March 28, 2007
First Post, Introductions
Welcome to Diary of a Speed Demon. My name is Ben Strom, and I'm a National Motorists Association member and graduate student at case. I'm not a lawyer, nor do I really want to be one, and nothing here is legal advice.
First off, I want to make something clear. I believe strongly in the purpose of Law Enforcement and their dedication to the communities they serve. Without question, they have a thankless and stressful job that could probably pay better. As a Nurse I feel their altruism and dedication is admirable, and as a citizen I'm glad that they are on the streets protecting my rights.
However, traffic law and the enforcement of that law has become insane. The proliferation of both traffic lawyers and speed measurement detection & jamming devices has made it so that the poor face what amounts to an additional tax on driving. This tax is applied randomly, and often without regard to whether the individual cited was actually speeding. Hopefully over the course of maintaining this blog, I can prove the above to anyone reading it, and it is my intention to do so.
As a matter of opinion though, I think any time that any organization (the government included) has an opportunity to reduce the perceived cost of belonging to that organization, it will most likely do so. The key word being perceived, because financial resources are necessary to maintain any organization of a sufficient size. Municipal, County and State governments have found a convenient way to reduce the expense of maintaining Police departments by making them into sources of revenue through traffic enforcement. Let's do the math briefly:
A decently paid Officer should get about $50,000 a year (close to the per-capita GDP of the USA). This officer probably operates out of a Crown Victoria, and going high on the estimate, let's assume that this Crown Victoria costs about $80,000 to fully equip and maintain, and that the Officer is probably provided with benefits and equipment equal to about 25% of his pay. So that makes the total cost of adding this officer to a Police department about $140-150k for the first year. Woah! Expensive.
Now, let's look at some data. Take, say, New Zealand, a country that has 225 highway patrol officers and issued 1.1 million tickets in 2001. Now, assuming that those officers have two weeks of vacation, holidays, and only work the equivalent of 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, that equals about 20 tickets a day. 20 tickets a day, with an average cost to the fined individual of about $150 per ticket, equals about $750,000 per year. Take away even 2/3 of that in court costs and expenses (probably not the case), and you have a revenue for the state of $250,000 dollars...almost enough to afford another Officer on the streets! Assuming that the Police department and courts system is even remotely efficient, one dedicated traffic enforcement officer could potentially pay for as many as three other officers to be on patrol and keeping the streets clean of crime...and also potentially providing more revenue when there isn't much to do.
So why do I care? If I just drove the speed limit, I'd be in free and clear. Even if an officer did make a mistake and pulled me over, the money's going to a good cause, right? Also, don't people who speed get in more accidents than those who don't?
Good questions, and ones that I will address in my next series of posts, before getting into my own experiences with the law and of course, more opinion. Needless to say, the speeding ticket industry in the U.S. is roughly $7-15 billion a year, and is a convenient way for Local and State governments to afford their law enforcement without being honest with the population and just raising taxes.