Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers