Automation will drastically reduce police and city budgets | Hacker News Reader

Automation will drastically reduce police and city budgets

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19 pointsnewman8r26 comments

Fines, in my estimation, should go to central coffers -then redistributed to municipalities based on need.

Otherwise it has perverse incentives, or at least misincentivizes certain kinds of policing. On the other hand, the state should not divert funds (you know as they are wont to do with lottery monies, etc which start out as being for education, or whatever, but then get put into a general fund and the gov goes about and spends it on their hi-viz, lo-impact projects or play other 3-card Monty games with revenue.

They should literally go to anywhere that isn't a profit center. In fact, they should just go directly to the national budget. No net income for anyone.

Anything else is an incentive for abuse.

They should also have a restriction so that no one can touch that money until something like 5 years after collection.

I dislike your suggestion because the central "coffers" still distribute the money. Say they need more cops,they can still use that money.

I suggest restrictions that would allow the money ti be spent only on reparative and maintainance related needs. Broken roads,bridges,buildings,etc... Payroll ,material procurement,real estate,marketing and a few othet things should never use fine money. I believe this would improve quality of life for the people in the communities.

> Otherwise it has perverse incentives, or at least misincentivizes certain kinds of policing.

Can you give specific examples? Because I can't think of any except "enforcing traffic rules". And that's not a misincentive, it's a good incentive. And the reality I see is that enforcement of traffic rules is extremely lenient despite the profit cities could make, because it's unpopular with the car driving population.

In my impression the vast comments of the form that fines are abuse come down to: "I don't want to follow traffic safety rules, because I think they don't apply to me."

How about when traffic rules are created not for safety, but to maximize revenue? 6 years ago, San Diego finally dropped red light cameras because they were installed as a revenue generation device, not a safety device.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/watchdog/sdut-san-...

That's not exactly creating a traffic rule to maximise revenue. The traffic rule, stop on red, previously existed. This is "just" about making revenue by electing to enforce the traffic rule.

Which I have no problem with. Don't go through a red and the camera won't get you. I really cannot feel too bad about entitled drivers feeling they can sail on through because "it only just turned red".

What about yellow lights being shortened to catch drivers on reds?

There's a disconnect in your understanding.

While these cameras do catch blatant red light runners, they also trigger tickets for safe, benign, and legal behavior. It penalizes the human experience way too much and it's caused overwhelming frustration.

There's often a line that you can't cross during a red light. If your vehicle even slightly tip toes over it, even if you're not impeding a crosswalk or the intersection in any way whatsoever, you get a ticket in the mail.

Lots of people are surprised when they get a ticket for resting their front tires on this line, as it is normally permitted behavior. It does not put anyone in danger and it is reasonably interpreted as not entering the intersection. It's not as though they're fighting the law. In that way it does create "new" rules.

Sometimes you have no idea where that trigger line is because it isn't labelled. Sometimes you do know but the camera is poorly calibrated, and the line becomes invisible once more. Sometimes you go up to the same line you always do every weekday on the way to work, but today it decided to issue you a ticket.

Sometimes you're taking a legal right turn on red but have to stop midway through the turn because a person decided to start walking across the street randomly. The camera might get confused and trigger a ticket, for an action you took to obey another right-of-way law.

Sometimes you're taking a left turn on a solid green light with no arrow. You have an opening and begin to take it, but someone else runs a red light, almost t-boning you in the process. You stop very suddenly to avoid the accident. They rightfully get a ticket. But your green light turns yellow and you quickly try to make it before it's red. You don't, and so you also get a ticket for someone else's wrongdoings.

Imagine the same scenario except you didn't stop in time. Your car gets smashed and you face death in the eye. An ambulance arrives just in time and takes you to the hospital. Your job doesn't offer health insurance and you're barely living paycheck to paycheck, but thankfully the car insurance is going to cover some of your hospital bills. You're still left with a final bill that amounts to your yearly income. A couple weeks later you call someone at the hospital to haggle it down, as the internet suggested you could try to do with some success, but they won't budge. You agree to a long-term payment plan with the hospital. It cuts deep into your finances and you have to make some sacrifices. You decide to start working a second job instead of selling things off.

Meanwhile there's a letter waiting in your mailbox. A traffic camera caught a picture of your accident and an automated system mailed it to you. It's quite a graphic picture of the incident in black and white. It claims you ran a red light. You've been fined $300. Attached is a brochure about being a safe driver, which touches on the consequences of running a red light. You could kill someone and change your life forever! The website on the ticket has all kinds of information about the camera system on the front page, claiming how accurate it is and how safe it will keep people. You get a popup about a randomly selected survey asking how you like the website. You can't seem to dismiss it on any page you go to.

But anyway that's okay -- This is obviously all a misunderstanding, and with all the free time and money you have, you can go see a lawyer that will help you fight it. Maybe you can even contest it without a lawyer, you read on the internet. You think there might be an FAQ on the system's own website but you can't read it without taking the survey. It's really hard to type with the cast but you try. You write a short essay with some very poorly spelled words about how you don't like their website very much. You later learn there is no FAQ.

You start imagining what life would be like if you had tons of money in this situation. You conclude you'd probably just pay the ticket and not waste your time fighting a wrongly issued ticket.

San Diego and the Lockheed contract team determined where to put cameras based on where they thought the maximum revenue stream was, instead of danger to others. One light -- at an intersection that is frequently gridlocked because it's the most popular route out of the airport, which frequently has out of town visitors -- generated nearly 50% of the revenue from the red light systems.

It was clearly not about safety, but about selectively enforcing laws to maximize revenue. That's why the city stopped doing it.

The problem is that people start making/enforcing traffic safety rules not to improve safety but to increase revenue. Things like setting up speed traps where you're almost guaranteed to be going over a certain speed limit.

You also have messes like people getting tickets way over their ability to pay, leading to lots of issues for the driver. It's not that the driver didn't break a rule, but the best thing for society would be to _not_ throw someone in jail for the crime of not having $200 for a ticket.

Stuff like ticketing quotas also add perverse incentives for police to try and generate arrests or ticketable situations. Combined with unfortunate "benefit of the doubt" issues, you get things like police planting drugs on people to arrest them.

Think about it! Police giving themselves stuff to do by planting drugs on people during traffic stops. What sort of incentive structure leads to this?

Full disclosure: I do think lots of people complain about traffic rules for pretty selfish "I'm the only safe driver" reasons. But I do think there's also lots of real issues in this system. Both sides can be wrong!

Off the top of my head:

(1) Red light cameras which cause perverse incentives for the city to set the yellow light rotation to be shorter than the federal standard[1].

(2) Civil Asset Forfeiture[2] is used by police and prosecutors theoretically to seize funds that are "more likely than not to have been gained from the commission of a crime", but is in practice too low of a burden on the prosecution and too high of a burden on honest taxpaying citizens to defend their property (the property is guilty until proven innocent). There was a long piece in the New Yorker on the topic a few years ago.

As I remember it, 60% of the annual budget of the Sheriff's Office in one Arizona county was from seized property. Can you imagine what a Deputy in a rural county will do if they are told that there will be 60% department layoffs unless seizures rise to previous levels?

(3) I'm trying to find the thread, but someone posted on Reddit everything that is wrong with Ferguson, Missouri (and all of the other tiny cities in St Louis county). Basically the cities are revenue-starved so they end up creating speed traps and the jurisdictions are so small it's not clear when the speed limit changes. Also, the court hours are onerous and it's basically impossible to pay a fine without missing a day of work (especially difficult in blue collar areas where most work is hourly and low-skilled).

I can't find the thread, but Curbed did an article[3] that largely overlaps with the content. Basically cities end up revenue-starved (usually because they are in a race to the bottom to give away tax incentives to woo / keep large employers) so they end up nickle-and-diming their residents and frequent commuters so much that it destroys any semblance of a quality of life. They purposefully streamline the infraction side and add friction to the challenge/defense side such that it becomes a poor tax (the wealthy can afford to pay the fine and move outside the city).

[1] https://padailypost.com/2019/07/23/opinion-the-ugly-truth-ab...

[2] https://www.acluaz.org/en/legislation/reining-civil-asset-fo...

[3] https://www.curbed.com/2018/5/24/17382120/tickets-fees-fines...

Why do punitive fines go anywhere? Collect the fines and then reduce the money supply by that amount. If the fine is collected via physical currency, destroy the currency. If it is electronic, deduct the amount but don't add it back anywhere. In essence every dollar will become very slightly more valuable but so slightly that no one will have motive to push for fines to be collected for their financial gain. Would the total amount of fines collected from all punitive activities across the economy be large enough to have a significant impact on the total money supply? My guess is no, but honestly don't know.

The types of governments that are typically collecting fines on a regular basis don’t possess the authority to destroy money or lawfully affect the money supply in any meaningful capacity.

Require them to pass it up to the level where destruction of money is possible.

This is such a misunderstanding of the different interests involved it scares me.

The big problem with that idea, at least in the United States, is the States’ employees don’t actually work for the Federal government, and requiring them to pass fines collected upwards would violate the 10th Amendment. Nor is it within Congress’ enumerated powers to seize the assets of the States or compel services from each State. The States are also specifically prohibited from having their own monetary policies, and thus have no incentive to cooperate with a money destruction regime.

Fines should be a way to reduce lawbreaking, not shake down the citizenry for extra budget cash. Cities that rely on this despicable practice deserve to die on the vine.

Should, in practice, no

Here in Victoria, Australia they love advertising that cameras are here to save lives. In reality they generate $700 million in revenue for the state yearly and do jack all to stop speeding or red light running - motorists just learn where the cameras are and continue their habit.

Every couple of years the Police demand pay increases by parking and turning their lights on where cameras are located. It's fascinating to watch.

If there is one thing I would never bet on it's the reduction of police budgets.

They'll just move to outright thievery, aka civil forfeiture.

Is it just me or is this way premature. First we'd have to have a lot of self driving cars. Then they'd have to also avoid most fines. They might avoid some, but might also create some new ones. This concern is 10-15 years away at best. Housing is a far more urgent issue.

I had the same reaction. "self-driving cars will eventually be everywhere" is true, but that "eventually" is a long time away.

I've got a Tesla, and while I use the autonomous driving approximately 0% of the time, I do use the adaptive cruise control quite a bit.

It allows you to set a speed limit relative to the current speed limit, and of course override it by stomping on the accelerator.

Can't say it's had any impact at all on how often I speed. I don't really see an increase in autonmous driving will decrease tickets. After all on a busy highway running at the speed limit will cause significant traffic issues and pissed off drivers cutting you off.

> I don't really see an increase in autonmous driving will decrease tickets.

This seems like you are thinking 1-2 years from now. I'm thinking 10-20 years where the vast majority of cars will be autonomous-capable and most people won't bother wasting their valuable time driving manually, just like we don't have professional elevator operators anymore.

And FWIW, about 95% of the surface of a freeway is empty at any given time. Fully-autonomous driving allows each vehicle to safely drive closer at speeds and to use less slack during slower traffic. If anything, a human driver should thank autonomous cars for increasing traffic density while maintaining the same speed. Humans are the ones that cause lots of slack in traffic.

> pissed off drivers cutting you off

Not a wise move when fully autonomous cars are wired with cameras facing every direction and recording capability.

Then again, I can imagine the inverse effect of this article where autonomous car owners are paid a revenue-share for reporting evidence of a traffic violation (like being cut off by a pissed off human driver).

Don't worry, all the delivery trucks will end up programmed to park illegally because it's often impossible to find a legal parking space.

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