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posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 03 2017, @08:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the sudden-outbreak-of-common-sense dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Camden, New Jersey is a very low income neighborhood. According to this NY Times article, until recently it had typical low income policing--heavy on corruption and violence and low on compassion.

But now they have a new chief and things have changed --

"Handing a $250 ticket to someone who is making $13,000 a year" — around the per capita income in the city — "can be life altering," Chief Thomson said in an interview last year, noting that it can make car insurance unaffordable or result in the loss of a driver's license. "Taxing a poor community is not going to make it stronger."

Handling more vehicle stops with a warning, rather than a ticket, is one element of Chief Thomson's new approach, which, for lack of another name, might be called the Hippocratic ethos of policing: Minimize harm, and try to save lives.

Officers are trained to hold their fire when possible, especially when confronting people wielding knives and showing signs of mental illness, and to engage them in conversation when commands of "drop the knife" don't work. This sometimes requires backing up to a safer distance. Or relying on patience rather than anything on an officer's gun belt.

While not out of the woods yet, it sounds like there is hope for Camden and maybe it won't just continue to be written off as a war zone.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by mhajicek on Monday April 03 2017, @10:54PM (1 child)

    by mhajicek (51) on Monday April 03 2017, @10:54PM (#488428)

    Personally I think moving violations should be proportional to your vehicle's mass, since your potential for causing damage is already. But yes, any fine which is not made proportional to a person's financial status is discriminatory.

    --
    The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Tuesday April 04 2017, @02:49AM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Tuesday April 04 2017, @02:49AM (#488510) Journal

    And velocity -- the energy imparted in any crash is a function of both mass and velocity.

    For example, a 440 pound motorcycle going 150 mph, has about 449 kJ of kinetic energy. A 2200 pound car going 67 mph has 447 kJ.

    https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/kinetic-energy [omnicalculator.com]