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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

If the cop shoots you, it won't matter what you said or didn't say.

And in TFA:

> According to ABC Action News, these affected customers ended up in handcuffs and in the back of a police car in the majority of the cases. A few people were even met with the business ends of a firearm and were taken into custody forcefully after disagreeing with police.

So with routine traffic stops, playing it cool is almost always the best bet. I've experienced scores of them, mostly for speeding, but some for reckless driving. And a couple for evading. And I've never gotten more than tickets.

One of those evading stops involved a county-wide APB :) I just said something like "Hey, I just saw "Dawn of the Dead", and got scared". Which was almost the truth, in that it was hypomania. They almost impounded the car, but eventually we all decided that it was funny.

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> So with routine traffic stops, playing it cool is almost always the best bet. I've experienced scores of them

Why do American police stop people so often? Every American here seems to have experience of being stopped and acts like it’s a super normal thing. I live in the UK and I’m don’t think I’ve ever even spoken to an on-duty police officer in my life. They don’t just cruise around stopping cars here.

> Why do American police stop people so often?

Multiple reasons, but the big one is money. There are a lot of places smaller than big cities who have massive revenue problems. Turning cops into revenue generators seems to be the preferred solution.

And then come second-order effects: private probation enforcement companies, private prisons, communications monopolies for private prisons... and they all lobby to keep and expand their pound of flesh. And you get this:

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/02/24/debtors-prison...

But hey, freest country on earth, amirite?

We haven't gone as far down the 1984 path as you have so we have still have human cops write tickets instead of using speed cameras.

It also depends a lot on your area. Where I live the cops to "real problems" ratio is pretty good. I'm basically free to go a safe and reasonable speed regardless of the speed limit. I'd have to do something really flagrant to get pulled over for it. In the wealthier cities and suburbs that the people of HN tend to live in you have many more bored cops looking for trouble where there is little to be found so they spend more time extracting revenue from motorists and making fishing stops.

But I hear about the police stopping people for things like tail lights in the US? Or in other comments people are talking about being stopped because they're driving a suspiciously cheap car in an expensive area? The police just don't seem to stop people here in the UK unless there's something seriously wrong. As I said elsewhere, I've never seen a tail light out ever, but it seems to be a common thing for normal people to be stopped for in the US?

And of course speed cameras don't bother you if you don't speed in the first place, so they don't catch people unless they're doing something wrong.

> they're driving a suspiciously cheap car in an expensive area?

This happens all the time in rich areas. It's a plain and simple fishing stop.

>I've never seen a tail light out ever,

Because your government intentionally makes vehicle ownership so financially onerous that everyone who drives a car has the resources (time more than money) to get it fixed promptly. In the US, even in poorer areas it's not common but it's not uncommon. In a 40min rush hour commute in the winter (when it's dark and you can see everyone using lights) I could probably still count on one hand the number of head lights and tail lights I see out.

> We haven't gone as far down the 1984 path as you have

> This happens all the time. It's a plain and simple fishing stop.

Oh screw off.

You can't make a good first impression on a speed camera.

Overwhelming majority of fishing stops result in a warning because the cop realizes after getting a closer look at the vehicle and its occupants and realizing that there's nothing sketchy going on. And I say this as someone who's been subject to a heck of a lot of fishing stops because I tend to check the boxes that make me worth stopping (one time I had almost an entire PD stop me over the course of a month as they rotated through the shift and location that put them where I was driving at the time I was there).

I'd much rather have laws that go fishing than robots that enforce the law to the letter 100% of the time.

> Oh screw off.

Please try not to be abusive.

> result in a warning because the cop realizes after getting a closer look at the vehicle and its occupants and realizing that there's nothing sketchy going on

If there's nothing sketchy going on... what are they getting a warning for?

> You can't make a good first impression on a speed camera... I'd much rather have laws that go fishing than robots that enforce the law to the letter 100% of the time.

I don't want people being let off because they make a good impression! That lets the police enforce laws based on their biases, such as race or gender. I'd much rather have simple factual enforcement. Either you were speeding or not.

>Please try not to be abusive.

As far as internet comments go I think it's more than a stretch to put "screw off" in the abusive bucket.

>what are they getting a warning for?

So the cop can have a paper trail proving he was awake and working.

>I don't want people being let off because they make a good impression! That lets the police enforce laws based on their biases, such as race or gender. I'd much rather have simple factual enforcement. Either you were speeding or not.

Automated enforcement of the letter of the law would instantly screw basically everyone. I don't think you understand how many letter of the law violations cops see every day and choose not to do anything about.

So me getting warnings, and my plates being in a cop's notebook / files is, to you, an acceptable price to pay for law enforcement officer productivity accountability?

>As far as internet comments go I think it's more than a stretch to put "screw off" in the abusive bucket.

But not "as far as HN comments go". The community members, posting rules/guidelines, the user moderation system, dang, etc. work to foster friendly substantive discussions. Please help this effort.

I think you're basically making a slippery slope argument. Nobody was arguing for automatic enforcement of all laws, but I think traffic laws are fine. I've never had a traffic ticket for anything ever. If you don't speed, they don't bother you.

If you're the type to drive no more than 55.00 mph on the highways posted at 55 and with prevailing speeds of 70-75 mph, you're probably doing more harm to society than help, to be honest.

I'm not sure the difference is so extreme in the UK. Our speed limit is 70 mph and most people do that or perhaps 75 mph.

> I'd much rather have laws that go fishing than robots that enforce the law to the letter 100% of the time.

This is how corruption, and racial profiling, and all manner of terrible things start.

You definitely DO want the laws enforced 100% without exception. It must be applied to those who write the law as equally as it does to everybody else. This is how laws get fixed.

>Why do American police stop people so often? Every American here seems to have experience of being stopped and acts like it’s a super normal thing.

And they also seem to think a cop pointing a gun at people they've stopped, or even shooting them for reaching into their pockets is also normal ("what did they expect?").

>I live in the UK and I’m don’t think I’ve ever even spoken to an on-duty police officer in my life. They don’t just cruise around stopping cars here.

Yeah, but you're not in the land of the "free".

What I really want to know is what's wrong with American break-lights? Often the cause for a stop seems to be 'your break-light was out' (sometimes it's implied it's a lie, other times not.) Again I've never seen a break-light out in the UK, never been stopped for a break-light, never had to replace my break-lights. What's different?

(from movies) I think it's usually the 'tail light' and it's so they can smash it when the walk by. I've never heard of a break light being out either.

> I've never heard of a break light being out either.

LED lights are slowly reducing this, but I don't think I can do my 20 minute morning commute for a week without seeing at least one car with a burned out brake light. How is it possible that you've never seen or heard of it?

Are you certain that movies reflect reality in this regard? I'm less willing than you are to believe a cop would smash a tail light, perhaps you could link me to a recent incident or something.

Yeah, that's movie-plot silliness.

In many jurisdictions the real method involves human cops making deputized dogs perform ritualized tricks near the car.

In US culture, performing this ritual grants the human cops permission to arrest people.

I don't even understand how you could easily smash a tail light. They're inside the car bodies, encased in heavy plastic, and usually made of LEDs so there's no single bulb to hit even if you could get through the plastic.

> They're inside the car bodies, encased in heavy plastic, and usually made of LEDs so there's no single bulb to hit even if you could get through the plastic.

Cops intentionally breaking tail lights is 99.999% something from Hollywood. I try and keep up to date on the various stupid abuses of power that happen at police departments throughout the country and I've never even heard of it happening. I thinks the notion of cops breaking tail lights probably predates the war on drugs (which gave them other ways to manufacture probably cause)

Nevertheless, tail lights weren't commonly LEDs until fairly recently and the styling that results in deeper housings also wasn't default until the mid 2000s. You can definitively break a tail light with the back end of a flashlight relatively easily though.

I'm sure you can imagine some jerk cop breaking a tail light on some 90s car because the person gave him lip and he can't find anything else to write a ticket for but jerk cops do all sorts of things and it's not really appropriate to use edge cases to reason about normal cases.

From what I've read, police in the UK rely more on speed cameras. But there certainly are lots of police in the US. I live in a small city, and it's rare that I don't see at least one police vehicle on a trip to the supermarket or whatever.

I experienced so many because I'm bipolar, and was taking an SSRI, which made me hypomanic, but with little affect.

There are substantial protections against unlawful search and seizure in the US constitution which are also supported by subsequent legal precedent/case law, often specifically referencing private property, dwellings, persons, etc. An arrest warrent does not necessarily allow police to go barging in to private dwellings to enforce it. Persons in vehicles were generally not explicitly referenced in the law and a slow encroachmemt on executive power has led to 100+ years of case law that eroded those protections when it comes to persons in vehicles, especially on public roadways. This has led to vehicles in public being a place where police have a lot of legal leeway and a common place for police to enforce warrants, etc. for minor violations and a common place for police to fish for possible crimes with less risk of explicitly violating a persons rights (at least in the eyes of the judiciary).

As I understand it, US culture makes it impossible for the state to build a trustable database of inhabitants, complete with addresses etc.

So if a cop sees something, he has to react immediately. They cant simply go to your home afterwards as they dont always know where it is. And gun culture makes it impossible to know when some random dude is going to shoot you, especially when pissed off or drunk. So I can understand the cop paranoia.

Strange thing with social security numbers as pseudo-id happen there too. I wonder how they know who to tax over there.

See small towns like Hampton, FL that get their funding overwhelmingly from setting up bullshit speed traps and ticketing everyone who passes through, sometimes to the point of the town existing almost entirely as a support structure for the police department: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton,_Florida

Usually it’s to enforce traffic laws, like obeying the speed limit or yielding for traffic signals. Are traffic infractions not common in the UK?

Sorry. My comments about being shot, and my outlandish experiences, were foolish.

But the point about TFA stands. "[I]n the majority of the cases", people were not arrested.

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