Neighbors Helping Officers
As if to prove my point (in a sense), the USA Today published a news article today describing how police officers in various locales are using volunteer citizens to help enforce speed limit bans.
Obviously, this kind of assistance helps enforce speed limits, and may help save lives. However, that technology is allowing for more perfect law enforcement and an enforcement rate far higher than conceivable when speed limits were passed. Such perfect enforcement distorts the original balance of enforcement rates, mortality rates, economic impacts, and convenience considered when the speed limits were passed. Perhaps maximum speed limits need to be reconsidered as a result.
More importantly, if such practices give private citizens the notion that helping police in something mundane like highway safety is their duty, then their prying into the lives of their neighbors is a modest natural progression of that mindset, eating away at our notions of privacy.
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Yes, community policing scares the crap out of anybody who has read 1984 or lived through an oppressive regime. But how is having a deputized local enforce the law any different than having a police officer do it? Is not the officer just as much a part of the community as the citizen?
I’d rather have a “professional” pull me over than have my neighbor flag me down. The community censure of a self-policing society may lead to a greater cost of breaking the law. There’s a shame factor that comes into play, there’s less of an us versus them mentality too.
I’m sure too that having community enforcement would also lead to looser laws. There’s a road in my home town that went in several years ago–a straight shot through former farm land, with long merge lanes and ramps that made it look like an interstate highway. People went nuts speeding on it, regularly topping out at 70, 15 mph more than the posted 55 speed limit. The local police loved the chance to play State Trooper and busted people left and right for speeding. After a couple years, the town council made an exception to state law and bumped the speed limit up to 65 mph to better reflect the community standard.
Community standards as the basis for law is something I support. It’s the basis for our laws anyway, right? What is law other than codified case law? In days of yore, law was defined via the will of the Moot, or the prevailing community standard. So what’s wrong with having local enforcement of laws? Why would you turn this into a police state? Do you really think so lowly of your peers? Would they not act rationally and with appropriate restraint?
Any official law enforcement enforcing speed limits is law enforcement first, citizen of the community second. There are oaths and police ethics and codes of conduct and all that jazz that is certainly not going to be as rigorous for volunteers as it would be for officers.
I’m all for community standards in issues such as speeding. The codification, though, is much stickier than simply gaging the proper community standard. I would bet that there was a fair amount of screaming at the police at town hall meetings for enforcing the 55 mph speed limit, with a lot of anger directed towards a town government awash in traffic ticket revenue. And shouldn’t the goal of public policy be to reduce such righteous rage?