Very interesting article here on the history of traffic officers. So, the long lost question that I was seeking an answer to but couldn’t really find a convincing statement on Wikipedia’s article about police. So, it really is like I suspected. Police are, in fact, all about the police car. As for the rest of the police technology, well mainly it follows as secondary requirements supporting the fact that police must operate their profession from a police car.
Traffic policing became necessary because nothing else worked to get people to drive safer. But with this came a whole host of laws that almost every driver was violating, and how do you reasonably handle that? If you hand out tickets to every single driver that broke a law, you’d have a lot of upset drivers? So, the magic compromise that was inserted was that of unstated human discretion on the side of the police officer. It is up to the officer to decide whether they should issue a warning versus a ticket. And that is where all the discrimination comes in.
Why do drivers despise speed cameras so much? Because they have no discretion. They record their statements of fact without regard to the race or other periphery characteristics of the driver. So… although we have a clear path out of the problem of police discrimination, it is not a path that many are willing to fully take, all the way to the end meaning of doing so.
20200612/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/g5pvgm/we-dont-need-cops-to-enforce-traffic-laws