Quote:
Originally Posted by jayswin
Ah that makes sense, I was just skimming. Yeah, that can be frustrating when it seems that police put more energy into speeding than anything else, but there's reasons for it.
1. There's a dedicated traffic unit who are attacking road violations and responding to accidents regardless of what else is going on in the city, except for extreme circumstances.
2. The traffic unit and traffic tickets handed out account for a huge portion of the police budget, which then allows them to fund other departments to work on other areas of crime.
So unless you want to see a significant bump in your taxes then you need to accept that catching speeders is actually producing revenue for cops to fight other crimes, not taking away from it.
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It makes sense that folks are upset about their perception of traffic enforcement. That's generally the only way in which people interact with police, and generally after they have been caught (by a real officer or a camera...). So it feels that that is "all they do". I can assure you though, CPS is VERY busy, and traffic makes up only a small portion of what police are involved in.
Traffic enforcement is a side of policing that I've found much more fascinating in the last few years. I've always been pretty ambivalent about it myself, knowing that if I got busted speeding, I'd be paying the fine. It's how it works.
After being around on CP and a few other places online, I started to notice people complaining about folks going too slow, the "left lane strugglers", the 'roads are designed for us to go faster' folks, and folks who felt that traffic enforcement was too strict.
So I have been keeping an informal tally for the last 4 years, of the pubic calls I deal with, who's complaining about what when it comes to driving, and the results were rather surprising to me. From what I was seeing online, I was thinking I'd be getting flooded with calls about slow drivers, and folks struggling along.
I almost never do.
I am, however, flooded with calls about speeders, "weavers", "swervers", impatient drivers, folks blasting through construction and school zones, unsafe drivers, and generally bad driving. Out of 4 years, I have had 2 people call up and complain about too much traffic management. I stopped counting after 500 had called stating that police don't do enough traffic management/enforcement. I deal with 5-10 traffic complaints per 12 hour shift. And that's just me.
It's also not common that an officer who is not specifically in the traffic division is doing the stopping, as they are all generally too busy. So unless you are really being egregious in what you are doing, 'normal' police likely have more important things to do than bust you. Photo radar vehicles are not run by police, either. They have Commissionaires in them (and that's a job you couldn't pay me to do...).