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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.
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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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I am of the firm stance that ghost police cars should never exist. If you need to be undercover to do a thing, then have a plain car.
But ghost cars are literally there to hide for “normal” everyday enforcement. And that type of police work should not involve hiding.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
I can see different degrees of this. I agree that I’d rather have a visible presence in traffic monitoring that helps remind people they are being watched for adherence to the rules of the road, and give people who are pushing the limits an opportunity to fix it rather than catch them. So speed traps for money quotas or a door to gain access to vehicles to find or “create” issues (usually based on profiling) is the problem here. As well as abuse of the power to be able to speed and ignore the same rules when an emergency isn’t pending, or escalating a traffic stop beyond what it was originally for again because of the power trip.
My response to the typical complaining about speed traps isn’t usually first to focus on the police, but to ask, “well, were you speeding or driving recklessly?” When someone gets mad from that question, then the problem may not be (just) the police.
That last part really sounds like “Well, what did you do to deserve getting hit in the first place?” to me.
We have rights to privacy and willfully giving them up for policing activities should be met with resistance. As Ben Franklin intimated, those that would give up liberty for security or power deserve none of those things. The founding fathers were pretty pro-privacy and went to a lot of trouble to be very outspoken about it. Not only in the Constitution, but in lots of original state’s Declarations of Rights, and they seem pretty into the idea that people shouldn’t be being targeted for punitive legal action unless there’s a warrant or probable cause, and passive surveillance is targeting anyone and everyone that passes by it all the time.
ETA an Upton Sinclair quote that seems relevant: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” I think about that a lot. Others should, too.
One more edit, a link to the actual Sinclair text: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1558/1558-h/1558-h.htm#link2H_4_0047
So what do you propose for the narrow subject of speed limits or other rules of the road? It seems enforcement of them (which btw is very lacking otherwise people wouldn’t speed so much) is off the table since that’s a violation of privacy in your opinion. So honor system?
I agree with you on a broad scale, privacy is more important and government doesn’t belong in many places. But using a speeding post to bounce that off of is a weird take. There are many rules and regulations written in blood, and road laws are included in that. And without someone enforcing the laws (but not using that enforcement as a way to abuse power) it’s a free-for-all.
We could certainly discuss the details of traffic stops, speed trap designs and motives, and of course abuse of power. My little comment was simply that if you aren’t speeding, and there isn’t that abuse going on, why would they pull you over, and why would you care if they are watching for others who are going too fast?
Right, it still boils down to: if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. I get that you’re accepting that philosophy. I reject it. Using robots for surveillance state activities is a thing we, as a society, should emphatically take a stand against.
No, it boils down to whether or not you want some enforcement at all of the laws. If you don’t, then monitoring speeding and driving shouldn’t be done. Using privacy arguments for how you behave on a public motorway is a ridiculous stretch. It also muddies the water of the real problems with law enforcement issues, aka the police problem. Catching speeders is not one of these.
We’ve had enforcement without cameras and automation for generations. Gimme a break. You’re just advocating for enforcement by robots instead of by actual people. That’s not a good future to continue working toward.
If you’re wanting to beat strawmen, fine, but I never once mentioned robots, you brought it up and it had nothing to do with anything I’ve said. I even agree that automation is a dangerous route, as the AI craze is showing, but that’s not how this thread started or even was about.
Cameras watching and enforcing traffic laws is giving control to robots instead of people.
Edit to add: look into Clearview AI and then tell me you are still ok with copious public cameras and AI for police use.
Police officers should be people, and they should be seen, especially when patrolling
me just assuming every V8 Charger less than five years old, white, red or black and clean is a cop by default
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.
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.
Define irony.
What am I looking at
A truck that’s about to gain some good ol’ American Freedom™.
Why do we have pictures of a cop when there are so many of plain clothed, mask wearing, and unidentifiable ICE guys?
Camouflage is one of the five physical traits of a predator, the others more or less apply with enough hand waving
its the five behavior traits all apply very obviously. Stealth, strategy (attack together), territorial (protect their jurisdiction), patience (speed traps), adaptability
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.
Why not use Comic Sans ? :)
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
