Category: Commentary

Whereabouts unknown

Posted on by Dezso Campbell

I lost touch with an out of state friend for a few years, so I went to text him the other day. His number was disconnected. So I went through a social media site and messaged his wife (The friend doesn’t participate in any social media). Later I received a reply that he had left her almost 2 years ago and his whereabouts were unknown.  So that was a little bit awkward.  To her credit, the entire dissolution of their marriage was not mentioned on Facebook, a rare display of restraint in this era of TMI.

Traffic Enforcement and the Decline of our Image of Police

Posted on by Dezso Campbell

I believe that the root of the public’s general unease with law enforcement officers can be traced to the shift of public safety resources from general law enforcement to traffic law enforcement. In the pre-traffic law enforcement era, most citizens didn’t have a lot of formal interaction with police, i.e., the police didn’t have a “business reason” to interact with average citizens. Generally, it was just accused law violators and victims. If you were a criminal, you had a bad opinion of police. If you were a victim, you likely had a good opinion of police, if they were able to assist you. Otherwise, the general public really didn’t have bad experiences with police (with exceptions, of course). Police were there to stop bad people from doing bad things to good people.

Enter the traffic violation era. Ticket money = revenue, and every city in the country wanted additional revenue, so almost every city hired traffic cops. So now, not only do “normal” citizen drivers get the honor of interacting with police, they get pulled over, treated coarsely, possibly searched, possibly breathalyzed, issued a citation, and are parted with some amount of their money (which they were attempting to earn by driving to or from work, before the pull-over). When one looks into the rear view mirror and sees the flashing blue lights, I would venture that “hooray, the police are here to help me!” almost never comes to mind. Many of us would live an entire lifetime free of being interrogated, were it not for traffic pull-overs. So while police are still there to stop bad people from doing bad things to others, all the public ever sees them do is pull people over.

Several generations now perceive interacting with the police as a negative experience. “Getting chastised and fined – that was just what I was hoping for as I attempted to drag myself to work at 6am this morning”

The emphasis in law enforcement transitioned from being helpful to being glorified meter maids enforcing traffic speed laws that really amount to helping no one. Driving at 70mph isn’t really any safer at 60mph – we have already made the decision as a society that driving very heavy objects as fast speeds in order to get places efficiently outweighs the costs of injury and death due to car accidents. Speed itself isn’t dangerous –driving unsafely while speeding is dangerous, and I have no problem with the police citing bad drivers, as distinguished from fast drivers.

Commute 

Posted on by Dezso Campbell

I am trying to be productive during the morning commute by dictating this, I’m not sure if this qualifies as productivity. The hours spent in my car each week are such a useless part of my life, the best I’ve ever been able to really do is listen to self improvement audiobooks to feel like it isn’t a complete squandering of those moments of my life.  

The rising popularity of telework has really highlighted how much better life was (in terms of not wasting your time with some sort of transportation every day) when people live where they worked