We Are All Criminals – or – Why I Hate Traffic Cops
There's an unspoken truth in most law: we are persecuting the minority. Now to be fair, we aren't persecuting a minority because their skin is a different color or they call their deity by a different name, we're only persecuting those minorities which are genuinely dangerous to the majority - it's a purely utilitarian thing.
For example: it's not so much that killing someone is a universally terrible thing, death happens all the time in the animal kingdom - some species kill each other during mating and we consider it normal and acceptable that they do so, but most humans don't. In 2010, there were 14,748 murders in the United States, a nation of 308,745,538 people. Assuming one perpetrator per murder, that means that 0.0048% of Americans committed murder in 2010. I think it's safe to say they were the exception, not the rule. So there's a mathematically provable statistic for the science books: Murder - acceptable for mantids, not acceptable for homo sapiens.
The statistics for other crimes are less clear: It's not reasonable to assume one robber per burglary, for example, so the 2,159,878 Americans who were burglarized last year were probably not burglarized by exactly 2,159,878 burglars - even if they were those burglars would account for a scant ~0.7% of the U.S. Population.
As a matter of fact, if you add up all of the crimes from the various categories - violent, property, murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft and vehicle theft, you still arrive at a final figure of 10,329,135 truly awful crimes in 2010. If each had one perpetrator we'd be talking about 3.3% of the population.
Now I'd like to show you a little diagram.
The nerdy among you will recognize this as a bell curve. The nerdier among you will correct the nerdy with the term "normal distribution" and might even note that there are vertical lines drawn at each standard deviation above and below the mean. The nerdiest among you will know that I stole this image from Wikimedia Commons. What does it have to do with crime, you might ask? Easy.
First let's assume that how acceptable a given act is to polite society falls within a normal distribution. That big dark-blue area in the middle, encompassing about two-thirds of all possible actions is what is considered perfectly normal behavior: nothing in this area will raise an eyebrow at all. This is the stuff we all do and observe others doing every day - tying our shoes, eating breakfast, etc. To the left and right of this area is a somewhat lighter-blue section encompassing about a quarter (13.6% + 13.6% = 27.2% to be precise) of all behaviors. This is stuff that some might find risque but no one is going to really freak out over: green spiked hair, a "f*ck you" t-shirt, etc. These areas combined account for 95.4% of all behavior, so it's not unreasonable to sya that the remaining 4.6% is the stuff that gets you arrested. Since we targeted about 3.3% of the population in violent crime and theft, that leaves about 1.3% for everything else, which seems pretty reasonable to me.
Where am I going with all these numbers? Over 100,000 people a day (about 112 thousand) receive a speeding ticket in the United States. That's just speeding tickets - no parking tickets, no DUIs, just speeding. Now granted some of those tickets are going to be for driving crazy fast and doing stupid things, but at some point they start calling that behavior "reckless driving" which, again, isn't part of the above statistic.
Note from the author: Now let me be crystal clear: I think traffic police need to exist. If you are driving while intoxicated, driving recklessly or exceedingly aggressively I think that some official body needs to exist to police that kind of behavior - but in these crimes the numbers are in my favor! About the same number of people are arrested each year for DUI as for aggravated assault - which we've already shown is adequately rare as to qualify as unacceptable behavior.
The 112,000 or so tickets given each day add up to over 41 million tickets per year - that's 13% of the populace! Between 1 in 5 and 1 in 7 American citizens will be ticketed for speeding this year, and that's not accounting for children or those who otherwise don't drive. About 20% of the U.S. is below legal driving age so even if we say that ALL of the remaining 80% (246,998,430 approximately) of Americans drive a car regularly (they don't) then that means 16.6% of Americans of driving age are ticketed every year.
But speeding is dangerous, right? This must be one of those things where the public at large must be protected from themselves, right? Well, even if you believe in such things, there's no evidence that speed limits actually save lives. There are even studies indicating that some roads in Montana were safer before they had speed limits created and enforced. The speed limit assumes a level of stupidity that the average person does not possess. Most people, it seems, choose a speed that feels safe to drive with full knowledge of their equipment, abilities and the current road conditions - and they stay under that speed. Apparently, however, some people that would drive 45 when the weather was clear and 25 when it rains will drive 45 when it rains if a sign tells them they can.
In the beginning, the problem with speed limits - and thus, the problem with traffic enforcement - was simply naivete. Most lawmakers aren't very good scientists, and most very good scientists don't have much to do with lawmakers; many traffic laws are, quite simply, based on assumptions, guesses or bad science. Traffic safety engineers and other scientists have, time and time again, come up with potentially effective safety strategies. They have done so in a scientific community which requires peer review and verification prior to acceptance of a standard. They know that the best policies mesh with observed human nature and properly collected evidence. They're also entirely ignored.
Why would a group like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) ignore an entire community of dedicated scientists in favor of something which not only doesn't work, but sometimes makes things worse? Because at some point it transitioned from actual science into big business. The average speeding ticket costs the ticketed driver about $150 - multiply that by 41 million and you get 6.15 billion dollars per year from speeding tickets alone. Over 95% will simply pay the fine without contest. The other 5% usually get their cases dismissed; why? Because as much as 50% of the time, the ticketing officer fails to appear at the trial, which is typically grounds for dismissal.
It's not just big business for the government either: When you get a speeding ticket in America, your state-mandated auto insurance costs rise. It takes about three years for your premiums to get back to normal and in that time the average American will pay an additional $900 in insurance costs - another 36.9 billion dollars in total. No wonder insurance companies like to promote the (apparently false) idea that speeding is a deadly serious crime which requires enforcement. If we do all the math, we discover that the average driver in America is losing $257.25 per year to a system that, quite likely, isn't actually saving anyone from anything.
More importantly than the financial details is the rate of occurrence - 16.6% per year. That's way higher than the 4.6% we should expect if the behavior is really unacceptable. That's also only an annual statistic - the number of Americans who will be ticketed within their lifetime is much closer to 100%... Realistically, 4.6%of Americans probably do drive at unacceptably high speeds on occasion, and these folks should be ticketed - but under the name "reckless driving" since that's a far more accurate depiction of their behavior.
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November 22nd, 2011 - 01:36
And for the record, no, I’m not a bitter driver complaining about a recent ticket. I actually haven’t had a ticket in years and if you do the math my rate is somewhat below 24.5% – I just think it’s crazy to criminalize something that practically everyone does, especially when it’s completely ineffective.
November 22nd, 2011 - 02:42
This is both geeky and cool! Did you by any chance read the similar exploration of child safety seats in the Freakonomics 2nd book? It was a similar story – knee-jerk laws are created by policy makers, that then create a big industry with vested interests in selling car seats, and this creates a situation where no crash-test centre will do an effective study on car seats because then they’ll be ostracized by the car manufacturing/seat manufacturing companies! Kind of crazy…
November 22nd, 2011 - 03:48
An excellent article! Perhaps you ought to write a followup article on how the minority (the ones at the far end ie 3 standard deviation) are the ones that cajole, make that coerce, the rest of the population to their benefit.
November 22nd, 2011 - 04:07
“The 112,000 or so tickets given each day add up to over 41 million tickets per year – that’s 19.5% of the populous! Between 1 in 5 and 1 in 6 American citizens will be ticketed for speeding this year”
I suspect you should probably apply your previous argument that the burglary stats are very likely to imply more than 1 burglary per event – I strongly suspect that those 41 million tickets didn’t actually go to 41 million different individuals.
(I manage to keep my personal rate of speeding ticket acquisition down to 1 every 2 or 3 years, but I have friends who average _much_ higher than that…)
November 22nd, 2011 - 06:18
An unrealistic independence assumption, well said (although I agree with the fundamental tenet of the article)
November 22nd, 2011 - 04:15
I think you misquoted the census figures for the population of the US by 100 million. Might want to fix that. :)
November 22nd, 2011 - 11:58
Good catch! The 2 has been made into a 3. Thanks!
November 22nd, 2011 - 04:19
Great article, not a bitter driver either, I received one speeding ticket in 10 years driving. It also occurred to me that speeding tickets aren’t about safety at all, the government doesn’t care that much about safety as it does about money. Where I live in Belgium, they try to hide their speeding cameras and paint them gray, so you won’t see them and when you do, people stomp their brakes as hard as they can. In contrast to the Netherlands, they paint them fluorescent yellow and place them in plain sight, so it has an immediate effect, not after 2 weeks when you receive the ticket. Here, they couldn’t care less about safety.
November 22nd, 2011 - 04:32
Someone’s gotten one too many speeding tickets :)
November 22nd, 2011 - 05:50
As usual, the Europeans are way ahead:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_space
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,448747,00.html
November 22nd, 2011 - 06:05
I have an admittedly anecdotal point to add:
Last year I moved from California to Thailand. Where I live now, there is effectively zero traffic policing. There are frequent police roadblocks, but for obvious reasons these are ineffective against most moving violations.
My point: traffic here is nowhere near as dangerous as you might think. People drive quite a bit slower than on an equivalent road in the US. The accidents I’ve seen are almost all due to poorly designed infrastructure: U-turns on busy 6-lane highways, major intercity highways with no dedicated passing lane, etc…
Yes, there are maniacs here too, but a funny thing happens when they go unpoliced: people start watching their own backs a little more carefully.
Food for thought, anyway.
November 22nd, 2011 - 06:38
Can’t agree more with this article. Thank you for writing it.
I have been annoyed with people driving at 100 KPH on the left most lanes on the highway, while even the cops would drive at 120. The challenge now becomes – is the cop on the road observing 100 as the speed limit or is comfortable with 120 or is it 140?
If would also be worth to do a compare with Germany – where they have autobahns with no speed limit, to validate if speed limits don’t make roads any safer. Agreed that its different social settings, and driving culture — but at the core, no one in the government seems to recognize that ticketing is a business not a safety measure.
November 22nd, 2011 - 06:59
Do not agree. If everyone actually drove and that was their only activity during their drive, then I would agree; but everyone knows that is not true. People do a myriad of things they shouldn’t when driving. Couple that with high speed and possible environmental factors and you have a recipe for disaster. Best thing I learned in the Marines: there is not such thing as an accident, ever.
November 22nd, 2011 - 07:34
I think you missed the point.. Nobody is suggesting we all start driving faster.
The suggestion is that:
A) People will drive at a speed they feel comfortable at, given the conditions like road quality, weather and other distractions they might be subjecting themselves to.
B) People will driver *faster* than they feel comfortable at in bad conditions purely because the sign tells them so.
C) Every road has been designed to safe at X speed. That X, it turns out, is also the speed most people who drive to what feels comfortable will drive. Reducing the limit below the design speed of the road only serves to increase the danger as the speed difference between vehicles increases. (Via one of the linked articles, but suggested here)
November 22nd, 2011 - 07:07
I think you left out one important reason for enforcing speed limits – fuel economy. Usually the limit is set so cars burn less fuel. If people drive faster, they pay more for gas and their cars produce more CO2.
November 22nd, 2011 - 07:37
Personally, I disagree with fuel economy (of this specific kinda) being mandated in law.
Require the manufactures to increase fuel economy of their cars, provide better public transport service, etc these are valid ways IMHO to mandate fuel economy.
November 22nd, 2011 - 16:06
I disagree. I drive to work every day on a State Route with a posted speed limit of 40 MPH. Based on my Tachometer and my “car statistics thingy”, I would get double the mileage at either 35 or 45 MPH. Really every car is going to be different based on the number of gears and things so the only standard is 55 MPH. Does everybody really commute on a freeway at 55 MPH? I can’t tell you the last time I saw a freeway at commute time that was moving at 55 MPH. The fuel economy and the speed limit argument makes little sense for most people except for during a Road Trip or for 18-wheeler drivers and other “edge cases”.
November 22nd, 2011 - 07:27
I like this argument, and I also suspect our current state of policing and ticketing is ridiculous. There is one thing I would like you to have covered; how would less policing effect reckless driving? It seems that with fewer police on the road, young people and other irresponsible-leaning drivers with fast cars would speed dangerously a lot more often. So we could reduce the police presence and reduce the ticketing for most speeding, but now the reckless drivers are less likely to get caught. Would increasing the penalties for reckless driving help? How do we maintain the status of reckless driving as unacceptable?
November 22nd, 2011 - 07:28
You missed a hundred million people in your note about the nation size! At first, i had to double back and wonder, “wait, the US shrunk in size?” Just a typo :)
It does affect some of your numbers down the line ($41 mil being 19.5%).
But one thing is for sure, I share your sentiment for traffic cops! I think they’re purely there to make us feel like someone’s doing something out there. I doubt giving speeding tickets actually keeps people from speeding.
November 22nd, 2011 - 12:01
Ouch, someone else caught the census figure being off, I’d not even considered that some of those numbers came from my own math and some from the references linked. I’ll be going back through to repair the math now. It doesn’t affect the numbers enough to negate my point, but it certainly does change things a bit.
November 22nd, 2011 - 12:07
OK, I think I’ve found all of the bad math and repaired it. The extra hundred million makes the ticketing rate ~16.6% – closer to 1 in 6 than 1 in 4, but still far too high.
Let me know if you see any other math errors to be corrected.
November 22nd, 2011 - 07:35
The point of such laws is to protect us from our own poor risk intuition. Speeding, when looked at from a macro scale, is likely a net loss: society loses money due to decreased fuel efficiency, lost lives, damaged property, and medical costs for injured drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists.
People truly don’t appreciate how dangerous a task driving actually is. Throw speeding, cell phones, texting, GPS devices, onboard computers, and boredom into the mix, and you’ll find how shockingly little brain-time people actually dedicate to the task.
I’m willing to concede that on restricted-access highways, exceeding the speed limit might have a better risk/reward balance. However, on standard surface streets, we need to start giving preferential treatment to pedestrians and cyclists, as most European cities do.
November 22nd, 2011 - 13:29
populace
November 22nd, 2011 - 17:12
Goodness! First I subtract 100 million from the populace, then I use the wrong spelling of the word itself! I should really not allow myself to post that late at night – thanks!
December 5th, 2011 - 19:09
I don’t follow the speed limit for my own safety. Whenever i follow the speed limit i start phasing out and thinking about other stuff not paying 100% attention to the road. this is how most sheeple drive.
however when i speed i am completely aware of my surroundings.
December 28th, 2011 - 17:46
this reads like something you’d see Adam Levitt write about. i love it. i have a radar detector and laser jammer, and go ~10mph over on the interstate. i drive cars that can handle track speeds up to 160 (more, but i wouldnt try anyway), i know what every fluid and pressure level is in the car, they’re meticulously maintained, and to date i’ve had 0 accidents. ever.
being as it’s clearly a big financial game, i play along. top of the line radar, top of the line lidar jammer. with that setup, i’ve had 1 ticket in 9 years, and it was me being careless. would rather pay the major companies making the radars and detectors than deal with the nuisance of court or traffic school anyway.