Reassign them to saving lives
The most serious safety issue in cities today is traffic injuries and fatalities. It used to be regular news to report holiday weekend traffic fatalities, usually a new record. These days traffic fatalities are just a fact of holiday activities and seldom even mentioned as news.
To deal with this issue Police Officers should be issued video cameras attached to radar guns with the radar ported to the video. All Officers regardless of their previous assignments would be reassigned to traffic enforcement to protect the safety of pedestrians, bicyclists, and personal mobility device users from unsafe drivers. Video police records should be accepted as evidence in traffic court and a reason to issue a citation. The officer would have discretion to flag each video as a warning, or a violation, or simply file as a record before uploading to the station. Officers would be trained to capture a readable license plate, a recognizable video of the driver. Smartphones today are capable of creating such videos and are already used in court in cases of assault and rioting.
Officers could operate from the safety of a sidewalk or a pedestrian island, and wouldn’t be subject to the dangers involved in a traffic stop. The productivity of traffic officers would be radically increased as would traffic ticket revenue since there is enough outside traffic that only locals would learn to obey traffic laws. Traffic fines could become a major source of revenue as it is for many small rural towns.
Officers preferring more traditional police work could be reassigned after completing specialized training, eg. Deescalation and mental health awareness for 911 officers; horseback crowd control for protests, which has been extremely effective for most of the 20th century; and CSI after proper forensic science training. These officers could also enforce traffic laws in their downtime from their primary duties.
Note: This is a completely rewritten version of a previous story.
