investigation but has never and can never be about safety
If you want to improve road safety you must increase licensing requirements, require more testing, and have an actual mechanism to revoke licenses for people that cause accidents. Sadly many states (including CA) are "no fault" states where the police do not even try to figure out who caused the accident, and very rarely is there any consequences to actual unsafe driving so because of that I fail to see how forcing someone to pay some fines for speeding will improve safety. That is a joke.