I'm in LA and I'm convinced that there aren't enough police to actually police the city so they rotate (like literally a clock rotating around the center) and police different areas for a week x 12 zones. I see cops for 1 week a quarter and the rest of the time you can be all Mad Max without consequences but for that 1 week you have to be on your best behavior.
I live near a small town that has no money. They hire cheap newbie cops for minimum wage straight out of cop school. They make them do speed traps on this little road that clips the edge of the town limits. The speed limit goes 45-35-25 in quick succession so it's very easy to speed accidentally if you just coast through. They also have a section of highway where the speed limit drops from 55 to 45 for a bit. A lawyer told me this town is the only place he actually goes the speed limit. He also told me if you appeal a speeding ticket it'll usually just disappear because the town has no money to pay prosecutors to spend all day in the real courthouse the next city over.
I went to college in a college town that had a lower speed area around the town. Everyone knew about the slowdown, but cops would wait there to catch non-locals who didn't know it was coming.
One day, after moving to the other side of the country, I was talking to a guy from China who was visiting the US for an event. I mentioned where I went to college, and he says "I know that place...the cops pulled me over there when the speed limit changed!"
Guy came from the other side of the planet, and that's what he remembered our town for, the dang speed trap.
During COVID there was a famous trial and successful prosecution of a white police officer who killed a man by knelling on his throat. And three other officers who stood there doing nothing about it.
Lets be clear, had there be no video. There would be zero convictions.
The "not bothered to start again" isn't by coincidence.
And then the same County Attorney's office which conducted that successful prosecution said they would no longer pursue charges that arise from simple traffic stops, so the entire PD decided they would no longer do any traffic stops. Now, you can run a red light right in front of squad car and they won't do shit.
Not really lol. There's still reckless drivers around. However, I've found the craziest drivers in the US to be from NYC, Florida, Atlanta Georgia, and California. Florida might be the craziest of them all, though.
Modern policing is largely reactionary in most places. If reports of crime or complaints of traffic violations tick up in an area they’ll deploy more officers there. Then, since there’s more police presence, numbers tick back down and they get sent to the next area of their jurisdiction that’s going in the wrong direction.
Clinton era put more cops out on streets and crime dropped. Freakonomics Levitt & Dunbar studied the data and concluded more cops explained small part of the crime drop, much less than expected.
(Looked further, much of the drop was from 18 years after Roe v Wade. Don’t argue with me, this was their conclusion.)
Same. 911 EMS, and I know a lot of cops and interact with many almost every shift, and they've told me as much. Not that I need them to, our large metro PD regularly posts on their social media that they're increasing patrols/presence in X area because Y happened, especially around incidents that get a lot of press. Maybe not the case in smaller areas/departments, but when you've got millions of people to police by 1-2 agencies, you have to be selective with resources.
Not to mention that with any kind of policing. The people in charge are more concerned about looks than results. You can't reliably predict where crimes will occur especially since an officer presence may deter a crime from happening in their vicinity. So police are either sent where there is already something reported, or where crime rates jump whenever there isnt a solid officer presence.
What Im saying is police from other Jurisdictions getting sent to a different area outside of their jurisdiction as in effort to deter crime in a different area, especially municipalities. But if what you were saying the have increased patrol in a particular area instead of their jurisdiction than that is true, and I likely misunderstood what the commenter meant
Yes I was speaking inside of their jurisdiction. I live in a large metro area and from one end of the county to the other can be a 45-60 min drive encompassing both the largest city and suburbs, most of which is covered by a combined city-county police force (and the county sheriff, but that’s a very small agency here) so deployment of resources is always changing based on what’s going on, and most of those changes are based on things that have already happened. I work EMS (1 agency for the entire county) and we struggle with the same deployment issues.
Leave it to a cop to not understand the situation, argue adamantly for the wrong point and, once realizing they were actually wrong, not even correct objectively false statements.
Yeah policing in most cities is staffed for bare minimum crime suppression and the judges just let career criminals out on repeat.
Nothing will change until judges are made personally accountable for endangering the public by being soft on people with 40+ arrests and multiple felony convictions.
There are not enough police to patrol all of LA all of the time but they don’t rotate, there are just not a lot per division. LA is so huge, and unlike most major cities, it is extremely spred out.
that is indeed the case. despite all the "defund narrative", US cities usually have far less manpower than their European counterpart. this means every individual US police officer is tasked with more work, more responsibilities, and longer hours than their European counterparts. the answer has never been less funding, but an expansion of the police force and their capabilities (social services) where everyone gets to work less hours.
LA population 3.9 million
Police - 9000
Ratio 433:1
Berlin population 3.7 million
Police - 27000
Ratio 137:1
When we lived in NO, my dad’s car was stolen. Police couldn’t find it. A retired cop found it, parked the wrong direction 2 blocks from a police station. ‘65 Mustang
When I lived in Houston it seemed like they had nearly zero focus on traffic enforcement. Very cool when they eat up 1/3 of the city's budget. They did the whole "quiet quitting" after the George Floyd protests and calls to reduce their budget. Then their budget not only didn't get cut, it was increased a lot, but they had become accustomed to not doing their jobs and just continued that way.
Are you kidding? People wanted to defund the police because the police suck at their jobs and refuse to improve. LAPD budget is over $3B a year. It's funding is ridiculously high and they basically scam the taxpayer through overtime loopholes and lawsuit settlements.
This is actually very true. LAPD is understaffed, I think our area only has 1-2 cars for patrol for the entire district. And they get pulled to another district if they’re needed there.
The police largely gave up on traffic enforcement in Texas. Only DPS, our state highway patrol does anything now. Around COVID and the defund the police movement, it’s like they just gave up on trying.
Yeah…settle down…no reason to call the guy dumb and blast him with the all caps…he made a statement suggesting an answer, which was based on his own observations.
Your copaganda isn't true in the most liberal left coast cities, much less conservative Texas. Find me one major Texas police agency whose 2026 budget isnt the highest in agency history, forget about even compared to 2019 before the defund movement took off in large
That would make sense if the police were actually defunded but they weren’t, at least not in my area. The only thing they did was move the 911 center outside of the department.
The vast majority of jurisdictions have a 'presence' requirement for moving violations where the citing officer must have been personally present when the violation occurred. THAT is why most police would never do this - they know it's a waste of time and the ticket will get thrown out.
If the cop was also a motorcyclist, he would - but other than that I think the cop would begrudgingly watch the video and then tell the motorcyclist that even though he had the right of way, he should be more careful and should've just let the car merge to avoid an accident.
when i was 19, the police in my city gave me a ticket after i slid on about 4 inches of unplowed snow, going 35mph on a 75mph speed limit highway. it was at 3am, so i didn’t hit any other cars, only the barrier, and i wasn’t in any lanes blocking traffic. he gave me a $200 ticket for driving “unsafe for conditions”.
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u/Ancient_Guidance_461 12h ago
Yeah this would never happen where I live. They don't even care about traffic laws.