New Zealanders have extraordinarily high trust in the police. A recent survey found 74% of us had ‘full or very high’ trust, significantly higher than even places like Denmark or The Netherlands. Watch a group of cops stopping for a takeaway coffee or pie and mostly you’ll see them relaxed and chatting away with the people around them. Unlike almost everywhere, the uniform commands respect, but not fear. The police here take upholding public trust extremely seriously. No institution is perfect, but from what I’ve seen from friends, family, and former flatmates in the police force - the training is excellent, there’s a strong culture of public service, and individuals who don’t fit are cycled out far sooner than anywhere else in the public sector.
Highway policing is something of a special case, and is resonsible for dragging down the public trust statistics considerably. Some of this is understandable. For other branches, enforcement is tightly and legibly linked to harm. Arrests made after an assault or financial fraud are met with public approval. Somebody is on the ground bleeding, families lost their savings, and the culpit is facing justice. Yet, with vehicles at speed, by the time harm occurs, it’s too late - everybody involved is dead, including the young mother and daughter in the opposing car. Highway police play an important role in maintaining safer driving norms, but since enforcement is disconnected from tangible harm, the public tends to be more resentful of it. The branch attempts to address this through decades of rolling prime-time TV ads highlighting the need for people to slow down, and the good work enforcement officers are doing, but these are continually undermined by the lived experiences people actually have. A rethink of strategy is desperately needed.
Driving home from a day trip to the capital yesterday, I pulled off the highway to fill up with petrol. I then turned left back onto the feeder road, stopped at a red light queue for the highway onramp, reached across for my phone to restart the podcast I was listening to, and was immediately pulled over by a policeman. He was set up in a small commercial carpark, his patrol car hidden to oncoming traffic by signage, and perfectly positioned to look across and slightly down at the third driver in the queue. The man was very personable. I told him my name and address. He asked about my phone use, I told him. He asked me to wait, and went back towards his car to speak with his senior partner on the phone. I had the windows down. I overheard him querying the situation, and being directed to give me a ticket.
I immediately began to flush red with middle-class embarrassment and shame. The cop was similarly embarassed, and adopted the anonymous beureaucratic persona as he returned, tersely informing me he was serving me a notice before delivering the requisite lecture. To the man’s credit, he avoided any claim that my actions were in any way dangerous, instead choosing to repeat variations of ‘you can’t do that’ until I, unprompted, agreed. He shook himself slightly. Then, his duty discharged, he sheepishly offered to help me rejoin the queue. I politely declined, and wished him farewell.
Driving home, unable to focus on the podcast, I considered:
-Distraction is a big driver of accidents.
-The logic of banning the use of cell phones while driving is understandable.
-Bans are usually best when objective and blunt. Adding provisions about how you can use them in various circumstances and not others only creates confusion and makes enforcement a nightmare.
-I could have turned on my podcast while at the station. I cannot dispute that I earned my notice.
However, I’m bothered by my certainty that the day’s trapping was demoralising for the young officer, harmful to the reputation and moral authority of the police, unlikely to affect driver behaviour, and hence, on balance, detremental to society.
While in principal I support the idea of a ‘user-pays’1 approach to law enforcement, our highway police have fallen into a mode where they’re incentivised to maximise revenues and hence enforce the letter of the law, rather than its spirit.
From this perspective, patrol cars are optimally deployed on straight rural highways with good visibility, wide lanes, and broad shoulders. Many of these roads have engineering design speeds2 well above the legal limit, and people are subconsciously encouraged to speed. More tickets are issued here, so that’s where the police set up. The opportunity cost is instead setting up in locations where even a small breach of the limit is clearly dangerous, and where officers can deliver their safety lectures with conviction rather than mild embarassment or, worse, subsuming oneself into the authoratrian role and taking a sort of proto-fascistic glee in being able to exercise power over others.
Instead, highway police strategy should be to maximise not fines, but the impact of officer times. Ticketed drivers should be left thinking about how their actions could have led to people’s deaths, not seething at resentment over being pinged for trivial infractions. In fairness, this approach would decrease infrigement revenues, though perhaps this could be made up for out of the enormous ‘rehumanise traffic cops’ media budget.
By which I mean, I don’t oppose, in theory, if the costs of enforcement are bourne not by society in general, but by those who make those costs necessary. The problem is the warped incentives this can create.
Every road has a speed that people naturally gravitate towards. People will tend to drive slower on narrower streets with parked cars and trees than on a wider street in the same neighbourhood, with the same speed limit. Engineers design sections of roads to be traversed at a particular speeds. For example, the turning radii of bends in the road are calibrated to be safely taken by cars at a particular speed. Bends in major four-lane highways will always be much more gradual than more rural highways - these highways have a higher design speed, even as the posted speed limit may be the same.