As someone from the UK, all these points seem ridiculous to me, are they really valid elsewhere?
I get that point 1 is extremely valid in a place like the US where everyone can have a gun.
Do other countries not enforce fines?
In the UK you can have your car confiscated on the spot if the automated number plate recognition in a patrol car flags you don't have insurance. Fines are enforced, but escalating that to non-payment of fines seems like something they could do (people might complain, but only the ones not paying their fines!)
Re point (1), it's definitely not just guns. In the US:
- Suppose a vehicle chooses not to stop. What's the safest way to complete the stop? High-speed chases are dangerous. The eventual spike trap or pushing the tail end of the car or whatnot is dangerous. The fleeing person won't be in a sound state of mind for safe driving even if not followed. Toss in a little human error like forgetting to turn your lights and sirens on, and these are predictably extremely dangerous. Just under 1% end in a fatality.
- There's an elevated risk of wrecks, side-swipes, and whatnot by virtue of being on the side of the road, often in dangerous areas.
- Most assaults on police officers don't involve guns. There are something like 7-8k assaults on officers due to traffic stops annually, despite knowing they carry guns. A little over a hundred of those result in serious injury to the officer, most of which don't use guns in the process.
- Don't forget injury to the passengers. 100k/yr are injured by the police at a traffic stop. Again, that's usually without guns. And why wouldn't they be? The police have nearly a carte blanche, and they're being placed into an environment where they know they're at risk, with perceived risk being higher than actual risk.
You mention the UK, so how do they fare? They have 100x fewer traffic stops, so I'll scale up the numbers accordingly. In particular, that means they have 2.5x officers injured just from vehicles being rammed during stops than the US has assaults on officers in total. That's suggestive of gun violence not being the entire story regarding traffic stop safety.
Mind you, that's not quite apples to apples. The UK has 5x fewer people and 2-3x fewer miles driven per person per year, suggesting we're missing another factor of 5-10 when trying to figure out why the US has more traffic stops, and my first guess would be that the UK police have a selection bias toward more serious offenses, so the higher safety rates of the US police are at least in part due to pulling over a higher share of less violent individuals.
Nevertheless, it's not just gun violence. Traffic stops are dangerous elsewhere too. (not to be interpreted as a comment on gun policy, rather that it's annoying to see important conversations like consequences of traffic stop safety derailed by irrelevant nationalistic swipes and jabs)
From here [0], extrapolating based on relative rates of traffic stops vs other police-initiated contact. An estimated 32k of those required hospitalization.
How much of the violence you list is because of warrant enforcement via 'traffic stop'?
Traffic stops should be used for traffic enforcement and treated as community policing, not as the main method of hoping to stumble on things the police should have resolved via actual police work and effort.
It seems like our federal system is an obstacle. I'm in Maryland and a huge fraction of our biggest habitual traffic violators somehow get Virginia license plates.
> Do other countries not enforce fines?
Where I live (Baltimore, MD) the 10 vehicles with the most unpaid speeding tickets owe $81,000 between them. So you can push 10k in unpaid fines and remain on the road somehow.
Remove the warrant check portion of traffic stops and suddenly they become much much less risky and just normal community policing. But adding that 'the person may have a warrant and the US justice system is happy to hand down 10+ year sentences (which are basically life sentences, you aren't getting a life back after 10 years) every traffic stop by choice become much more high risk.
Policing shouldn't be done via traffic stops. Traffic stops should be done via traffic stops.
You could be forgiven for, "Botched execution," and, "First public execution in decades," happening, in that order, within a couple weeks of each other, coming off as a sort of Bronze Age hint given by fate and our hubris-driven refusal to take it.
Google "Double-clicking games for children", or "Mouse skill games for children", you'll find many. I'm wary of recommending any because I can't see if they carry ads, but the first I tried seemed perfect. A simple game of matching similar cards, the targets are huge, and the flip is done by double clicking, single click does nothing. Basically a double-click crash course. I bet a couple of days is enough for them to train the dexterity.
“Drop [an unwelcome surprise] in your lap” is a common English idiom.
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