jeff yen

Copland

This was supposed to be an entertaining story about how I had to go to traffic court, but it quickly degenerated into one of the disjointed discussions which figure largely on this page. Sandalia!

I recently had the great pleasure of appearing at traffic court in a small (to the point of nearly not existing) town in Kern County, California. Mojave is a town whose twin purposes for being appear to be to supply truck drivers with food and fuel, and to garner traffic enforcement revenue.

The town is little more than two intersections of gas stations and fast food. However, as I cruised down what -- for lack of a better term -- must be called their main drag, I was passed on both sides of the street by no less than 8 CHP cruisers. I spotted a couple others parked along the road and down side streets. Notwithstanding the strategic location of this town along the route between Las Vegas and much of California, this seemed an extraordinarily significant police presence. I theorized for a moment that possibly our benevolent government had located all manner of emergency services in Mojave, to better serve the people travelling to and from Las Vegas.

No hospitals, fire departments, or even towing garages were immediately evident. This perforce leads me to two possible conclusions, not necessarily mutually exclusive:

1) All the cops were just changing shifts, which is not unlikely -- I was there at about 8 in the morning.

2) An unusually high proportion of highway patrol is located in that part of the state, to catch what is likely a higher proportion of speeders along that barren stretch of highway.

*** RANT WARNING!! ***

This led me to reflect on the surprisingly adversarial and revenue-driven character of our traffic enforcement system. Arrest quotas are technically illegal, but everyone knows (or at least, has a deep suspicion) that the CHP and other enforcement offices have them. Police officers spend a surprising amount of time enforcing and prosecuting speeding tickets and the like, when there has been no conclusive evidence that lower speed limits save lives. That said, this is apparently a highly polarized issue, and I can find essentially no unbiased sources of information on the subject. I spent about a half hour reading a report that I thought was fairly interesting and sensible, and then I saw that it had been funded by an insurance group. Indeed, it is in the enforcement community's -- as well as the insurance corporations' -- interests to keep this state of affairs going. For both parties, the benefit is clear.

Insurance companies can charge vastly inflated rates for people with speeding convictions on record. I recalculated my insurance premium with one speeding violation, and it was 150% of the original. Extend that over a minimum three years, the length of a violation's life on your record, and the benefit to the insurance company's bottom line becomes very significant.

Governmental authorities operate with similar interests in mind, although they are less driven by greed. Law enforcement is chronically underfunded, and so they are encouraged to engage in tactics -- illegal arrest/ticket quotas, speed traps (technically illegal in non-freeway areas), and saturation arrest tactics which draw officers away from other, one would argue more important, tasks. There is even one example -- that I know of -- of authorities lowering speed limits on certain roads for no other reason than to increase enforcement revenue.

If we make the reasonable assumption that a government's job is to protect the safety and freedoms of its citizens, then it follows from the preceding that our law enforcement policy, at least as far as traffic enforcement is concerned, is badly broken. Traffic enforcement has largely become another method of taxation, as opposed to ensuring the safety of American motorists. That this alternative method of taxation is endorsed and sometimes underwritten by the insurance industry makes it even more deplorable.

Additionally, one must consider the point -- I believe valid -- that if a law immediately and habitually makes criminals out of the majority of the people under its domain, then it is perforce an unreasonable law.

Take Prohibition, for example. For a period in the early 20th century, the vast majority of urban populations in the United States were guilty of violating legislation banning alcoholic beverages that, in the words of then-president Hoover, was an "experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose." While Hoover was praising the motives behind Prohibition, the key word here is "experiment."

On top of all this, the penalties for minor traffic infractions seem severe. For myself, I think the penalty was reasonable, since I was assessed the maximum fine possible. However, most of the people I saw go up for a speeding violation were assessed the maximum (some leniency was given to those with multiple violations), and the vast majority opted for the installment plan method of payment, implying that they hadn't the means to pay the assessed fines. This suggests a system intent on punitive and financial aims, rather than rehabilitative -- a suggestion borne out by the practices of the corrections system at large. However, that is a discussion for another time.

Predictably, I can suggest few alternatives that aren't already well known. Penalties proportional to income, for one, is a measure already enacted in some countries.

Upon reflection, the issue of traffic penalties is of trivial importance, and only truly important to those unfortunates who can ill afford to pay the fines, are forced by way of penury to drive without insurance, or are otherwise barred by any number of means from fulfilling all of the legal and economic requirements of car ownership.

If you believe, however, that "the true test of any government is how it provides for its least fortunate,"* then perhaps a few aspects of our government are in need of review.

*As far as I can tell, this is a popular misquote of British author Samuel Johnson, who wrote, "A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization."