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Criminal Charges Against Speed Trap Tweeter
martinlp writes "A Twitter account named Pigspotter is making big news in South Africa. The traffic authorities in Johannesburg are taking legal action against Pigspotter, an individual who is tweeting up-to-the-minute information about speed traps in and around the city. He has recently stopped, stating that his Blackberry is going in for repairs, but it may be out of fear of getting prosecuted. The police claim he must be getting inside information and suspect that disgruntled traffic officers may be involved. There is also speculation that it is more than one individual that is tweeting."
South Africa has the highest homicide rate in the world.
It's good to know that the police are concentrating on fast driving.
No doubt an increasingly broke and hopeless government has learned how to make more money. Err... I mean, save lives.
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On aspect of TFA struck me as awfully peculiar:
One thing is for certain, though: PigSpotter has deeply offended senior members of the JMPD. Some openly accused him of racism yesterday.
"This guy's use of words such as 'pigs' and 'bacon rashers' is alarming because you find that most of these officers are black and he is white. Why is nobody talking about this?" a police source said yesterday.
Is this a South Africanism, the notion of 'pig' being a racial epithet? As an American, 'pig' is a not at all uncommon term for the police; less polite perhaps than 'po-po' or 'Five Oh', but certainly nothing racial. Or is this merely a vague attempt to villify the guy, since the police know they're not exactly going to get the citizenry rallying behind them on this?
It's not about safety. It's about money. Speed traps are designed to trick people into a spot where revenue generation occurs.
There's a spot I know of ~100 miles north of me where a highway marked at 65 off-ramps onto another highway marked at 60. The change in speed isn't marked at the top of the ramp, however, but 3 miles down the road instead. Local sheriffs LOVE to sit at the top of the hill and watch for people doing 65-70, who don't know about the speed change, and then cite them tickets.
Likewise, my city has a bunch of redlight cameras. And non-coincidentally, right after installing them, someone noticed they could issue a lot more fines if they shortened the yellow light time, despite every available study showing that safety is improved with longer yellow times. They are now getting sued and it's going up to the state supreme court because they shortened the things to .25 seconds below the state required timing in order to beef up ticket revenue, AND they made them "civil fines" rather than actual ticket infractions to try to get around a state law prohibiting cities from getting more than a certain percentage of their funding from traffic fines (a law, ironically enough, passed because of certain little shit-pot one-stoplight towns that were running traffic scams left and right and getting 80-90% of their revenue from issuing insane tickets to out-of-towners).
Of course, the major problem here is that police - pretty much all of them - are corrupt. They start them on traffic duty, set a ticket quota, tell them to issue tickets by hook or by crook. If they don't meet quota, they get their income screwed with, they don't get a chance at overtime hours, or they get lousy performance reviews. By the time they graduate from issuing traffic tickets any semblance of honor, integrity, or respect for the general population has long ago been trained out of them in favor of the "fuck it, ticket them, cuff them, they're all guilty of something anyways" attitude.
Show me an honest cop today, and I'll show you a flying pig doing cartwheels next to a unicorn.
"Speed traps are set up in spots where assholes like you drive balls to the wall every fucking day."
No, they're set up ONLY at places where there's lots of revenue to be made. I mean, they've literally stopped running red light cameras on intersections because "it's not generating enough revenue". The LAST thing they care about is keeping the public safe. You cannot install a redlight or speed camera under the premise of "keeping things safe" and ethically remove it with the answer of "it's not generating revenue".
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
This is just a visibility bias. Do you remember the last 10 officers who didn't give you a ticket? But you do remember those who did. There are many honest cops, but they are doing their job and not screwing with citizens so the citizens don't even notice them.
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Among other things, it says that traffic fine quotas are explicitly forbidden in most jurisdictions (USA).
And who the fuck is ever going to catch them doing it? The police?
No, they have "spoken but unwritten" quotas. All the law forbids is actually writing a quota down. It doesn't forbid the local government making a budget based on an expected yearly dollar-amount in fines, and then holding the police department responsible for either making quota or having their budget cut. Nor does it forbid them from writing the cops up for "insufficient zeal in traffic enforcement" (actual words they use on the reviews) for failing to meet the unwritten quota.
Again, I ask - who's going to report them or enforce it. The police? Yeah right - protest a quota policy and watch how fast no police department will ever hire you again, because you don't play ball with the corrupt policies. Anyone honest enough to not write fraudulent tickets is never going to move up the ladder, only the dirty ones ever get promoted.
But those "honest" cops KNOW some of their co-workers are not honest cops, they all know of cases where a colleague fudged an arrest report or claimed that a driver crossed the white line when they didn;t actually, because they had a hunch that the driver was not legitotherwise but had no probable cause to stop them, etc., etc., ALL cops know of these things happening from time to time, yet don't arrest them or report the cops to supervisors or testify on behalf of the other cops' victims.
So there are no honest cops.
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I'll just add, before someone accuses me of a sort of bias, saying I'm just a leadfoot who wants to speed without consqeuence... BZZZT, wrong!
I don't drive. I never drive. I have never driven nor owned a car.
The reason? I am disabled and can't.
Why am I disabled? Because when I was a teenager crossing the street as a pedestrian I was struck by a speeding pickup truck driver.
So I think I can reasonably claim that I have no particular bias in favor of traffic scofflaws.
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What you got to remember is that the world is filled with people with very small penisses who can only think of the world as them vs the state and everyone else.
They think their car is a source of income for the state when even the simplest look at the figures will show that cars COST the state far more then they pay in road taxes and such things. This in itself is not a problem. Society needs roads and transport but if you start to base your political outlook on a basic misconception (road taxes meet the costs of road construction and maintenance) it all goes wrong. Because then you start thinking that public transport, school and medical facilities must be paid for by their users as well. And not by your traffic fines.
Even if traffic fines were a serious source of income, as in not just meeting the costs of police but deliviring more! then who cares? What do I care for a tax for assholes. Don't be an asshole and you are not taxed.
But as you see from the majority of reactions, a lot of people are assholes and come up with bizarre explanations of why they should be allowed to speed.
It has been proven time and time again that if everybody drove the same speed, as indicated by people who are smarter then you, traffic would flow a lot more smoothly. The ultimate example was given a few years ago in a simulation with cars crossing each other on a busy level intersection with no trouble whatsoever.
The problem with speeding is NOT wether you can or cannot handle it, but if everyone else on the same road can. Considering cars are the biggest killer out there, it seems clear that people can't.
But don't worry, the police are all corrupt, you can drive 50 miles over the speed limit and when you kill someone you just shrug it off as an accident.
Because nobody is reponsible for their own actions and should never face the consequences. Oh and if someone dares to slam their car door in front of your house, the swat team should be called out and a speedbump the height of everest installed to slow those demons down.
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Provide me the evidence. Just because you and a bunch of other people believe it is true, doesn't make it true. If it was really happening to any great extent, there would be evidence. Someone, somewhere would be blowing the whistle. (And I don't believe that all cops are corrupt, any more than I believe that all Americans are god fearing.)
>>>Do you remember the last 10 officers who didn't give you a ticket?
Yes I do, because I was surprised they did not ticket me. (I speed a lot and in 99% of cases I deserve it.) You made a false assumption here. As for the grandparent post I agree that Speed Laws are about making money. Accidents are not caused by fast driving (500,000 miles and zero accidents for me).
Accidents are caused by lane changes where one driver misjudged and hit another car. i.e. Zig-zagging i.e. recklessness. Nobody has ever proved that speeding, by itself, caused accidents. Look at the low rate of accidents in places like Montana where 85-90 mph is the norm. Speeding is not what causes accidents. Driver error/recklessness does.
So basically reducing the speed limit, even as low as 35 on an interstate, will not magically end crashes.
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How come we never see them speak up when another cop is under indictment for brutality? You would think a criminal would be a criminal, but if they wear a badge then they're somehow exempt. Any cop who can stand by silently while another cop takes away basic human rights is just as guilty.
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