Letter just submitted to the Vancouver Sun
Has a secret decision been made by the Vancouver Police to no longer enforce traffic laws? In the past week, I have seen examples of cars doing the following: U-turns in the middle of the street and the middle of an intersection, running through stop signs, excessive speeding, and more. Unfortunately there wasn't a cop there to hand out a ticket, right? Wrong! In each of these cases, there was a police car there but they did NOTHING. To close the open season on pedestrians and bicyclists, I would wholeheartedly support an initiative whereby each officer personally receives 10% of the amount of the ticket added to their paycheque. Maybe that would incentivize them to ... wait for it ... actually enforce the law!
Robert W.
Vancouver, BC
Update: It was indeed published here.
2 comments:
Two friends of mine completely disagree with my idea to incentivize the police. Too bad for them. I think their problem is that they're looking at my idea as a "zero sum game". They think that there are 'X' number of police officers and that using them to enforce traffic will take away from other things such as property crime. I disagree.
Two simple solutions:
1. More officers could be hired from the SIGNIFICANT extra proceeds that will come from the RAMPANT traffic violations.
-OR-
2. Maybe we don't even need armed police officers to provide such enforcement. There used to be only police handing out traffic tickets. That's long changed. Why not have traffic enforcement people who give out tickets to bad drivers? They could each carry a small digital camera with video capability to capture both the infraction and the subsequent handing out of the ticket. They will get hassled no more hassle than the parking ticket people do. In fact, if the driver takes off then they could just video the car, record the license number and issue the infraction by mail, just like the red light cameras do automatically.
I disagree with using words like "incentivize".
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