The cash cow car driver - easy prey for the panicmongers. Panics they don't want to encourage.
20240206
The car driver is an easy target for governments interested in revenue. Automobilists are generally law-abiding citizens. The threat of losing their driving privilege is a major incentive to obey the law. Governments take advantage of this fact in issuing speeding tickets. They set up radar in places where it's perfectly safe to exceed the posted speed limit. They collect big fines because they know that people will not fight back. They regulate parking and rake in money from people who are parked illegally.
The dangers of speeding are not that vast. The number of people who die in automobile accidents goes down year by year.
Police enjoy traffic duty because it's safe. Fighting illegal immigration or gangs is dangerous work! People who commit street robberies and homicides tend to have guns. Even shoplifters, carjackers, smash-and-grab folks and burglars are often armed. They have no respect for or fear of the police. My ex-wife was no doubt panicked by this murder by a carjacker on K Street a couple of blocks from her office last week.
The police would just as soon avoid dealing with such crazies. Why should they put their lives in danger? Especially when cases like George Floyd and Michael Brown demonstrate that their efforts will be vilified rather than appreciated. Search on "Derek Chauvin" for an unending stream of politically correctness justifying his imprisonment. The search engines will try not to show you this documentary about what really happened. They won't even let you question whether or not Floyd died of the drugs in his system or whether or not what Chauvin did was standard practice. For a cop, it's much easier to go after supposed speeders than real lawbreakers.
Another victimless crime that police used to love was illegal drug use. Most druggies just wanted to avoid being arrested and didn't put up too much of a fight. There were bribes to be had and cash to be confiscated. That source of police revenue has shrunk as more and more jurisdictions have decriminalized and even legalized drug use. The drug cartels operate at a level far above local police. Not much income from them, but the motorist remains out there all alone, the fattest target, the easiest to shake down.
Police have often targeted a motorist's property. They stop a car, search it and take whatever of value they find. They make the bogus claim that its origins are suspect, that it might have been obtained through crime. While legally they can't just keep the stuff, they don't have to give it back either. It somehow winds up in police pockets. Exposure of the egregious abuses of civil asset forfeiture is putting a stop to it. With yet another source gone, you can expect all the more hassle for motorists.
It used to be that a policeman would simply accept a bribe and go on his way. But a bribed cop is putting his job and generous pension at risk. In the United States and Western Europe, they don't take that risk. Instead, the unjust fines they impose are collected through the courts and the money thus extracted goes into police salaries.
The nice thing about Ukraine has been that courts weren't involved. You paid the policeman on the spot. The bribe was smaller, and both sides knew exactly what it was – a shakedown. And it worked. It was a more friendly and less costly system. Now, alas, Ukraine is going to automated enforcement via cameras. It is bound to get more expensive as income from fines appears as a line item in police budgets.
My interlocking themes in this series are the lies governments tells, the political correctness that enforces them, and the panics that they promote in order to support their lies. Political correctness is not so applicable to shaking down motorists, but lies and panics certainly are.
Police overstate the threat of unsafe driving in order to justify their speed traps. Danger on the highways was one justification for building the interstate highway system in the United States in the 1950s-70s, and that of Europe starting a decade or so later. Better highways have contributed to a lower death rate. Other contributing factors were better made, safer cars, draconian crackdowns on drinking and driving, and an aging population. The highway construction boom benefited a great many constituencies: construction, automobile manufacturing, oil and gas, government budgets, and law enforcement among them. They didn't need to generate too much panic in order to push these programs through. And give credit for improved safety to their speed traps.
Over the 25 years 1990-2015, the death rate in transportation accidents fell from 27 to 22 per 100,000 people aged 25-44 in the USA. Meanwhile, mental health-drug overdose-suicide deaths went from 41 to 107 per 100,000 people. Many of those were deaths of despair, brought on by job loss from offshoring and competition with illegal immigrants. But the powers that be get money from big pharma, recreational drugs, offshoring and massive immigration. No panic there. They continue to panic us about the dangers of unsafe driving where there is money to be made.
My interest is panickology. They used to panic us about illegal drug use in order to justify busting drug users. They don't do that anymore – you may notice that the reefer madness story has lost its appeal. Now that the government is taking its cut from harmful drugs – the ones categorized under the lovely misnomer "ethical" drugs as well as the ones that used to be illegal – they have shut up. It is people outside the system like Alex Berenson and Peter Breggins who now warn us of the dangers of drugs. They may be trying to panic us, but in their case the danger is real.
Government doesn't panic us about the dangers that come from illegal immigration, or from homelessness and the lack of sanitation and crime that the homeless bring. Instead, they strongly downplay the crimes committed by illegal immigrants and the underclass on the street. They discourage the media from reporting on them. Why? Most significantly, the down-and-outers generally vote for the leftist parties. Huge interests – churches and other nongovernment organizations – justify their existence and their salaries supporting these people. Big businesses want docile, cheap labor. Liberals living a couple of ZIP codes away can signal their virtue by voting to give other people's money to these underclasses.
In the final analysis, government, media, and the self-styled better classes of people knock themselves out letting you know that anybody who objects to turning our cities over to the impecunious, illegal and uninvited is a hardhearted racist. That's political correctness on steroids. And when it comes to events like Charlottesville, January 6 and the like, it involves pushing a considerable amount of panic-mongering.
Wrapping back to the cash-cow motorist, I am of two minds. I am sure that there are safer and more efficient ways to get people where they are going than private automobiles. I started a book a quarter-century ago predicting that by now computer-controlled on-demand jitney buses to take people when and where they wanted to go. It would be faster because there would be many fewer vehicles crowding the roads. Faster again because there would be no parking. It would be safer because there would either be professional drivers or self-driving systems. My thesis was that it would depend on transponders on board every vehicle, so that a centralized system would know exactly where every vehicle was at all times, and what was around it. It would have been far more effective than a stand-alone system like Tesla's in which the on-board computer tries to figure out what's going on by deciphering a camera image.
I am not sure that my idea was any less realistic than Elon Musk's, but I overlooked one vastly important fact. People want control of their own lives. They want their own cars. They want their freedom. With the government restricting freedoms on just about every front, the freedom to drive your car where you want is symbolically very important.
For myself, I'm happy with a bicycle. I would even put up with it having a transponder to let the automated vehicles know how to avoid hitting me. Even better would be giving bicycles free rein in bicycle lanes on the far less traveled streets. But it will never happen. No money in it.
Japanese police are probably more robust than other countries. If they were to take something away, they would not only be fired, but would also be a criminal offence.The retirement benefits accumulated year after year would be invalidated. Speeding violations are dangerous in Japan because the roads are narrow, but most people know that they won't catch you unless you exceed the speed limit by 10km/hr.
However, since the evaluation within the police department depends on how well they crack down on crimes, cases of false accusations of criminal offenses occasionally occur.
The misallocation of public safety resources away from helping the people and towards helping the elites goes back to at least the Sheriff of Nottingham enforcing poaching laws on starving peasants in illegally seized royal lands. The FBI doesn’t even make a pretense of following the law, having been in bed with the mafia from day one of Hoover’s corrupt regime. Watch “Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oVpt_I9iQQ