Comment by modeless
2 days ago
We should welcome more precise law enforcement. Imperfect enforcement is too easy for law enforcement officers to turn into selective enforcement. By choosing who to go after, law enforcement gets the unearned power to change the law however they want, enforcing unwritten rules of their choosing. Having law enforcement make the laws is bad.
The big caveat, though, is that when enforcement becomes more accurate, the rules and penalties need to change. As you point out, a rigidly enforced law is very different from one that is less rigorously enforced. You are right that there is very little recognition of this. The law is difficult to change by design, but it may soon have to change faster than it has in the past, and it's not clear how or if that can happen. Historically, it seems like the only way rapid governmental change happens is by violent revolution, and I would rather not live in a time of violent revolution...
The problem with precise law enforcement is that the legal system is incredibly complex. There's a tagline that ‘everybody's a criminal’; I don't know if that's necessarily true but I do definitely believe that a large number of ‘innocent’ people are criminals (by the letter of the law) without their knowledge. Because we usually only bother to prosecute crimes if some obvious harm has been done this doesn't cause a lot of damage in practice (though it can be abused), but if you start enforcing the letter of every law precisely it suddenly becomes the obligation of every citizen to know every law — in a de facto way, rather than just the de jure way we currently have as a consequence of ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’. So an increase of precision in law enforcement must be preceded by a drastic simplification of the law itself — not a bad thing by any means, but also not an easy (or, perhaps, possible) task.
The reason speed limits make such a great example for these arguments is because they're a preemptive law. Technically, nobody is directly harmed by speeding. We outlaw speeding on the belief that it statistically leads to and/or is correlated with other harms. Contrast this to a law against assault or theft: in those kinds of cases, the law makes the direct harm itself illegal.
Increasing the precision of enforcement makes a lot more sense for direct-harm laws. You won't find anyone seriously arguing that full 100% enforcement of murder laws is a bad idea. It's the preemptive laws, which were often lazily enforced, especially when no real harm resulted from the action, where this all gets complicated. Maybe this is the distinction to focus on.
This unwritten distinction exists only to allow targeted enforcement in service of harassment and oppression. There is no upside (even if getting away with speeding feels good). We should strive to enforce all laws 100% of the time as that is the only fair option.
If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes problems then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed limit, or design the road slower).
43 replies →
Actually it does harm people. High speed traffic is noisy and unpleasant, flows unpredictably, and tears up roads faster.
I think I would expect certain laws that are currently considered statutory / strict-liability laws, to be shifted to instead constitute only "evidence of negligence" and/or act as "aggravating conditions."
So, in the case of speeding:
- Speeding on its own would only automatically "warrant" the police to stop you / interview you / tell you off, and perhaps to follow you around for a while after they pull you over, to ensure you don't start speeding again (and to immediately pull you over again if you do.) I say "warrant" here because this doesn't actually give them any powers that private citizens don't have; rather, it protects them from you suing them for harassment for what they're doing. (Just like a "search warrant" doesn't give the police any additional powers per se, but rather protects them from civil and criminal damages associated with them breaking-and-entering into the specified location, destroying any property therein, etc.)
- But speeding while in the process of committing some other "actual" crime, or speeding that contributes to some other crime being committed, may be an aggravating factor that multiplies the penalty associated with the other act, or changes the nominal charge for the other act.
We might also then see a tweak for "threshold aggravations", such that e.g.
- Speeding while also doing some other dumb thing — having your brake-lights broken, say — may be considered to "cross a threshold" where they add up to an arrest+charge, even though none of the individual violations has a penalty when considered independently.
This would, AFAICT, translate well into a regime where there are little traffic-cop drones everywhere, maximizing speeding enforcement. If speeding is all they notice someone doing, they'd just be catch-and-release-ing people: pulling them over, squawking at them, and flying away. Literal slap-on-the-wrist tactics. Which is actually usefully deterrent on its own, if there are enough of these drones, and they just keep doing it, over and over again, to violators. (Do note that people can't just "not pull over" because they know there are no penalties involved; they would still be considered police, and "not complying with a police stop" would, as always, be a real crime with real penalties; if you run from the drone, it would summon actual cars to chase you!)
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Oddly, I think if you follow this legal paradigm to its natural conclusion, it could lead to a world where it could even be legal to e.g. drive your car home from the bar while intoxicated... as long as you're driving at 2mph, with your hazards on, and avoiding highways. But miss any of those factors, and it "co-aggravates" with a "driving recklessly for your reaction speed" charge, into an actual crime.
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Not really? If you're caught with burglary tools on private property that's still illegal even if you only took one step.
Likewise if act in a way that makes someone feel that you're going to hit them that's assault regardless of whether you actually ever touch them.
etc. Many such cases.
> I do definitely believe that a large number of ‘innocent’ people are criminals (by the letter of the law) without their knowledge.
Because of that (or rather, to sort out the mess), I always felt that citizens should have a right to be informed of every law that they are expected to obey so that at least in principle, they'd be able to comply (to be effective, plain language explanations would need to be included).
Imagine an app that told you, whenever you cross state boundaries, what is different in the law now from your previous location.
Precise law enforcement would motivate political will to proactively law change to be more precise and appropriate, or tuned, to the public sentiment.
Imprecise law enforcement enables political office holders to arbitrarily leverage the law to arrest people they label as a political enemy, e.g. Aaron Swartz.
If everyone that ever shared publications outside the legal subscriber base was precisely arrested, charged, and punished, I dont think the punishment amd current legal terrain regarding the charges leveraged against him would have lasted.
But this is a feature, not a bug.
Code is Law is pretty much demonstrates that it is not possible to precisely define law.
https://www.fxleaders.com/news/2025/10/29/code-is-law-sparks...
Additionally, law is not logical. Law is about justice and justice is not logical.
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I don’t know, law enforcement in the US is already heavy handed in terms of enforcement. Not that it’s done equally, which is your intention, but it’s that the enforcer already thinks they are overly powerful and already commonly oversteps and abuse their power. This pushes further into a police state.
Maybe my YouTube algorithm just shows me a lot of it, but there’s no shortage of cops out there violating people’s rights because they think when they ask for something we have to comply and see anything else as defiant.
I think we need perhaps less laws so people can actually know them all. Also, I think we need clarity as to what they are and it needs to be simple English, dummy’s guide to law type thing. But there’s a lot of issues that simply stem from things like 1) when can a cop ask for your ID? / when do you have the right to say no? 2) similar question as to when do they have a right to enter/trespass onto your property? 3) as every encounter usually involves them asking you questions, even a simple traffic stop, when and how can you refuse to talk to them or even roll down your window or open your car door without them getting offended and refusing to take no as an answer?
I don’t think we generally have any understanding of what our rights actually are in these most likely and most common interactions with law enforcement. However, it’s all cases where I see law enforcement themselves have a poor understanding of what the law and rights are themselves so how are citizens to really know. If they tell you it’s their policy to ID anyone they want without any sort of probable cause then they say you’re obstructing their investigation for not complying or answering their questions or asserting you have to listen to anything they say because it’s a lawful order; it’s just common ways they get people to do what they want, it’s often completely within your right to not comply with a lot of these things though.
I've always said one of the best non-major-related courses I took in college was Criminal Justice 101, which went through all the most applicable SCOTUS case law for common scenarios. Ignoring the variation in state laws, you could boil it down to about 30 rules of thumb. Many of the most important are covered in the classic YouTube lecture 'Don't talk to the police.'
Teaching this as a requires HS class would be an incredible benefit to society, because, on the flip side, many police encounters escalate to violence because the citizen has an incorrect understanding of where their rights end/don't exist.
The most obvious rule to follow is that you should always assert your rights (correct or incorrect) verbally only, as soon as you involve physical resistance, the situation will deteriorate rapidly (for you.) Any violations of your rights will be argued and dealt with in court, not on the street. Confirm requests/demands from officers are 'lawful orders', and then do them.
One issue is that imperfect enforcement is often how the momentum to change the law is created.
If the police had been able to swoop in and arrest the "perpetrators" every time two men kissed, homosexuality would have never been legalized; If they had been able to arrest anyone who made alcohol, prohibition wouldn't have ended; if they had been able to arrest anyone with a cannabis seedling, we wouldn't have cannabis legalization.
This brings up an often overlooked aspect of the role of laws in society, that it it’s important that there exist an ability to break laws. It’s critically important to the growth and flexibility of a society that laws are never perfectly enforced, that there remain ways to evade persecution. It is healthy. Faced with this situation, societies have to think further about what might have been missed in existing law that would cause ongoing skirting of the law and find better ways to structure its mutual responsibilities that we each impose on each other, often unjustly. It would be a terrible thing if the snapshot of laws at any given moment in time was allowed to be perfectly enforced. Laws are not moral documents. Their creation is fraught with unjust power grabs and non-universal moral codes. They are also created knowing that they will not be perfectly enforced and are given exaggerated cruelty when enforced to discourage others. Perfect enforcement would require a full rewrite of all laws.
Quite the opposite. A lot of obviously innocent people ending up in jail will have created a massive backlash a lot earlier, helping fixing idiotic legislation.
Only if the legal system allows itself to be changed.
The present system in many countries is that criminal and civil codes are too large to be comprehended by a single person, too large to be changed rationally, and the processes too subject to corruption to be changed all at once.
For crimes that require intention, people usually only end up in jail because they thought they could get away with it, because of imperfect enforcement.
If everyone knew they would be immediately arrested the second they sprouted a cannabis seed almost nobody would try.
That really depends upon the the reputation. If the police were to arrest a lot of 'very dangerous people', and all you see on the new is that they put the 'very dangerous people' in prison, then that isn't going to cause outrage. What causes outrage is when you know Mark down the street is one of those 'very dangerous people', but he was definitely not someone you gave your those vibes. So you look it up and notice the actual crime, even if it sounds bad on paper, means Mark might not actually be one of those 'very dangerous people'. A single instance isn't much, but across society this leads to questioning a law.
But it only happens because you got to know Mark originally. If he was already labeled a 'very dangerous person' and was arrested early on, there's a much better chance you wouldn't have gotten to know him, and the extent you would question the law would be very differently.
This is difficult to talk about in theoretical, because most examples are obvious cases of bad law (people already recognize the issues) or cases of good law that how dare I question (laws people don't recognize as an issue). People spend a lot of time thinking about a law that has already soured but hasn't been removed from the books, but rarely catch the moment that they realize the law originally soured in their mind (and any real world modern examples that might be changing currenlty would be, by their nature, controversial and quite easily derail the discussion).
Put shortly, those people are only obviously innocent (not deserving to be punished, but technically guilty of what the law stated) because the law was imperfect in enforcement and you got to know some of them before the law caught them.
Imperfect enforcement is a feature as often as it is a bug. You can't make "antisocial behavior" in general illegal but you can make certain behaviors (loitering, public intoxication) illegal and selectively enforce against only those who are behaving in an antisocial manner. Of course the other edge of this sword is using this discretion to blanket discriminate against racial or class groups.
Speeding is brought up as an example that most replies refer to, but it really is not limited to that. How about jaywalking? Using the road on a bicycle when there's a bike lane available of varying quality? Or taking a piss in the bushes after a drunken night out? Downloading a 60 year old movie? Besides, perfect enforcement does not work with vague laws. It's not a world I would like to live in, where there is no room for error.
To add some context -
> Imperfect enforcement is too easy for law enforcement officers to turn into selective enforcement. By choosing who to go after, law enforcement gets the unearned power
This is by design, in an American context of building a free society. By default, you are allowed to do whatever you like to do in a free society. To constrain behavior through law, first a legislator must decide that it should be constrained, then they must convince their legislator peers that it should be constrained, then law enforcement must be convinced to attempt to constrain it de-facto, then a judge must be convinced that you in particular should have a court case proceed against you; a grand jury must be convinced to bring an indictment, a jury of 12 peers must be convinced to reach a verdict, and even afterwards there are courts of appeal.
The bar to constrain someone's freedom is quite high. By design and by wider culture.
> The bar to constrain someone's freedom is quite high. By design and by wider culture.
I think there’s a difference between the marketing brochure and reality.
The existing laws are rarely well specified enough for precise enforcement, often on purpose.
You cannot have precise enforcement with imprecise laws. It’s as simple as that.
The HN favorite in this respect is “fair use” under copyright. It isn’t well specified enough for “precise enforcement”. How do you suggest we approach that one?
We can fix it by fixing the law. In this case the obvious solution is to abolish copyright (and other IP laws).
There can also be an argument that laws are always only an approximation, and they should be broken in corner cases where they clearly don't work as intended.
Civil disobedience can also be a useful societal force, and with perfect law enforcement it becomes impossible.
Enforcement stops completely at around US$1-billion.
The far left and neoliberals are united on this. Whether it's by malice, self interest or incompetence (or a combination), they end up discriminating against the lower classes.
Neoliberals and the far left, when forced to work in the real world, both tend to prefer putting power into rules, not giving people in authority the power to make decisions.
The upside is there's less misuse of power by authorities, at least in theory. The bad news is, you now need far more detailed rules to allow for the exceptions, common sense, and nuance that are no longer up to authorities.
The worse news is, that the people who benefit from complex rules are the upper classes, and the authorities who know how to manipulate complex rules.
"Don't be evil" requires a leader with the authority to enforce it.
A 500 employee manual will be selectively implemented, and will end up full of exploits, but hey, at least you can pretend you tried to remove human error from the process.