How St. Louis County, Missouri Profits from Poverty(washingtonpost.com) |
How St. Louis County, Missouri Profits from Poverty(washingtonpost.com) |
As much as I personally would dislike it, Finland's model for traffic fines is probably a more "fair" strategy.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/multimillionaire-faces...
(edited for clarity)
Of course, this 'advice' only works if you are coming from an upper/middle class family...
Seems like the problem needs to be attacked from both ends. First, better enforcement to make it clear that you can't keep driving around without a registration, rather than making it look like a gamble each time. Second, better public transportation so that a car is less of a necessity, to give options to those who can't afford to operate one safely.
As it is, we're putting people in a situation where they need a car to survive, can't afford to operate one safely and legally, and then randomly and capriciously punish them for it.
In a different case, a Tennessee judge ruled that a child had to be renamed by its parents because
(1) "Messiah" is a title, not a name,
(2) that title is held by only one person,
and (3) that person is Jesus Christ.
Obviously, that ruling was grossly unconstitutional. But local courts often have only a hazy, at best, grasp of the law. I suspect it wouldn't be hard to have the principle that a single woman is prohibited by law from entertaining male visitors after 10 pm overturned in very strong terms... if anyone who could work within the court system were ever affected by this.
It would be nice if our legal system didn't deteriorate so badly at the bottom tiers. My guess is that the staffing levels necessary to provide our current levels of "oversight" preclude the obvious approach of only hiring people who can be expected to know what they're doing.
How the poor are treated in our country is a crime, yes, but if you can't afford a speeding ticket, you can avoid getting a speeding ticket by not speeding. Going faster than the speed limit doesn't really get you there appreciably faster, but it does increase your chances of being in an accident substantially and greatly increases your chances of getting a speeding ticket.
Stealing food to support your family is one thing. That literally means you can eat that night. Speeding is completely avoidable. It doesn't mean a corrupt officer won't still pull you over for something, but it surely would reduce the odds that they would look your way.
Secondly, I am amazed why there are too many policing jurisdictions in each county. You have the City Police, County Police, Highway Patrol, local SWAT teams, and State Police, in addition to Federal and drug enforcement agencies. Too many inefficiencies and redundancies.
https://www.google.com/search?q=cost+of+phone+call+from+jail
http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/why-does-it-cost-18-...
In order to choose not to speed, once speeding is inevitable because of a lack of time, the woman in the article has to accept the consequence of being late (forced) or the consequence of getting a ticket (probabilistic), and she (and most people) choose the risk choice rather than the 'forced' choice. The correct answer is to wind that transaction back to what she was doing before she was late, and finding the places where she ended up with not enough time, and those are then filled with a series of what appear to be inconsequential choices with respect to time vs time availability.
I found it a fascinating read, and it gave me quite a different perspective on problems like these where the 'obvious' answer seems to be "if it hurts, then stop doing that."
Working your way out of poverty demands superhuman levels of energy and willpower. You have to juggle multiple jobs, each with their own schedule and you have to be able to float through crises. The plumbing failed in your run-down apartment again? Well, it's not like you can call in sick today, you don't have the kind of job that affords you the luxury of taking time off.
When you have kids, it's even more severe. Kids need things all the time: food, school supplies, clothes, attention. They get sick. They need to be supervised at all times.
So you got off work late and you're trying to pick up your kids, who've been waiting at school for 20 minutes already, and you're still hoping to make it to the first half of your class so that you can get the education you need that might help you get out of this whole cycle. You know that eventually a school official is going to complain about leaving your kids outside. What do they care? Your kids aren't their problem. You've already dealt with people from the school before, you don't need another problem with them.
Every minute counts. But now you're stuck at a red light and you know how this cycle works. You drive it every day. If you hit this light while it's red and the next light is green, you'll be stuck at a red light in every single intersection between here and the school.
If only.
If only you had left 30 seconds earlier, you could've avoided the red lights.
If only you had driven just a little faster, you could've avoided the red lights.
If only you had pulled out ahead of that slow senior sedan, you might've avoided the red lights.
While you're sitting there, at the red light, staring at an empty intersection because this light is on a timer and there's no cross traffic, the seconds tick by like minutes.
Your kids are waiting, still.
And you're afraid, too. What if the school official wants to reprimand you? What if they want to argue? You don't have the time. What if that creepy kid is hanging out with your kids right now? Drugs are everywhere, it's hard to keep them away. What if a patrol car drove by and noticed your kids standing outside?
What if, what if, what if. Every second.
--
It's a piece of cake to sit back and analyze this situation from afar: yeah, sure, speeding only saves you 10 seconds on average in a small town. Maybe a minute here or there depending on where you are. It's not worth the safety risk to yourself or others. It's not worth the ticket.
But I don't believe anyone is completely immune to sacrificing their principles or reason in all situations. Live a stressful enough life where every minute counts, and you too will start trading the risk of a traffic ticket for the reward of one extra minute.
For a poor single mother holding a job with few or no benefits and with a support network often consisting of people in worse circumstances, that time may have been back in the heady days of 2005 or 2006.
One might say, some people are born into lateness.
Better to violation mine a person driving an old beater full of kids than a salesperson in a late model on their way to a sales call. The poor person is more likely to rack up insurance, license, and registration violations. And they are more likely to show up in court without an attorney to negotiate fines down.
As mentioned in the article, a poor person driving slow must mean they have something to hide. Understandable though it is, the mistake is to imagine this is anything other than a retail business. The police officers are writing violations in order to fund their paychecks. The judges and prosecutors are imposing fines for the same reason.
Flipping the light from yellow to red when cars are in the middle of an intersection isn't law enforcement.
I was driving on the Illinois tollway over the weekend, which is under construction and at a 45mph speed limit. I was in a hurry to meet a client, but I'm at a point in my life where I can't afford the $375 ticket for speeding in a construction zone. So, with people flying around me at 70mph, I set my cruise control to 45.
Because the $375 ticket would cripple me financially right now. It's not a hard concept.
In order for your stance to make sense in the universal moral sense, people must respect the law. In order for people to respect the law, the law must conform to normative behavior. Bureaucrats who invert this causality and work to dictate people's common behavior (whether it's 10mph too-low speed limits, drug persecution, or even something a-posteri-innocuous like the MA seatbelt law) are ultimately responsible for destroying this respect and creating a society where everybody is guilty but only selectively prosecuted.
I didn't think it would apply to articles too, but here we are.
The article goes over a huge number of factors and details about life in this area. Why did you think this one piece was worth pulling out and making an obvious comment on? "If you can't afford a ticket, don't speed." Well duh. Who are you talking to? That woman isn't reading your comment, and I'm sure she already knows what you're trying to tell her anyway.
That was Bolden’s second arrest. In 2009 she was arrested in the town of Bel-Ridge for a warrant on a speeding ticket.
The Foristell warrant stemmed from a speeding ticket in 2011
“These are people who make the same mistakes you or I do — speeding
Both were speeding tickets that he had neglected to pay.
a warrant stemming from a 20-year-old speeding ticket.
Speed seems to be a major factor throughout the entire article. Would removing the one thing solve the problem? No. Would it help some people? Undoubtedly.
It's not picking out one sentence. It's picking out one thing that the article said over and over again is a major factor in people going to jail over minor offenses.
As for the bigger problem, if we started holding civil servants liable for damages caused by failing to do their jobs correctly, it might help.
If you've read the Seven Habits of Highly Successful people one of their points is to invest time to work on 'important' but not 'urgent' things. They argue that by doing so these things do not contribute to 'urgency' later by becoming a crisis. They back into the same, rather powerful concept. Which is that if you don't take time to externalize all the 'costs' you don't effectively manage the resource. In my case I would get a free hour of time and think I could do "anything" with it, but once I started keeping track of things I had put off in my notebook I started recognizing where I'd spend that hour doing something unrelated to the stuff being put off and later that activity was going to be 'urgent' if it didn't get done. By choosing instead to put that hour toward one of my projects needing time I keep them under the crisis threshold. I also recognized things I really wasn't ever going to get to and got rid of those projects entirely from my 'queue.'
It can be challenging to realize that you can only do one thing tonight even though three things are vying for your attention, and pulling an all-nighter (my go to trick for college) really taints the hours you spend on projects the next day, which then take more time than they would have, which means even more things vying for your attention. You have to 'back up' to before that point where you are over loaded and understand what you can really get done in that time and then prioritize based on overall progress against the goals. Relatively easy to say, really hard to do.
It's a controllable factor which costs literally nothing, unlike registration and insurance. So why does speeding claim so many?
You arguing in a similar way to the people that say if Mike Brown didn't want to get shot, he shouldn't have been walking down the middle of the street. The problem is that all of those poor people getting tickets at a higher rate is symbolic of a larger, societal problem (poverty), in much the same way that Mike Brown's death was symbolic of racism (and also poverty too, of course).
You probably think it is because poor people speed more than non-poor people. I would guess that all of us technically speed as soon as we pull out of our drive way. The difference is these places have cops enforcing speeding laws more rigidly
Can someone explain this? Are the poor really being targeted? Why are there more ticket possibilities? (Because you could get someone for expired registration, too?)
Is this a correlation ≠ causation thing? (I.e., police are more likely to pull over a speeder with multiple violations? That doesn't mean you're targeting the poor.)
You have therefore missed the point of the article.
I frequently observe this kind of "rational" skepticism in analytical people who are studiously avoiding something uncomfortable.
So no, it's not "rational" skepticism to avoid something uncomfortable, and yes, it has everything to do with traffic safety. Maybe you missed the part of the article where the person prone to speeding tickets got arrested following an accident? It didn't say she was speeding at the time, but speeding doesn't help avoid an accident at all.
The tendency to divert uncomfortable conversations about race is one of the reasons our nation has arrived at this point. It has become a coping mechanism for us.
Again, who are you talking to? These people aren't reading your comment. You wouldn't be telling them anything new anyway. They already know that they shouldn't break traffic rules if they can't afford the fines. I'm certain it's not a problem with lack of knowledge in that area. None of us are under any illusions that it's OK to speed if you can't pay the ticket. So what's the point of saying what you said? All I can come up with is that it makes you feel superior.
The point of Internet forums is to have a discussion. It would appear we are having a discussion. ChuckMcM even linked me to an interesting-looking book. That's the point of Internet forums.
Interestingly, I wonder what has a higher value/ROI for "the system". A) A couple small tickets (worth, say, $200) that don't get paid, result in multiple missed court dates, arrest warrants, nights in jail, etc. Or B) A small ticket (worth, say, $75) that gets paid in full immediately, no court date required.
So what's the point in commenting if you don't think my post has any value? All I can come up with is that it makes you feel superior.