alt Hacker NewsPolice 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.
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Absolutely. Turns out policing actually requires real police work.
These cameras only punish law-abiding citizens. Fake plates and out-of-date temp tags effectively render these people invisible to the ALPRs.
Yeah, this is a major problem, and it obviously is not just Kansas City. In San Francisco the useless SFPD completely stopped writing traffic tickets, gradually over the last 20 years. They were writing > 14000 per month as recently as 2014 and this was below 500 per month for years until recent reforms brought it up slightly. The problem is that the police are self-selecting members of the tinted-dodge-charger club and do not perceive traffic laws as real laws. This ties in more generally to the fact that every single individual member of law enforcement throughout the United States needs to be closely scrutinized by psychologists.
I can confirm that they are not shy about pulling over people with regular plates that have just expired, however. They’re on top of that. N = 3, 100% enforcement within a month.
But long-expired temps are everywhere. So confusing. How?