What amazes me sometimes is what people actually think is going on as opposed to what is going on.
Did you know that (I’m guesstimating here) 80% of the money spent plowing snow is actually not plowing snow? It’s just sitting around waiting for snow? That we get called in 6 hours before it’s forecasted to start? Then it may start snowing 6 hours after it’s forecasted, snow for an hour, then they hold us there for 10 more hours just to make sure and until the roadway is dry?
Do you know how many times I got 10-20 hours of snow overtime and not a single flake fell? I’ll give you an example. If we have 3-5 snow events all year, the crews are probably called in 20-25 times. Just in case. And we’re talking 100s of people up and down the roadway including supervisors and contractors. People don’t know a lot.
I agree that changes are needed – on both sides of the engagement.
Cops cannot stop responding to incidents. We would have chaos on the streets without police involvement on the street.
Rogue cop behavior needs to end.
But on the flip side, criminal activity requires cop involvement. Without so much criminal activity, cop-citizen interface would be reduced. Likewise, resistance and belligerence and attempted flight is a sure way to ensure an escalation in the interface. Part of that aspect is clearly on the individual’s choice in how to react. But part of that is on the common narrative that it’s not safe to be black when encountering a cop. that narrative puts both the citizen and the cop on heightened tension from the start, and that is more likely to lead to escalation that shouldn’t have been necessary without unnecessary expectations.
LOL I don’t know what goes on in the vehicles. But it’s not possible to be driving around all night. That would be more dangerous than anything else. And people would be expecting them to do just that.
I want idiots that run the flashing red lights of a school bus to get their licenses suspended, pay fines starting at $3 Grand and have their arses beat.
Live PD accomplished that but A&E just cancelled it due to protests.
The expense involved makes it impossible to do on a national scale and would put the ride along cameramen in every police car in the country at significant risk.
The battery and storage capacity doesn’t exist for cops to have body cam’s on every minute of their shift so till tech advances that’s a non starter.
There are also significant privacy issues related to recording every moment a cop is on shift.
The cops are societies intake officers. If there is any problem, a car crash, the neighbors are yelling, there’s a bear in the park, the cops are the first one’s sent. Sending armed force as our first reaction, its not surprising that the mistakes are lethal mistakes.
I read about a case in the last week where there was a domestic disturbance call. The cops got there, man and wife were arguing yelling and upset. The cops say (and the surviving wife disagrees) that the man reached for the officer’s gun, the other cops shot them dead. Nobody mentioned that if the first responder had been a social worker, without a gun, then neither the gun being grabbed for or the gun that killed the guy would have been on site.
“There is unknown trouble. Add a violence” is a policy that isn’t working.
Obviously. Road crippling events have happened as a result of trying to time it better to save money. A few deaths as well. But you know how people are. They think they know what you should be doing better than your bosses.
Where I grew up a Blue norther can accelerate coming off the rockies at maddening speed, drop softball sized hail or three feet of snow and straight line winds of over 100mp are not uncommon.
We’ve had years where temps could range almost 120 in the summer and more than ten below in the winter will chills in the -30 range or lower.
We had “Section line roads” every mile going north and south and the roads were eigh to ten feet lower than the fields, sometimes the drifts were so bad you couldn’t see where the fields ended and the road began.
Lots of respect for the guys that get out in that kind of weather to try and keep at least the major highways open.
I-40 from Amarillo to Moriarty could be shut down for days, or even weeks at a time in a bad winter but they kept trying.
Plowing snow was one of the major reasons I went back to collecting tolls. I could be there 2-3 days at a time if it’s bad. If I was 30 I’d have no problem. We would work 8 hours on (no breaks) and 4 hours off. Sounds like a lot of off time, right? Try that rotation for a couple of days. It’s not always fun and games.
