Originally published at: Los Angeles Police Department seizes 40 cars in a crackdown on street takeovers but will return cars in 30 days | Boing Boing
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Drunk drivers often get court-ordered breathalyzers installed on their cars if they want to be able to keep driving to work. I wish that repeat offenders for this kind of behavior got court-ordered speed governors / GPS speed trackers installed on their vehicles. Seems like some tech companies could make good money installing those, so I wonder why nobody’s been lobbying for such a law.
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LAPD should have been doing this from the start.
A 30 day confiscation might seem like light punishment, especially to folks who would like to see these cars seized permanently. For those folks, I’d like to point out the potential cost to get a car put of impound after that 30 day hold.
30 days of impound at $44 a day = $1300ish
Not everyone will get all these tickets below but they will get some combo of them.
Street racing ticket = $1000 and up to 30 days jail
Exhibition of Speed ticket = $500
Evading police = $1000
Running red light = $100
So, to retrieve your car after 30 days, you may need to pay upwards of $3900. Many of these cars will never be retrieved.
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KTLA is the first station to sensationalize these “street takeovers” because they mean ratings. It doesn’t matter what else is going on in the world, street takeovers are breaking news. They even recycle old footage to report on takeovers they don’t have video of. When a few people were doing stunts on the new 6th Street Viaduct bridge, we had to see the same 5 seconds of footage repeated ad-nauseam for days.
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Street takeovers, like encampments or graffiti, feel like chaos, which frightens people, particularly those who watch TV news the most. And are the most reliable voters. Do the math.
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To that, add $142 to start the impound and $8/mile to tow it to the garage, per http://www.opgla.com/rates
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I see no problem with this as long as the cars are returned as those cute car crusher poop cubes.
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“History never repeats itself but it rhymes”
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The city could try making traffic more friendly for the affected neighborhoods. They could build traffic calming impediments on the “wide streets”, such as concrete pedestrian crossings that create narrow gaps, S-curves, roundabouts, center dividers, all kinds of immovable changes that would make a road useless for a drag race.
Yes, I know that LA drivers really want the traffic to flow much more than they care about the houses they drive by, but maybe the city needs to change that and start protecting the residents.
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Also it can be pretty challenging just to get through daily life in L.A. without a vehicle so if any of those cars were their owners’ primary form of transportation then that alone would be a non-trivial ordeal.
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There is some evidence that such measures may also reduce other antisocial behavior that might not seem directly related to bad driving
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I’m fine with returning the cars after 30 days as long as these dangerous morons get their licenses suspended for at least a year.
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It’s really sad that the police can’t handle this. They need to declare the cars involved in these incidents as a nuisance, and crush them, rather than holding on to them for a month. That would make a real difference in this behavior.
This is true. It may be an LA-specific madness. They really are both annoying and extremely dangerous though.
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Yes, came to say the same. A lot of these young men will lose their jobs because they can’t get to work in LA, where public transportation is poor and taxis/car shares are expensive. Punishment aplenty in impounding their cars for 30 days, to be sure. This will be a genuine hardship.
I think this is a reasonable first action by LAPD to discourage the behaviour. They can escalate as needed from here.
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They are racing on major roadways and in industrial zones, so this wouldn’t be practical. You can’t “traffic calm” routes needed by tractor trailers, or six lane roads. Plus, you’d have to do it essentially everywhere, because they’ll just keep going elsewhere.
That’s not to say LA doesn’t need to be more pedestrian friendly. Good god, does it ever. I lived there for 25 years without a car (it can be done in specific neighbourhoods) but I knew I was taking my life in my own hands every time I went out. I got hit three times, all in crosswalks while I had the light. Pedestrians are invisible in LA.
I think I’m alone in this belief, but I’m skeptical of “traffic calming” in general. It seems to all have come from the pop-science book Traffic (or at least everyones’ awareness of it did) but that book was the Atkins Diet of civil engineering. It might as well have been written by Malcolm Gladwell, for how much crap is in it. All the traffic calming measures I have seen all strike me as things that people will simply get used to. It slows every down for a little while, but I haven’t seen any studies showing they are effective long term.
I think the way to calm traffic is to make cities more livable on foot. Make people not want to drive. In cities where public transit is clean and fast, and neighbourhoods are walkable, people don’t bother owning cars.
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nope. been going on in miami for some time now.
from December 2020:
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Extreme punishment has never been demonstrated to discourage criminal behaviour. If it did, capital punishment would have solved murder. What works is addressing the social injustices that create it. These kids do this because they are bored, unemployed, disenfranchised, or all of the above.
Impounding the cars for 30 days is sufficient. As stated upthread, this will cost these young men a lot and will likely be sufficient disincentive to do it again.
Extreme punishment tends to have the opposite effect- it radicalizes kids against the system. Coming down with an iron fist is going to disenfranchise these kids a lot more and take away their ability to work or have any other kind of fun to boot. That’s a good way to turn a bunch of bored teens into gang bangers, and now you have a much bigger problem.
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