I don't know, I think paying your traffic tickets is about the least you can do downstream of very occasionally being caught for habitual dangerous driving behavior. Breaking the "municipal debt collection" breaks the deterrent effect of traffic tickets.

I agree that in the abstract maybe there are better things some cops could be doing, but it seems like a vaguely reasonable use of some traffic enforcement resources. It's not like this taking away from murder investigations.

There's a prisoner's dilemma defecting thing going on here, right? You'd want neighboring municipalities to enforce warrants out of Oak Park.

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tptacek 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It literally does take away from violent crime investigation! Remember, I'm not making a moral argument about the legitimacy of traffic fines. In fact, that's one of our big issues in Oak Park. I'm saying that police departments make prioritization decisions, and Flock cameras structurally undo those decisions by throwing alerts on cars (which would not otherwise have been curbed) that produce warrant arrests.

The key thing to understand is that an arrest eats half an OPPD officer's work day, so if OPPD is arresting someone, you want the juice to be worth the squeeze.

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loeg 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Your traffic cops would otherwise be participating in murder investigations? My understanding is that these are different specializations and they don't overlap.

No real objection to "the data source is bad," but I think the solution there is improve the data source rather than willful blindness.

	▲	tptacek 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I didn't say "murder investigations". We have a very small number of detectives, who do not conduct traffic stops, but the overwhelming majority of our force (and of all the police work done here) is patrol, all of which do conduct stops. We don't control this data! It's good to want things, but whether or not you think it's good that LEADS isn't good enough for real-time enforcement, it is not.

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queenkjuul 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think lots of upstanding citizens have forgotten to pay a ticket at some point (as in, I've done it, as have some other people i know, and none of us are criminals or even dangerous drivers. My ticket was for a one-day expired license plate sticker, btw). The cop doesn't even know from the license plate that the person driving is the owner of the car, and so they don't even know that the driver actually has a warrant until after they're stopped.