If you think authoritarianism will lead to order and peace, you're gonna have a bad time. The presence of a secret police is already causing wide scale violation of our constitutional rights.

Order and peace sounds great! But that's just road crime, why stop there? We have so many wifi enabled nodes and cameras. Lets put alpr on every Waymo and Tesla. Gait detection and face recognition on every Ring. Triangulate every cell phone down to the meter. Dump it all in a big data watershed. Let anyone with username/password query it (no MFA needed). We could even name our panopticon after some mythical all-seeing artifact, like a palantir. You won't be able to take a breath without officials knowing.

You lost me at "reestablishing order and peace"... what do you believe is happening in our cities? And how is tracking cars nationwide going to fix whatever problem you think exits?

Just curious to understand how you think vehicles are such a critical point for decreasing crime in the US?

I do agree that we have heavy crime (though HN will say it's all anecdotal and the stats show we're in a period of remarkable peace).

I just don't know that greater enforcement around vehicle use will have the outsized effect that you're claiming.

> "Massive database of vehicles" is the best hope we have for reestablishing order and peace in American cities

Have you tried electing moderate prosecutors who don't drop charges just because the habitual offender has a heartbleed sob story?

A massive database of people's travel records is the best hope we have for reestablishing morality and church attendance. Cops could proactively round up mon-attendees or those who went to a synagogue. </christofascism>

Famously, excellent Dutch record keeping was bad for jewish people in the Netherlands in May 1940.

Also, an unlicensed-plated car and your dream enforcement, my first thought was of "illegal" cases I have done include moving a vehicle to a neighboring property a couple blocks away. How strict would you like it? Should I be forced to use an expensive tow service to move an unregistered car across the street on some slow residential street?

reestablishing order and peace in American cities

False premise

Police ignore crime that's happening on the roads right now.

Drive around Kansas City sometime, particularly on the Missouri side. Tons of temporary paper license plates that are a year past expiration. Any member of law enforcement could pull the person over and enforce a penalty for it.

They just... don't. I don't know exactly why that is. Are they afraid that doing so opens them up to the chance of being shot or engaging in a high-speed pursuit? The former definitely happened in North Kansas City a few years ago (not to be confused with KC North) but having a massive network of cameras tracking license plates and how they move across town doesn't help. At the end of the day, you have to send someone a fine, and if they don't pay it and don't show up for court, you are again faced with having a police officer try to interact with them one-on-one, this time to enforce a bench warrant for their arrest.

In the meantime, you now have an absolutely massive data set of citizen movements being collected without a warrant by an increasingly authoritarian American government.

Your comment suggests that you do not spend much time in American cities. They are safer than they have been any time during my life.

You have fallen for political talking points.