Yossarian wrote:If you are talking about drug users, I completely agree. Treat drug use as a health problem.
Yeah, drug users was definitely in my mind. Also I was thinking about the basic amount of law enforcement infrastructure that has to be put in place in order to handle a generally higher level of enforcement that is required by a larger amount of attempts to enforce. Example of what I mean, take red light cameras...
- Random intersection with streetlight is left alone by the cops, other than the now and then placement a cop takes to nail folks who run the red. The streetlight is causing a minimal amount of municipal infrastructure to be in 24/7 existence, just extra bulbs and a cherry picker to get up there to maintain the thing, and the bulbs/picker are shared by all the streetlights in the territory. PLUS it creates a revenue stream and creates a way for the cop to remind the public that there are reasonable rules that need to be followed in civilization. The interaction between cop and red light runner is interpersonal, face to face interaction between the people and their municipal government.
- Take that streetlight and add a red light camera. Now, in addition to the bulbs and cherry picker and light bulb storage, the streetlight+camera combo is forcing municipal infrastructure into existence in the form of additional hardware parts and storage and maintenance, and also regular servicing of the camera to download it's pictures, run down the information about the vehicles in the pictures, and put all those people through the court system with all the attendant costs to the municipality.... only to have it thrown out because there is no live witness to testify that violation X actually happened. The "background din" of the court system increases, causing a need for more clerks to handle the paperwork and more judges to handle the increased caseload. And the interpersonal face to face interaction is gone.
- Remove the camera, remove the need for a certain amount of law enforcement infrastructure, and the cops can go back to ticketing the egregious offenders that won't even bother trying to appeal, and the enforcement system itself has more time to do things right the first time. And costs have gone down, due to the loss of all that infrastructure that wasn't all that useful anyway.
In L.A., they sent out $500 tickets for running red lights. The $500 ticket wasn't able to cover the costs of the infrastructure behind the cameras. Such an non-headline worthy thing, but how much financial fraud might have been investigated if the resources that were devoted to making a red light camera company rich (because privatization means savings dontchaknow?) were instead kept in the municipal budget?
... Another parallel example of the process, from an entirely unrelated field. Some may remember a kerfuffle a few years ago about an announcement that women need not get mammograms as often as had been advised. There was a fair amount of "you don't care about the women" being tossed around, but I recall reading that the reason for the downgrade was a multi-year examination of the data of the outcomes. Basically, the detection tech had gotten good enough to detect microtumors, and so advice for more often mammograms was given. Then, after some 6ish years of data was gathered about how time and again microtumors were detected and then disappeared without any need for treatment, and some docs got around to questioning their own knee-jerk reactions, it painted a picture of how our detection technology had advanced to the point of being able to watch the body's process of ridding itself of threats.... They realized they were creating a lot of adrenaline/fear overload by trying to enforce a 'no tumor' ideology onto a population of cells that could damn well take care of themselves in the great majority of instances.
The body of the population, the body on the exam table... The microscope scrutiny of total law enforcement / the microscope of total tumor detection...
I think we will, as a whole, benefit greatly from calming the fuck down over the petty shit that isn't actually a threat. How much time did the detectives have at their command to devote to sandusky and lynn, when there was other shit crossing their desks that should have not been an issue at all? If that time could have been devoted to sandusky and lynn years ago, how many rapes might not have happened?
Times like this, when I consider these questions, I'm sorta all for rough justice. First, came the law as the townfolk declared it, and the idea of a dedicated judge and lawyers was not yet spawned.