As far as I can tell this is extremely easy to implement. And utterly removes any mal-incentives.
Aside from that, the fines go to the jurisdiction that charged you, which can then be used for whatever the jurisdiction wants; road repairs, school improvements, landscaping, administration, etc. etc. So if you were charged with a provincial fine, the money would go to the province, if you were charged with a regional fine, the money would go to the region.
In a way, that's a "tax-refund" pool, isn't it? We don't need to spend as much tax money on these things because the fines partially fund them.
A $50 5-over ticket comes with a $100 surcharge that goes to the anti-DUI education fund, $100 toward the brain injury fund, $100 toward the reckless drivers victims fund, etc etc. All these fines get directed at various nonprofits that do things like run the mandatory classes people have to to take after getting a DUI or your 3rd speeding ticket or whatever. Of course those classes cost hundreds of dollars to attend. I don't think anyone is quite sure where the money goes. Of course this is all done with good intentions but the practical effect is that it just increases the fraction of the population who's one traffic offense away from sliding into poverty.
Awhile ago there was an article posted here about the breakdown of fines for a simple speeding ticket in CA and it was pretty disgusting the amount of fines that one has to pay in addition to the ticket itself and it all goes toward stuff that should probably be funded via the general budget or not at all. Maybe someone can find the article.
There are rural areas greatly underserved by law enforcement due to low pop densities, so there has to be something which accounts fir that.
however, i'd challenge the idea that solving more crimes is necessarily a better use of our tax dollars.
cars are the number one killer of people in america that police can directly affect. so why wouldn't we want more enforcement of traffic rules (which is where most of those fines come from), to reduce traffic fatalities? (we need to know which rules best reduce fatalities of course, but that's a given)
suicides are also high on that list. community policing techniques can help there.
and don't get me wrong, homicide investigations are important, for both prevention and justice, but homicides shouldn't dictate spending on, and the attention of, our police force.
at the bottom of the list are mass shootings (basically a rounding error of yearly gun deaths), yet police forces spend disproportionate amounts of money on (reacting to) mass shootings (assault weapons, active shooter gear, tanks, etc.).
I think automotive industry innovation can do more to bring the fatalities down than any practical amount of policing. Also, I'm tired of the low standards for actual driving ability in America, combined with the lazy speed enforcement approach by cops. My life has very, very rarely been threatened by a speeder, but it has regularly been threatened (particularly when I'm cycling or walking) by negligent or outright incompetent drivers.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/28%C2%B038'57.5%22N+81%C2%...
Michigan Public Act 85 of 2006 requires speed limits to be set to reasonable speeds for traffic (generally based on the 85th Percentile rule), so as not to artificially incriminate the general population. It overrides local laws, so it also prevents corrupt municipalities and/or corrupt police departments from lowering the speed limits for financial gains (speed traps).
https://www.wzzm13.com/article/news/investigations/13-on-you...
https://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2011/10/po...
I don't know if Florida has a similar law. But if not, they should consider it.
While I applaud the intention behind this law, I hope you're overstating Michigan's reliance on the 85th percentile rule. For the uninitiated, "The 85th percentile speed refers to the speed at or below which 85% of vehicles are traveling" [1] as measured by a speed survey of current conditions.
The problem with the 85th percentile rule is that it completely ignores the safety of other road users and the surrounding community, taking drivers perception of safety as fact. I think drivers tend to underestimate the risk that increased speed poses to pedestrians and bicyclists, especially in urban and suburban areas.
Problems exist even on roads that only allow drivers: 'Raising the speed limit to match the 85th percentile speed may lead to higher operating speeds, and hence a higher 85th percentile speed. This generates an undesirable cycle of speed escalation and reduced safety. As a 2016 Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) report stated, “The 85th percentile speed is not a stationary point. It is, rather, a moving target that increases when speed limits are raised” (Farmer 2016).'
Rather than relying primarily on the 85th percentile rule, I hope Michigan gives full weight to the additional factors the MUTCD manual mentions, like “(A) road characteristics, shoulder condition, grade, alignment, and sight distance; (B) the pace; (C) roadside development and environment; (D) parking practices and pedestrian activity; and (E) reported crash experience for at least a 12-month period” [1].
If after considering these factors the road is still a speed trap, then the road should be redesigned to align drivers expectations with the posted speed [2], not the other way around.
[1] https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-studies/Documents/SS1701.... [2] methods include narrowing lane width, eliminating or reducing shoulders, reducing the number of lanes, increasing road curvature with pedestrian islands, speed bumps, etc
And you now admit you drive according to the speed limit having been ticketed? So it seems like what the police force are doing is effective.
Thats the “unspoken” general expectation. Even some fine schedules, have 1-10 over as a $0 fine. See pennsylvania:
https://www.penndot.gov/TravelInPA/Safety/TrafficSafetyAndDr...
However, some draconian towns like Collegedale, TN which advertise no crime statistic in 20-30 years feed off the college kids and give them 5mph over tickets all day long.
Its not necessarily about changing behavior, but there is a balance to be striken between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.
I want to see this broken down in terms of business days between crime and someone being charged.
I have a suspicion that the correlation is being diluted by all the open and shut "guy A punches guy B and gets charged with assault and battery because everyone in the bar saw him do it" cases that don't require any investigating (other than possibly collecting statements) types of violent crime that will get "solved" regardless of how much time the police spend collecting fines.
My brother-in-law is a state police. When he was on patrol, they would get lots of calls because someone mowed across someone else's property line. Or someone stole someone else's pet rabbit. Once a mom called in and claimed that her teenage son was assaulting her. When they arrived, it turned out he just wasn't listening to her and doing chores and homework so she wanted to 'scare him straight' and have the police tell him he had to. Other ones are because some 15 year old texted nudes or posted on Instagram that they were going to 'kill' a teacher that gave them a bad grade.
He is now a detective and it is like you say above. The easy ones get solved right away after some minor investigation but there are no resources to spend weeks investigating murders with no witnesses or likely suspects.
In the end, part of it comes down to what do you want the police function to be.
Wow.... I would like to see that parent charged with wasting police time.
Given that everyone[1] speeds, I think you're comparing half dozen of one to six of the other.
[1] Okay, something like 95% of the vehicles on the road, and everyone hates the other 5%.
Plus, there may be some social benefits to having a civic response force that does not wander the streets with loaded firearms.
Aren't these better cases for a fine than ticketing someone for going 5mph over limit?
Places where the police collect more fines has higher criminality and the police has less resources per crime to solve crimes?
I don't believe this nonsense article at all. They are overfitting their data. It's more or less fraud. They are mixing units in the regression. Most of the control variables are correlated etc.
They even tried to link fracking to this somehow, but didn't find significance.
http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/upload_documents/...
"Our results suggest that institutional changes—such as decreasing municipal government reliance on fines and fees for revenue—are important for changing police behavior and improving the provision of public safety."
What they are acctually discovering is that crime clearance rate is mostly dependent on crime rate.
I see the correlation, but not the causal link. Is high fee a symptom of lower effectiveness rather than high fees causing lower effectiveness? Or they have no causal link at all?
This seems pretty important, anybody else get this from the paper?
I’m interested in having this research concluded because my gut agrees with the sentiment that incentivizing police to collect fees will reduce impact on non-fee crimes. But my head won’t let me act without reliable evidence.
A police officer has 1.0 amount of time in a shift. If he spends 0.2 of his shift sitting at a speed trap trying to meet some quota, he has 0.8 of his shift left to patrol / help solve crimes; however, the reciprocal of this ratio could occur to, depending on which duties he is assigned.
Now step back... The entire police force has 1.0 amount of time per officer per shift. In order to meet budget goals, they allocate 0.8 of that time to speed traps. Now 0.2 of man hours are spent actually doing anything useful (hint: solving crimes do not pay the bills... ).
We can examine data to confirm this, however I don't see the need. When you have a time budget, every activity takes a portion of that time. If you spend 90% of your time playing solitaire at work, you aren't going to be very productive. The relationship is absolute, so the data should support it. If not, there is some noise interfering.
As a programmer, I don’t agree with the absolute that someone who spends 90% of their day playing solitaire will be less productive than another spending 0% of their day.
The police know the game, and so you end up with these bizarre situations like when the NYPD union announced they they were going to stick it to DeBlasio by making arrests “only when necessary.”[1] (Which of course is an implicit admission that arrests were being made that weren’t necessary.) The real target was the NYC budget, because the NYPD brings in half a billion dollars a year. (Over 10 million a week) That’s insane. Ironically, even though the police stopped citing people, crime remained low and steady.
[0] https://www.rand.org/blog/2015/03/to-serve-and-collect.html
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/1/6/7501953/nypd-mayor-arrests-unio...
The current WaPo headline: "What happens to police departments that collect more fines? They solve fewer crimes."
So if a police department didn't profit from any of the spoils of (alleged) crime, they would be an ideal force?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Fund
Police officers in the UK don't get to enrich their departments or their local towns by fining more people. For that we have parking and 'yellow box junctions' where councils can make lots of money by fining motorists. It is just a tax on motorists, not really 'crime' what goes on with this.
