And not sit there by the side of a boring flat, relatively safe highway with a radar gun in one hand and a hamburger in the other one, pulling over mild mannered "easy targets" going 70 in a 60. Actually patrol neighborhoods looking for the drag racers and pull them over. Break up the massive "street takeovers." Catch the guys weaving in and out of traffic dangerously (even if they're staying under the speed limit).
Hell, if they handed out a $200 ticket for everyone browsing their phones while driving, they could probably fund their entire departments.
When I was young, I would go down to Front Street in Philly on weekend nights. It's an industrial area so the street is real wide to allow for 18-wheelers to turn in and out of the warehouses and factories. This made it ideal for drag racing and showing off souped-up cars. It would get really crowded with folks showing off their cars and participating in the races.
One weekend after my buddy and I went down there, I saw on the news that the police intervened finally to stop the drag racing. It was a very big operation to quickly and simultaneously pull enough cops cars out to block both ends of Front Street entirely to corral all of the racers and spectators in. Helicopters were also deployed in case someone wanted to try to speed through the city to escape. In the end, all the cars they managed to corral got impounded. I don't know what the long term effect was on the drag racers.
I imagine that if you're going to do it right – and not just set up a bunch of reckless high speed chases through neighborhoods/cities – it actually has to be a fairly large operation, pulling in a lot of resources for a substantial amount of time. And I don't know if it ultimately stops drag racing or just pauses it for a while, nor do I know what the opportunity cost is of pulling all the resources away from other policing tasks.
While I'm generally for impounding drag racers and ATV swarms, I do think there are tradeoffs and risks that the police department leadership has to take into account.
Traffic stops (and domestic abuse) are some of the most dangerous things a cop does. Even if not dangerous, it's likely the things that get them the most abuse.
When something is dangerous or unpleasant, even if we are paid to do it, we will often hesitate to do it.
Not sure where you live but our cops do nothing but give out traffic tickets. Hide at lights that are really long and ticket people who grab their phone while waiting. They pick random low volume stop signs and hand out tickets to people who have been accustomed to rolling them.
In some cities in CA, the police department is understaffed (and traffic law enforcement particularly so) because 1) pension reform / reductions, 2) housing costs and general cost of living making police salaries unattractive, and 3) unpopularity of police as a job choice.
Also probably they spend their budget importing fentanyl or buying office furniture from their brother or something (mostly tongue in cheek here, and I certainly haven’t done or seen an audit but unfortunately “inspired by true events”)
> 2) housing costs and genera cost of living making police salaries unattractive,
A friend's neighbor in wine country is an early retired officer due to injury - their benefits pretty much match many tech workers.
Looks like in San Jose police salaries start at $111k and max out at $186k, BUT additionally SJ spent $58M on overtime. _Average_ overtime pay for officer, sgt, lt and captain were $38-68k and some earned as much $200k in overtime. So the salary is probably $150-$220k on average I'd assume. Not as bad as many think.
Sadly, any complicated technological solution appears easier than trying to reform and change the politically charged nature of American law enforcement.
I don't think this will help with that. From the text of the bill, the only requirement is that the system alerts the driver when they are more than 10mph over the limit. The system us not required to limit the vehicle speed, nor is it required to report the infraction to the authorities.
I'm curious why you don't like the idea, because in my opinion it doesn't go far enough and should instead require active speed limitation in new vehicles (i.e. the car is prevented for exceeding the speed limit by a certain amount or at least has a much lower top speed governor). For something as regulated and potentially dangerous as driving, it seems pretty silly that cars are able to massively exceed legal speeds, particular since it's a "feature" that plenty of people take advantage of regularly with very little in the way of consequences.
People drag race right in front of my house all night long on the weekends. It’s absurdly dangerous.
We are on the edge of a residential neighborhood (so our house faces the main road), and a few blocks from a police station. The police do nothing.
I don’t think I’ve seen somebody “pulled over” in my city in like a decade.
A few days ago I say a guy pull into the oncoming traffic lanes and hit the top of 3rd gear to cut in front of a line of cars at a stop light.
Just absolutely insane, deranged behavior and I see it every single day.
Edit: I was mistaken and thought this limited speed. Apparently this is actually useless.