Brilliant idea! This is definitely not going to wreck communities and will not be misused. The proposal should include a band to be worn around one's arm, then the resemblance to soviet era civilian helpers will be complete.
There's a part of me that would love to see this for cars parked in bike lanes. Bikes already get almost no infrastructure compared to driving or walking, having what little there is so often blocked by the more privileged party adds insult to injury. Not to mention the danger it puts cyclists into where they have to move onto the road where drivers may not be expecting bikes (because, y'know, there's a bike lane on the street).
Of course I realize that this could easily be abused, and you'd instantly get a lot of irate drivers calling for volunteers giving tickets to cyclists who blow through red lights, and it's tricky where exactly you'd want to draw a line there on citizen enforcement.
It seems like a sociologically simpler option may be soon within reach, though: once we have fully self-driving cars, you could commission a few parking enforcement bots that would tirelessly hand out tickets, in a more or less unbiased manner, all day and night long!
Parking tickets are much more reasonable to delegate than a moving violation.
You don't have to stop the violator, because they're usually not present, and you can leave the ticket on the vehicle.
The circumstances that lead to a finding of violation are subject to less dispute. Cyclist claims light was green, citizen enforcer claims light was red, is harder to prove vs parker says time was 5:30 and citizen enforcer says time was 4:30. Some parking tickets are more sensitive to location -- if the vehicle is very near the boundary between acceptable and not acceptable, perhaps an escalation to a sworn officer is in order, but parking in a red zone / parking in a bike lane / parking in disabled without a visible permit is usually clear cut.
It isn't, but the problem I see is this: With so much power there should be a requirement of proof. No problem for parked cars, just take a picture. And for cyclists going through a red light? An always-on camera? Without proof I do see an increased potential for irate "enforcers" to take it out on someone. I tend to think that those who are going to volunteer are going to be a self-selecting subset of the population who take "law & order" more seriously and react more strongly to violations.
Wasn't talking about a particular infraction specifically, just in general giving citizens police-ish powers seems open to abuse. For example, it gives you something that you can hold over someone's head/blackmail them with, "gimme X or I'll submit this ticket". There's also the possibility of lying in various forms (e.g. photoshop or otherwise fake a picture to submit).
These problems exist to some extent with professionals too, but it's easier to work on the trust angle with a small pool of salaried people that presumably want to keep their jobs for a long time, as opposed to a large pool of random citizens for whom this is a side gig or volunteer effort.
yes, I wasn't sure of the tesla cable either, because they all have buttons on them. You press the button and charging comes to a stop and the cable unlocks. I don't know if the car key has to be in range for this to happen, or if it works for anyone who presses the button.
There's already significant (and hard to fathom) backlash against electric car owners "getting free gas" at some of these charging stations. Electric car owners aren't nearly as sympathetic a victim set as handicapped.
Couple that with gpm's sibling comment and I think it's too ripe for abuse. (I hate getting ICEd out of a charging spot as much as anyone, but I'm not sure that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks here.)
I don't know the right terminology, but maybe it's a "power" thing.
For instance, if it's two people at the same power level, it gets complicated. If it's someone at a high power level defending someone at a lower power level, it's ok.
So defending handicapped people, or kids, or puppies is ok.
I've heard stories of people breaking a car window to get a kid or puppy out, and that's pretty much universally accepted.
But defending other people at the same level as yourself might be a harder sell.
I remember reading that the difference between police and citizens is that police can give out misdemeanor tickets.
Also, When I was living there, I heard it's an easy way for the municipality to make more money. Might not be the reason, but those were the rumors in the Third Ward/Museum District neighborhood.
This reminds me of the 1990 novel 'Earth' by Dan Brin, which featured a near-future populace that all wear the equivalent of Google Glass, and use it to self-police everything they see. Like an open source version of a police state.
Not saying it's a good thing, but I feel like it's inevitable with the ubiquity of cameras.
Just imagine how effective boycotts will be. You just look at the grocery store shelf, and you automagically see which foods you can buy. They'll be able to give tickets on cars much easier as well. Just have AI's pour over everyone's monday video after hours, and get that ticket for parking in the handicapped spot in your mail on wednesday.
Most of the impact will be far more intimate though. Bartenders' glasses will just say: "Do Not Serve" when they look at a person. (Automatically keeping track of how many drinks each person is getting.) Women and men at bars will be able to just look at each other, and it will say "Sex Assault Risk", "Has Kids" or "Violent Crime Conviction" or whatever.
And that's just connecting the glasses to the public databases. They would also be connected to the small private data repositories updated by a person's close friend group. Imagine the information overlays there. Everything from "Has Girlfriend", to "STD Reported", to "Puts Out", to "Small Penis".
I can imagine life becoming almost an open book in the far future.
>and get that ticket for parking in the handicapped spot in your mail on wednesday. //
Lol, I think your age might be showing? Surely you get the charge auto-deducted from your account.
That way you can get auto-fined by the bank for having insufficient 'ShelbyvilleCryptoCoin' to pay. Then get auto-fined for getting an unauthorised over-draft, then auto-charged by the government for financial irregularity, then auto-fired by work for "bringing disrepute on the company". Then your 'worker car privelege' gets rescinded and you get picked up by a robocop, citizen, before you even finish your commute.
First your wife knows is an automated message saying she no longer owns the house as it's been sold to fund your trip to a prison colony on Rigel Prime ...
I thought I was using as much imagination as possible coming up with just my likely scenarios. Yours are more Sci-Fi, but there is an uneasy feeling that maybe some of these "auto reporting" type things could actually happen. Likely not to the extent you indicate in your post, but I wonder if they may in the future just auto deduct tickets and such from your bank accounts?
Precisely this is being done, today, in China. A facial recognition AI keeps track of your location and activities. If you jaywalk, it immediately deducts money from your bank account.
Rigel Prime, as the name suggests is prime real estate, you aren't going to send scum of the earth ticket dodgers to somewhere as nice as that.
I also like the fact that in this future we send prisoners to different solar systems, but still haven't sorted out self driving cars. Have you not heard Musk? We're getting full self driving next year!
Perhaps, but if I were governor of Rigel Prime I'd be selling tickets for the chance to be one of the first settlers. Criminal would mess up that image some what.
Its like universities and prisons. Both have cheap labour available, but the phd students both want to be there, and are paying to be there, thus universities are more profitable than prisons.
Police are supposed to be citizens on patrol. How about having the existing police follow this short list, while we are being innovative;
>To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
>To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
>To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
>To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
>To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
>To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
>To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
>To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary, of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
>To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.
As a minority I'm conflicted. Many urban areas have tensions between minorities and police, thousands of people face police harassment every year over minor infractions.
On the other hand, as services like Nextdoor illustrate, many neighbors have an inherent fear and discrimination against their minority neighbors, and can show the same type of overreacting behavior as the police.. I guess I'd rather have enforcement from individuals without license to kill.
It's a very important point - we can influence and hold responsible police through democratic procedures, for example measure racial bias and implement de-biasing measures, but there is no accountability for the mob. Which is why we have the police in the first place.
In theory. However, as recent events have shown, the police and the whole justice system becomes an institution that protects their own, including things like prosecutors declining to bring strong cases against police abuse since they work together on other cases. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that it's more complicated than one being good and one being bad.
> police harassment every year over minor infractions.
I'm confused by this phrase. do you think that minor infractions shouldn't be enforced at all? is it "harassment" anytime someone faces a consequence for violating the law?
When looking at the major police brutality cases over the past few years you will notice that there is a disproportionate amount of force used by police relative to the threat.
Eric Garner was accused of selling illegal cigarettes, was this a crime? Yes. Should he been put in a choke hold and held down by multiple officers despite being clearly subdued and repeatedly saying that he could not breathe? No. Sandra Bland was killed over a parking ticket. Recently, in Phoenix, a young family was threaten horribly because the daughter "shoplifted" a doll without the parents knowledge.
There is a clear pattern of disproportionate force used in relation to the actual activity being prosecuted.
The cases you cited aren't harassment, they are brutality and excessive force. I'm asking how minor infractions should be enforced, if at all, so that they are simply enforcement and not harassment.
It's harassment if undue attention is payed to the infractions of a specific group over society as a whole.
For example, if my office had a policy that everybody should wipe down the microwave after using it, it wouldn't be a problem if that rule was enforced across the board.
But if there was someone in the office who hid behind a potted plant and watched specifically for me to microwave my food so they could catch me in the act, and if I noticed that they seemed to only care about my food and no one else's, and if I noticed that even when other office members did the same thing next to me that I was still the only person who got in trouble -- at a certain point it would be reasonable for me to assume that this was personal, and not just about the microwave.
When I see phrases like this used, I always assume the view of "harassment" comes from an unequal enforcement on these minor infractions. For example, minorities getting prosecuted more often for infractions than non-minorities would.
Minor infractions should definitely (always) be enforced, but an argument could be made that they're unequally enforced currently, which might be interpreted/manifest as harassment against some.
So how would equal enforcement work? Should officers deliberately overlooked speeding or parking enforcement because their app tells them they've reached the monthly limit for the number of minorities cited for those infractions? How is that possibly fair to those minorities who live in those communities? "Whelp, everyone's double parked in front of the fire hydrant again till the first of the month. Sucks I can't use the street for another week"
who's to say they aren't currently doing that? That's what I'm wondering. Are there metrics for this or not? If there are, then the ridiculous scenario I contrived above is one solution. If there aren't metrics, then why is anyone assuming the worst?
This is a straw man and you know it. The line between police harassment and brutality is very thin. All marginalized communities are asking for is equal treatment under the law.
I consider this a bad faith argument so I’ll just leave you with this. Just yesterday the Supreme Court ruled against a prosecutor who repeatedly ruled out black people from jury selection, it was found this prosecutor on average asked white jurors 11 questions and black jurors ~25, this is just one of the many examples of unequal treatment under the law that criminal justice reformers are advocating against. It sounds like you need to do some reading, so I’ll recommend The Color of Law.
the bad faith arguments are the ones that claim that minorities should get free passes to break the law. And the straw-man arguments are the ones that cite single examples of officer/judicial misconduct and ascribe that to the hundreds of thousands of men and women in criminal justice. What if someone cited a handful of examples of minorities acting badly as representative of the entire population? Tell me about the faith of that argument.
> It sounds like you need to do some reading
you are no in no position to recommend me reading when you evade the most basic questions about the central premise of your argument.
As long as they don't have a gun and have no ability to kill (plus the seeming ability to be absolved of responsibility so easily) I feel it would be an improvement. That what makes it potentially different than Zimmerman for example. If they can kill then I agree, there's no improvement and it's potentially worse.
I’d love this. We have people parking in the fire lanes of stores, anywhere they feel in a parking lot (make up your own spot, the lines are just suggestions), parking on sidewalks and in front yards. Even parking in the streets when parking is not allowed, backing up traffic.
It’s just chaos. Local police are underfunded so they are understaffed and are too busy to enforce code or parking violations. And nobody pays their parking tickets anymore anyway. You have to rack up 20+ before they will put a boot on your car.
Many cities have laws against parking on lawns. Even if the owner is OK with it (or is parking on their own lawn), the neighbors might not be for property value reasons. There's also the problem of vehicle oil leeching into the soil:
Many condos/townhome developments in the US have "homeowners associations" (HOAs) which often empower your neighbors to do precisely that -- enforce parking and other rules within the bounds of the development.
Speaking from personal experience, while it's private property and legally allowed, and despite the HOA having good intentions in theory, this leads to an attitude of distrust amongst neighbors, people weaponizing petty complaints or viewing their neighbors as "informers", and/or a cabal being vocal, passive-aggressive complainers about everything.
A better solution would be farming this out to a private unaffiliated company -- although by no means perfect, would prevent the detrimental effects on quality of community.
The obvious implication of farming it out would be that instead of simply being beholden to your neighbors, you would concentrate power in whoever or whatever group is paying the firm. That seems strictly worse to me.
On the HOA note I lived in a couple. Both times a small club of elderly women with nothing to do during the day would walk the neighborhood multiple times per day and enforce every single rule for every neighbor that they didn't like, which was nearly everyone. Car 13" from the curb? Citation. Shrubbery not trimmed? Citation. Visiting relative's car parked in driveway more than 3 nights in a row? Citation. Guest parking on street overnight? Citation. Watering your lawn not enough, too much, or during the wrong hours? Citation, citation, citation. Some tomcat or stray dog in the neighborhood pooped in your flowerbed and you didn't even notice it and thus didn't remove it? Citation. Fence paint peeling? Citation. Repainted the fence the same color as before without getting written approval from the HOA architectural committee, which was never even established? Citation. Got the committee established and got written permission to paint the same color as before but painted your fence a slightly different color of grey from the neighbors' since theirs have faded over the years? Citation. Unapproved lawn buddha statue in the backyard where no one can see it? Citation. American flag in a flag holder on the post next to the front door? Citation.
These types see themselves as defenders of law and order, protectors of good, and take pride in that not a single infraction on any day anywhere goes without a citation. They know all, and see all, and disapprove of all.
And the HOA management association loves them because they bring in tens of thousands of additional revenue per month, and even enables them to confiscate a few houses now and then should the homeowner contest the charges and refuse.
I would never ever ever ever live in an HOA controlled area again.
Farming it out to a private company would be worse given the potential perverse incentives. We already see this in things like private prisons lobbying against more lenient drug sentencing.
In fairness, we already do this when we allow police to enforce the law. To be honest, police are people too. They are every bit as irrational as the rest of us. I'm sure they hold just as many prejudices as I do. (Maybe even the same prejudices that I do?)
Police would, at least, have more training though. So there's that.
And people have to adhere to the law, but sometimes they don't.
Again, police are people. Sure they're supposed to follow the rules. But sometimes they don't.
What makes police better is that they at least have the training. So they have the knowledge of how to do it right. Whether or not they do it right in fact is an entirely separate issue.
Having the citizens police each other, spy on each other is a characteristic of totalitarian regimes, notably present in both communist Eastern Germany and Nazi Germany. A fundamental part of democracy is to trust a citizen by default - not just with voting, but with behaving in general. Before police and courts come into play there needs to be a little leeway, for people to act, make mistakes, see their actions conflicting with the interest of others, to correct themselves etc.
Fundamentally, people should be put in a cooperative environment; having a significant part of the population be in "cop mode", looking for offenses, would be very harmful for society.
> people should be put in a cooperative environment
yes. but, a case can be made that someone who parks in a spot reserved for people with disabilities, or parks their car in the middle of a bike lane is disrupting and damaging the cooperative environment. furthermore, in the US the presence of guns and people willing to use guns means that confronting such a person directly is significantly riskier than it would be in some other, truly civilized, country.
mobike and other bike/scooter/whatever sharing apps already turn users into police already. One is encouraged to report a bike that has been parked in an out of reach place, such as in someone's private backyard. I'm quite upset myself when I'm following the map for the only available bike nearby only to find out that it's obviously inside someone's apartment, so I'm torn about my feelings - i don't want to turn into an unpaid vigilante for some Chinese company, but I'm also pretty mad at the assholes who do this and would rather they not get away with it so easily!
Similar program is in use in UAE for years. Anyone can use police app to snap a photo of illegally parked car.
Specially trained police staff review hundreds of photos per day and issue tickets in one click. Far quicker, safer, easier approach.
If enough people had driving cameras, and if insurance is mandatory, I guess individuals could report dangerous driving to insurance companies, and cause increased insurance premiums for dangerous or reckless drivers. Which is weird because then insurance companies become the police.
I wish we could report video to the police for dangerous driving... The police waste money enforcing rules that are only loosely correlated with preventing danger. Why not use the strongest signal possible - actual dangerous driving or near misses etc.
To avoid the "granny reporting everything" problem and avoid the "anti-social" problem, only allow three submissions per year?
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Of course I realize that this could easily be abused, and you'd instantly get a lot of irate drivers calling for volunteers giving tickets to cyclists who blow through red lights, and it's tricky where exactly you'd want to draw a line there on citizen enforcement.
It seems like a sociologically simpler option may be soon within reach, though: once we have fully self-driving cars, you could commission a few parking enforcement bots that would tirelessly hand out tickets, in a more or less unbiased manner, all day and night long!
You don't have to stop the violator, because they're usually not present, and you can leave the ticket on the vehicle.
The circumstances that lead to a finding of violation are subject to less dispute. Cyclist claims light was green, citizen enforcer claims light was red, is harder to prove vs parker says time was 5:30 and citizen enforcer says time was 4:30. Some parking tickets are more sensitive to location -- if the vehicle is very near the boundary between acceptable and not acceptable, perhaps an escalation to a sworn officer is in order, but parking in a red zone / parking in a bike lane / parking in disabled without a visible permit is usually clear cut.
These problems exist to some extent with professionals too, but it's easier to work on the trust angle with a small pool of salaried people that presumably want to keep their jobs for a long time, as opposed to a large pool of random citizens for whom this is a side gig or volunteer effort.
Take a 4 hour class, and you can write tickets for cars parked illegally in handicap spots.
If so, why?
Just the easiest thing to spot and not misdiagnose, I guess?
- non-EV cars in EV charging spots
- EVs not hooked up to charge in EV charging spots
"Charging spots are for charging" seems very reasonable.
I think teslas have the ability to lock the cable in the charging port.
There's an aftermarket $60 for $1 worth of plastic lock system: https://evannex.com/products/capturepro-charging-lock-for-te...
Couple that with gpm's sibling comment and I think it's too ripe for abuse. (I hate getting ICEd out of a charging spot as much as anyone, but I'm not sure that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks here.)
For instance, if it's two people at the same power level, it gets complicated. If it's someone at a high power level defending someone at a lower power level, it's ok.
So defending handicapped people, or kids, or puppies is ok.
I've heard stories of people breaking a car window to get a kid or puppy out, and that's pretty much universally accepted.
But defending other people at the same level as yourself might be a harder sell.
I remember reading that the difference between police and citizens is that police can give out misdemeanor tickets.
Not saying it's a good thing, but I feel like it's inevitable with the ubiquity of cameras.
Just imagine how effective boycotts will be. You just look at the grocery store shelf, and you automagically see which foods you can buy. They'll be able to give tickets on cars much easier as well. Just have AI's pour over everyone's monday video after hours, and get that ticket for parking in the handicapped spot in your mail on wednesday.
Most of the impact will be far more intimate though. Bartenders' glasses will just say: "Do Not Serve" when they look at a person. (Automatically keeping track of how many drinks each person is getting.) Women and men at bars will be able to just look at each other, and it will say "Sex Assault Risk", "Has Kids" or "Violent Crime Conviction" or whatever.
And that's just connecting the glasses to the public databases. They would also be connected to the small private data repositories updated by a person's close friend group. Imagine the information overlays there. Everything from "Has Girlfriend", to "STD Reported", to "Puts Out", to "Small Penis".
I can imagine life becoming almost an open book in the far future.
Lol, I think your age might be showing? Surely you get the charge auto-deducted from your account.
That way you can get auto-fined by the bank for having insufficient 'ShelbyvilleCryptoCoin' to pay. Then get auto-fined for getting an unauthorised over-draft, then auto-charged by the government for financial irregularity, then auto-fired by work for "bringing disrepute on the company". Then your 'worker car privelege' gets rescinded and you get picked up by a robocop, citizen, before you even finish your commute.
First your wife knows is an automated message saying she no longer owns the house as it's been sold to fund your trip to a prison colony on Rigel Prime ...
Or, maybe I watched too much dystopian sci-fi.
I thought I was using as much imagination as possible coming up with just my likely scenarios. Yours are more Sci-Fi, but there is an uneasy feeling that maybe some of these "auto reporting" type things could actually happen. Likely not to the extent you indicate in your post, but I wonder if they may in the future just auto deduct tickets and such from your bank accounts?
I also like the fact that in this future we send prisoners to different solar systems, but still haven't sorted out self driving cars. Have you not heard Musk? We're getting full self driving next year!
Also, there might be dangerous places you don't want to risk damaging a nice robot in!
Its like universities and prisons. Both have cheap labour available, but the phd students both want to be there, and are paying to be there, thus universities are more profitable than prisons.
>To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
>To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
>To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
>To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
>To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
>To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
>To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
>To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary, of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
>To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.
On the other hand, as services like Nextdoor illustrate, many neighbors have an inherent fear and discrimination against their minority neighbors, and can show the same type of overreacting behavior as the police.. I guess I'd rather have enforcement from individuals without license to kill.
I'm confused by this phrase. do you think that minor infractions shouldn't be enforced at all? is it "harassment" anytime someone faces a consequence for violating the law?
Eric Garner was accused of selling illegal cigarettes, was this a crime? Yes. Should he been put in a choke hold and held down by multiple officers despite being clearly subdued and repeatedly saying that he could not breathe? No. Sandra Bland was killed over a parking ticket. Recently, in Phoenix, a young family was threaten horribly because the daughter "shoplifted" a doll without the parents knowledge.
There is a clear pattern of disproportionate force used in relation to the actual activity being prosecuted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_Cit...
For example, if my office had a policy that everybody should wipe down the microwave after using it, it wouldn't be a problem if that rule was enforced across the board.
But if there was someone in the office who hid behind a potted plant and watched specifically for me to microwave my food so they could catch me in the act, and if I noticed that they seemed to only care about my food and no one else's, and if I noticed that even when other office members did the same thing next to me that I was still the only person who got in trouble -- at a certain point it would be reasonable for me to assume that this was personal, and not just about the microwave.
Minor infractions should definitely (always) be enforced, but an argument could be made that they're unequally enforced currently, which might be interpreted/manifest as harassment against some.
> It sounds like you need to do some reading
you are no in no position to recommend me reading when you evade the most basic questions about the central premise of your argument.
It’s just chaos. Local police are underfunded so they are understaffed and are too busy to enforce code or parking violations. And nobody pays their parking tickets anymore anyway. You have to rack up 20+ before they will put a boot on your car.
https://www.ksla.com/story/7065953/shreveport-council-approv...
https://www.modbee.com/news/article108667517.html
Speaking from personal experience, while it's private property and legally allowed, and despite the HOA having good intentions in theory, this leads to an attitude of distrust amongst neighbors, people weaponizing petty complaints or viewing their neighbors as "informers", and/or a cabal being vocal, passive-aggressive complainers about everything.
A better solution would be farming this out to a private unaffiliated company -- although by no means perfect, would prevent the detrimental effects on quality of community.
These types see themselves as defenders of law and order, protectors of good, and take pride in that not a single infraction on any day anywhere goes without a citation. They know all, and see all, and disapprove of all.
And the HOA management association loves them because they bring in tens of thousands of additional revenue per month, and even enables them to confiscate a few houses now and then should the homeowner contest the charges and refuse.
I would never ever ever ever live in an HOA controlled area again.
I think one of the key ideas was "checks and balances"
Police would, at least, have more training though. So there's that.
Again, police are people. Sure they're supposed to follow the rules. But sometimes they don't.
What makes police better is that they at least have the training. So they have the knowledge of how to do it right. Whether or not they do it right in fact is an entirely separate issue.
Fundamentally, people should be put in a cooperative environment; having a significant part of the population be in "cop mode", looking for offenses, would be very harmful for society.
yes. but, a case can be made that someone who parks in a spot reserved for people with disabilities, or parks their car in the middle of a bike lane is disrupting and damaging the cooperative environment. furthermore, in the US the presence of guns and people willing to use guns means that confronting such a person directly is significantly riskier than it would be in some other, truly civilized, country.
I wish we could report video to the police for dangerous driving... The police waste money enforcing rules that are only loosely correlated with preventing danger. Why not use the strongest signal possible - actual dangerous driving or near misses etc.
To avoid the "granny reporting everything" problem and avoid the "anti-social" problem, only allow three submissions per year?