Even as another driver I automatically class any police car I see as "highest possible risk of doing something stupid without warning", right up there with a minivan full of kids and a texting driver that I've observed swerving several times and has changed lanes without signaling.

The only problem with this is that the cop car probably deserves a class of its own, even riskier than the swerving distracted-driver minivan full of kids.

Maybe it's a function of me living in a small town, but I have only once seen police doing anything dangerous while driving. I've NEVER seen one use his siren to get through a red-light, either.

When they have the siren on, they're typically driving much faster than normal, but normally they're indistinguishable from a normal driver.

The one incident I did see was a motorcycle officer do a U-turn across four lanes to come ticket me (no seatbelt). He turned on his lights first, and the road was relatively clear.

Small town makes a big difference. What are the odds that a friend of a friend (or even a cousin) sees the cop do something stupid, compared to a large town?

[edit] To put this in the context of the article, if a Cop does something publicly stupid in a small town, there will be a social penalty levied against them when they e.g. sit down for a beer next to someone who saw them do something stupid.

Well, it's not that small.

~35k population.

I have no idea who any police officers are, nor have I ever (knowingly) sat down next to one...anywhere. I occasionally see a group of them at Arby's or something, eating with each other at lunch.

FWIW I have a very wide social circle in town, here (I own a bar)--but it includes no police officers.

> Maybe it's a function of me living in a small town, but I only once seen police doing anything dangerous while driving.

I guess so. I've seen it more times than I can count.

Know this, we had a former officer as a guest speaker and he made it quite clear that, between radio calls, logging and looking up stuff on their systems, police are incredibly dangerous to be around. His best advice was to stay far away from patrol cars.

DPS and the local PD used to race from the center of our town to the 24hr diner on interstate in our town at 3 am. Why, no one ever reported them.

We tried this in chicago with bus drivers blowing through reds and getting caught on our red light cameras. Turns out the unions strong-armed the city early on to make bus drivers non-responsible for traffic violations and the city ends up paying their own fines.

The larger issue with urban corruption is how unions enable this corruption. All the technology and feel good sentiment doesn't mean a thing if unions continue to have this much power over the taxpayer. Police unions make sure the bad apples don't get prosecuted as well, so this goes way beyond mere traffic issues into human rights issues like being killed in police custody and having a 'code of silence' and all the powers and wealth of the police union against the victim's family looking for justice.

http://bribespot.com/en/ tried/is trying to do something like that: crowdsourcing info on corruption. I saw their pitch and thought it's an awesome idea, but I don't think they got the traction that would be needed.

India has one with quite a lot of reports: http://www.ipaidabribe.com/

I have twice had to jump out of the way of an unmarked NYC police car that turned on its lights and sirens and ran a red as I was crossing the street.

I also always look both ways crossing one way streets as I've almost been clipped by a police car going the wrong way down one.

The trick is still: who does the investigation?

A past idea of mine is: everyone. Every vehicle registration accumulates points at the rate of one per week. Fingering another vehicle deducts 5 points from their total and (to deter false reports) one from yours. If your total is negative, you can't drive/ride.

There's probably a great deal wrong with this.

This would de-incentivize the reporting of infractions, which is the opposite of what you want.

You want to incentivize the reporting of verified infractions, while de-incentivize false reports. A consensus system could be used to "verify" a report.

In this kind of system, I think the negative points are to remove the burden of confirming infractions. It's in an individual's best interest to both keep driving AND to remove poor drivers. Hitting the correct ratio is the key.

Old people who don't drive would report one vehicle per week.

We could also do network analysis on the graph of people reporting other people. If there are any strange, unnatural patterns, they could be ignored. But if Jonny has been reported by 10 people in the last month, and those 10 are unrelated to each other, that would be compelling evidence Jonny is not behaving well. The system can still be gamed if a group of people are organized online to report targets (like 4chan does DDOS attacks). Fortunately, in order to report someone one would need to disclose his identity. On 4chan there is radical anonymity, by contrast.

the system i've laid out here can help solve that problem:

https://github.com/neyer/respect

if someone you respect, directly or implicitly, performs the investigation, then you can respect the results of the investigation. if someone you don't respect does it, you can disregard it.

Robert Klitgaard posits that accountability/transparency reduces corruption