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Driverless Cars Could Cripple Law Enforcement Budgets
colinneagle writes "Google's driverless cars have now combined to drive more than 700,000 miles on public roads without receiving one citation, The Atlantic reported this week. While this raises a lot of questions about who is responsible to pay for a ticket issued to a speeding autonomous car – current California law would have the person in the driver's seat responsible, while Google has said the company that designed the car should pay the fine – it also hints at a future where local and state governments will have to operate without a substantial source of revenue.
Approximately 41 million people receive speeding tickets in the U.S. every year, paying out more than $6.2 billion per year, according to statistics from the U.S. Highway Patrol published at StatisticBrain.com. That translates to an estimated $300,000 in speeding ticket revenue per U.S. police officer every year. State and local governments often lean on this source of income when they hit financial trouble. A study released in 2009 examined data over a 13-year period in North Carolina, finding a 'statistically significant correlation between a drop in local government revenue one year, and more traffic tickets the next year,' Popular Science reported. So, just as drug cops in Colorado and Washington are cutting budgets after losing revenue from asset and property seizures from marijuana arrests, state and local governments will need to account for a drastic reduction in fines from traffic violations as autonomous cars stick to the speed limit."
Approximately 41 million people receive speeding tickets in the U.S. every year, paying out more than $6.2 billion per year, according to statistics from the U.S. Highway Patrol published at StatisticBrain.com. That translates to an estimated $300,000 in speeding ticket revenue per U.S. police officer every year. State and local governments often lean on this source of income when they hit financial trouble. A study released in 2009 examined data over a 13-year period in North Carolina, finding a 'statistically significant correlation between a drop in local government revenue one year, and more traffic tickets the next year,' Popular Science reported. So, just as drug cops in Colorado and Washington are cutting budgets after losing revenue from asset and property seizures from marijuana arrests, state and local governments will need to account for a drastic reduction in fines from traffic violations as autonomous cars stick to the speed limit."
So what's the next shakedown target in this game of "citizens vs government"?
Good /GrumpyCat
At least the car will be polite to the ticketing officer....
"Gee Officer, I don't know why this thing is speeding"
Saving the common people several billions a year would send nothing but good vibrations up the economic chain. Yeah, some cops may lose their jobs, but the billions extra that people would have every year means other jobs get created elsewhere.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
The justice system and the police are primarily a revenue tool, to be unleashed as required, and controlled by factors other than the law.
And people wonder why the police are largely treated with mistrust and disdain.
If speeding tickets are just a shake down to pad out budgets, then the police are just flunkies, crooks and toll collectors.
Fuck the police.
There's no money lost here. Writing tickets didn't generate anything for the economy, other than perhaps the reduction in destruction of property. Clearly if driverless cars aren't breaking the laws, then that reduction is occurring in a much more efficient manner. Thus driverless cars are a net GAIN to the total economy, not a drain.
Less speeders means less traffic cops which means less need for traffic cops which means budget problem solved. Cops that exist to give traffic tickets will not be needed. After all, if traffic tickets pay their salary, and there are no more traffic tickets...sounds like supply and demand balancing things out just fine.
But, but what about our conflict of interest? How are we supposed to operate a law enforcement and public safety organization without making revenue collection part of enforcement? How are we going to make the system unfair if we start eliminating inherent conflicts of interest? It's totally unfair to the government, we must punish those people for not breaking the law by making them pay a fine. I mean that's what we already do in some states (like mine) to punish people who try to help the environment by driving green vehicles.
Seems to me that if enforcement actions are no longer necessary, then you won't need as big of a police force so the loss of revenue will be offset by not having to pay the salaries of all of those traffic cops. This is a non-issue.
I read the internet for the articles.
Allow the local governments to charge more for faster lanes.
Oh, wait, they already do that in some localities.
So law enforcement budgets will be lower, but the need for law enforcement will also be lower because you won't have to pay as many cops to run around patrolling the roads and writing tickets. Plus there will be fewer injuries and less property damage due to reckless driving, which means less economic waste.
If law enforcement legitimately needs more money, then raise taxes and pay for it. People keep talking like it's bad for the economy to permanently address problems because we'll have fewer jobs consisting of temporarily patching those problems. It's just another variation on the "broken window fallacy".
The car is either driverless, or it isn't. Either the car maker is responsible, or the owner is.
But, really, who the hell is going to take liability for a device which says "I'm in charge of driving, you just sit there" right up until it goes into panic mode half a second before you impact with something and says "bummer dude, you're now in charge, evade quickly, liability transferred to passenger".
Sorry, but if I'm sitting there reading my newspaper or whatever, I'm not controlling the vehicle. If I'm responsible for controlling the vehicle, then I will actually be controlling the vehicle.
There's simply no room for a sudden shift in blame to the person in the drivers seat ... that makes no sense whatsoever.
And if the car suddenly loses its marbles and mows down a bunch of schoolkids, you think the cargo/passengers suddenly own responsibility for that?
This to me has always been the point at which driverless cars kind of fall apart, determining who is really in charge, and defining what that means.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
When people are convicted of crimes, they are to be punished. Tickets are that document of infraction (crime punishable by fine). More severe punishments are misdemeanors and felonies (punishable by fines and/or free lodging at the slammer). So when governments use tickets as revenue sources, something has gone wrong in judicial process (yes, so what else new?).
mfwright@batnet.com
... but have they tested it with a black dude in the driver's seat?
The question I'd like to see answered with data to back it up is how many time are officers out handing out moving vehicle violations vs. how much money do they bring in? If they weren't out spending time/budget on writing tickets, would additional work get done, or would there be superfluous staff that could be cut? I think it's important to have a well staffed police department should trouble occur, but if they are using tickets to increase their budget I question if they are just trying to support too much overhead.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
You know through taxes.
While you're at it how about properly funding schools through taxes rather than bake sales. Actually there are a lot of things that could benefit just by being properly funded by taxes.
More and more departments are buying more and more stuff they simply don't need. More and more departments are starting up SWAT teams they don't need. I'm sorry, a town of 5,000 simply doesn't need a special weapons and tactics unit. They just don't. Studies have shown that when departments start up special units, guess what? They want to use those units. These units get paid more. Police salaries are already too high in many places. Police administration salaries are ridiculously high, some over $250,000. Admin salaries should be capped below 100k. Police salaries should be capped at well under 100k. Public servants should never be getting rich. All public service jobs should be capped.
For too long, police and cities have begun to rely on the "revenue" from tickets and parking citations. Parking I can see somewhat. But too many places have quotas that police have to meet with giving out citations rather than actually policing. All cities should require police to walk their beats for the first few years like they used to. Police have gotten away from this and as a result, the streets are worse, no one knows anyone else, and the police don't have a vested interest like they once did.
Enough of this nonsense.
So no more end-of-the-month speed traps by police departments to balance their budgets? Whatever will our police departments do for money?
Wait, I've gotten speeding tickets before and I've always had to write the check to the city/county courthouse, not the police department.
Taxing EVs makes perfect sense. They still need roads to be built and maintained.
Adding an enforcement fee for a car that doesn't need enforcement is just absurd. If the number of tickets being written drops because there are no more speeding cars and reckless drivers, then just reduce the size of the police force. You don't need patrol cops any more and that's a good thing. Instead of employing people as patrol cops, they can instead work as artists or scientists or something that makes the world better instead of being a necessary evil.
Would it pull over if it sees the blinking lights / siren behind it?
Could you spoof it with a bunch of blinking xmas lights on the side of the road?
$6.2 gigabucks/year is $300K/officer? That means 20,667 officers for the whole country. Methinks one or more numbers here is fudge.
Why should a car that won't be committing traffic infractions pay a fee for traffic infractions? That doesn't even come close to making sense. That's like saying everyone who puts on a seat belt should pay an extra fee to make up for "lost revenue" from fewer tickets for not wearing a seat belt.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
The problem is "law enforcement" agencies using enforcement as revenue streams for cities and states.
This puts law enforcement against the very people they are supposed to serve and protect.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
The vast majority of road wear is from heavy trucks, mostly bringing stuff like groceries that we all need. The only reason we have a gas tax is because it's taxable. That's the only government process for deciding what to tax: is it reasonably practical to tax X? Yes? Then we're just arguing about the rate.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If the system is funded in large part by criminalizing a behavior so consistent and common that it can fund life-long full time salaries with benefits and pensions, then it's a system worth dismantling. Defending the need to criminalize otherwise law abiding adults for budgetary purposes is obscenely poor governing. If we, as a society, deem the crime important enough to stop, and it's rampant enough to be an epidemic, make an earnest effort to stop the crime. If it's really not that big of a deal, change the laws to reflect that. Riding the sweet spot where it's not enough of a penalty, consistently enough, to really dissuade people from doing it, yet it's enough to be profitable for the people exacting the fines, is unethically exploitative. If your government department needs funding, then get it through taxes, not extortion.
Adding an enforcement fee for a car that doesn't need enforcement is just absurd.
The way I read it, is its not an enforcement fee for a car that doesn't need enforcement. Its a $1000 tax on (I think) all cars to support local police municipal revenues so they can continue to pursue criminals where there isn't a net payoff at the end... like nearly all of them.
Right now, it appears some of the revenue from traffic fines pays for the detectives investigating theft, arson, fraud, missing persons, murder, hunting with out a license, public urination, vandalism, and so on.
Take away the traffic fines, and sure, you don't need nearly as much traffic enforcement, but they would also face a budget crisis within the rest of the department even if they let go of all the excess 'traffic enforcement' officers. Clearly that money to pay for regular police work is still going to have to come from somewhere. Raising local taxes is the obvious solution, whether its a tax-per-vehicle, or it gets added into property taxes, or whatever... its going to have to happen.
That's actually a good point: since the occupants would have zero control over their vehicle, it would be trivial for LEOs to set up drive-through nudie scanners, redirect all traffic through them, then single out the cars that "appear to be carrying contraband" and put them on a separate track for an "enhanced" search.
The fact that such a thing would be mind-bendingly unconstitutional will probably never even cross their minds, so long as the practice remains profitable.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Driverless car pulled over by driverless cop car and given a ticket.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
It's not just about the money. Traffic stops are a major tool that police use in law enforcement. If they think someone is suspicious, they look for a traffic violation as an excuse to pull them over and investigate. Likewise, normal traffic stops give officers a chance to notice suspicious activity.
Someone should dig up the numbers for the percentage of arrests that begin with a traffic stop.
I'll Google that for me:
http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHT...
While there may not be solid data nationally, at least in this one area, traffic stops account for about a third of all arrests.
The figures are nonsense. There are 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S.
Whoever did the sums appears to have confused agencies with police officers, since that gives $344,444 per agency.
There are about 461,000 sworn officers in local police departments, giving a revenue per officer of $13,449. Local police officers only make up 2/3 of the total number of officers in the US, so the actual revenue per officer is even lower.
If we dropped human drivers, speed limits could be increased in many cases (sometimes the design of the road itself is the limiting factor, and new roads would assume driverless conditions).
is 20,773 cops NATIONWIDE, or 415 cops per state....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
There does not seem to be any such agency or law enforcement group.
Which have nothing to do with cars. So why tax cars? Why not a general tax or a property tax or such?
Putting a $1,000 fee for transportation will really hurt a lot of poor people.
The main problem with driverless cars isn't the idea itself, but the fact that governments and corporations will inevitably ruin them with privacy-invading nonsense, as well as proprietary software and DRM. Some newer cars practically have to be taken to certain 'certified' mechanics in order to be fixed.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
The car is either autonomous, or it isn't. If it isn't autonomous, I'll drive it myself and be in control the whole time.
Semi-autonomous means we'll give you the illusion you're not in control, but we might randomly shift blame to you.
Either the car is 100% in control, or the driver is 100% in control. There is no gray area in which both are in control. There is no transition from "car in charge" to "human in charge".
It has to be all or nothing. Semi-autonomous is a huge bit of weaseling to say "we're mostly in control, but you're responsible". It can't be a fluid thing where once you've dozed off or started doing something related to not driving the car where all of a sudden you are in control and must react.
If you really think liability is going to be determined by what firmware the car is running, and who is responsible for updating it ... then I will tell you right now, driverless cars will forever be in the domain of a gimmick, but for which the actual laws aren't inadequate. And, if the laws aren't adequate, you either need to fix all of the laws, or basically say you can't have driverless cars.
Me, I'd refuse to take any responsibility for the vehicle, and wouldn't sit in an operators seat. Either the car has it and can handle it, or it bloody well can't.
And, until someone settles the legal questions of "what happens when I'm sleeping in my backseat with nobody to interact with the car", being in a legal gray area more or less nullifies anything supposedly useful about a "semi autonomous car".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Speeding being dangerous is a commonly believed myth. Speeding vehicles are safer in many respects, especially since other vehicles that notice a speeding vehicle do not question what the intent of said vehicle is since the actions being taken by it are obvious without any guesswork. Speeding drivers also have to pay closer attention to their driving task since they know they have less reaction time and have to keep a hawk's eye out for the cops.
What is dangerous is what I refer to as "steering wheel attendants." People who are NOT giving the necessary attention to the driving task are very dangerous and are the biggest cause of traffic collisions by far. Speeding people have a lot of pressure to watch what they're doing; excessively casual drivers think they can fuck around because driving isn't exciting or interesting and seems to happen quite slowly...until an unexpected reaction is needed, and that's when the metal scrapes and the SUVs roll.
Put your damn makeup and phone away and go 90 MPH in a 65 zone. You'll be shocked how much adrenaline and paranoia increase your attention span for what's going on around you.
Which usually goes back to local law enforcement, or at least a portion of that, but not in all states. There are cities here in Missouri where the local governments made up most of the revenue from traffic violations. A couple cities were famous for this until the state passed some laws prohibiting them from doing this.
Nebraska, I believe, collects all traffic fines revenue and then doles that money out to the schools instead of police departments. Doesn't matter if it's a local cop or a state trooper who pulls you over and issues you the citation, the money goes to the state to prevent what occurred in Missouri.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Two other reasons for a gas tax are because it's less regressive than a sales tax, and because it provides the proper incentive not to consume more fuel than necessary (i.e., drive less or drive a more fuel-efficient vehicle). Driving less reduces the need for fewer lane-miles of road, and that saves us all even more money.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
I can fully get behind this. So how do we get cops to actually start prosecuting the bad drivers instead of just sitting by the side of the road and nabbing people who are driving safely but exceeding a semi-arbitrary number?
The wear from driving on roads is non-linear with vehicle weight. It really is the trucks that matter.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Wait just a moment here... Where does all our current funding go?
I pay roughly 45% of my annual income in Taxes (split between state and federal), this is not including sales tax, fuel tax, property tax, and registration. With all of that added in (some via estimate) it is pretty easy to get that number to between 50 and 55%. I will never agree to a tax increase, ever. What we have here is a very poorly run situation, one where police are required to "tax" people from breaking silly laws and distracting the police from doing what they should be doing, stopping real crime.
In a world where it takes an hour or more for police to come to my home after it has been robbed, yet you can drive around and see 10 speed traps, there is something wrong. Tickets should not be used as a source of income for the police departments, there should be no incentive for them to harass what are otherwise law abiding, tax paying citizens. "There is a person across town who is being murdered, and here is the officer writing a citation to someone who has never committed a real crime."
42 69 6C 6C 20 47 61 74 65 73 20 69 73 20 61 20 77 68 6F 72 65 21
While I can't quite say tailpipe emissions are a complete non-issue, there are only a handful of cities in the US where they even matter a little. ULEV and better cars really don't matter unless the air above your city never circulates with the outside world (which does actually happen in a couple of places).
But that's all a dodge. Forcing other people to drive less has been core to leftwing philosophy for decades now. It all about tribal identification, not about anything practical. (Which is why the Tesla throws the right for a spin: it's a really nice American car, but then it's a hippie electric car that might as well come with a "Coexist" bumpersticker, such cognitive dissonance!)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I would totally agree with this except for one issue. Many rural drivers spend A LOT of time on dirt/unimproved/farm roads. These roads are NOT maintained by any federal or state agency. The only way to fairly evaluate miles driven on roads that SHOULD be taxed is a GPS tracker... but then you're handing the government the keys to the castle if you are giving them a GPS record of all your travels. So as it stands I'm not really happy with either way.
The reality is that government programs in general subsidize many things that it's truly unfair to ask the general population to pay for, but we do. Some examples: Finding red diesel is sometimes too difficult for machine operators, so they just buy regular diesel at the higher tax rate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... Tire retailers charge a disposal fee on a set of tires, even if you re-purpose the tire for something else (tire swing, front bumper cover, etc). Oil change shops are required to charge an oil disposal fee, even if you bring your own oil (think high performance synthetics), even though when you buy said oil, the same tax was charged. Similarly, if you change your own oil and burn it in a waste oil heater, you still have paid the disposal tax. The government really gives you no recourse for this nickel and dime over-taxing, it's just accepted that there is some give and take in the system.
I think the real rub here is that while people generally want to do good for the environment, nothing motivates like money. If you feel you are actually saving money by driving a hybrid/EV, way more people will commit. If you tax the snot out of it, then all the sudden going green doesn't look so good. This type of conflict of interest is what brings out the conspiracy theorists... claiming the oil industry is behind the taxation of EVs and such.
As an aside, and partially to steer this back towards the issue of driverless cars, I personally feel that all of this driverless car tech still has a long way to go. Referring to the story about driverless cars http://hardware.slashdot.org/s..., I often wonder how well google's cars would stack up to a decent snowstorm here in Utah. Deciding when to pull over and wait for a plow truck to follow is something that takes feel... something that must be built into driverless cars before I see them being widely adopted.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Such as the San Joaquin Valley, where dirty air costs up to $1,600 per person per year in medical costs and lost work.
That's the opposite of the right wing, which supports road and fuel subsidies and zoning and density limits that force people to drive more.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
The wear from driving on roads is non-linear with vehicle weight. It really is the trucks that matter.
If trucks paid their fair share of the road maintenance, we'd probably see a lot fewer trucks on the interstates as freight shifted to trains (which are far more efficient and would be more cost-effective, if the trucking industry weren't heavily subsidized in the form of roads; railroads have to maintain their own track). Eventually we might even see long haul freight move off of the roads entirely, which would allow us to build cheaper interstates since they wouldn't have to withstand the constant pounding of heavy vehicles.
The net result would be a reduction in freight charges and less tax money devoted to road construction, making the economy as a whole more efficient. We should do it.
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That $300k number is just absurd. $6.2 billion in fines, divided by $300k per police officer, would imply only 21,000 police officers. There are 34,500 officers in New York City ALONE. Wikipedia puts the total at around 930k sworn officers with arrest powers (765k state/local, plus 44k part-time, plus 120k federal).
Even using only fulltime, and ignoring the Federal officers, would get you to about $8k, not $300k.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Why should it be paid out of income taxes? You're assuming that's the right way, but do you have any basis for that assumption?
I'm fine with government being responsible for building roads, and to some extent road-building costs should be broadly distributed, including to non-users because they benefit from having the option of using the roads even if they don't. But it also makes perfect sense for those that incur the heaviest costs to pay the bulk of them, not for any punitive reasons but for economic efficiency. The economy as a whole is healthier if money is invested in the form of infrastructure that has the highest returns, and by aligning costs with usage we drive transportation to the most efficient means.
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Thats a nice thought. If only the police went after real criminals.
There has been an ongoing battle to get police to recover stolen cell phones. These devices can be tracked right to the person holding it, in the case of most smart phones. However, as these devices generally don't fall into a felony theft, the overwhelming response is to ignore it. The problem with this mentality is in general these are proven violent criminals taking property by force.
Furthermore, there are areas in most major cities that go unpoliced because cops dare not go in except in force. There are a myriad of reasons for this, but the point is it happens.
Lastly, Id like to add, I have personally witnessed the injustice of the current police mentality. I was attacked by a person with a brick. They hit me in the head twice and stole my phone and wallet. I was seriously lucky to be alive after the assault. The police investigating the crime first bumped the charges from attempted manslaughter (which it was) to aggravated assault, so they could call off the search for my assailant. They then preceded to interrogate me and accuse me of trying to buy drugs to coerce the name of the attacker out of me. They believed I knew my assailant and flat out said they couldn't do anything else unless I gave them his name. Not only were they accusatory of someone who just had their face bashed in, but I gave them the location where my credit card was used after stolen, and my cell phone records, as the thief had been texting with my phone. They did no further investigation.
You, sir, live in a very idealistic world.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.