The cops have a pervasive misallocation of resources from the top down.
For example, US police eventually come up with enough evidence for prosecutors to start proceedings only in about 50% of murder cases [1]. Yet police departments spend very little of their time working on murder cases. [2]
Assuming you believe police investigating murders is valuable, I don't see how you can think police should be wasting time on broken taillight stops when they're failing that badly at it. (If the cops can't be reassigned they should be fired and their salaries used to pay cops who can)
[1] Technically I'm describing the murder clearance rate, but I use this phrasing to avoid the common and incorrect implication that a cleared murder means it's necessary actually "solved"
[2] There's no great metric for this. Assuming a police officer who just filed an incident report about a traffic stop for a broken taillight probably wasn't working on a murder case immediately before we can use incident reporting data. For ex, https://data.sfgov.org/d/wg3w-h783/visualization
For example, US police eventually come up with enough evidence for prosecutors to start proceedings only in about 50% of murder cases [1]. Yet police departments spend very little of their time working on murder cases. [2]
Assuming you believe police investigating murders is valuable, I don't see how you can think police should be wasting time on broken taillight stops when they're failing that badly at it. (If the cops can't be reassigned they should be fired and their salaries used to pay cops who can)
[1] Technically I'm describing the murder clearance rate, but I use this phrasing to avoid the common and incorrect implication that a cleared murder means it's necessary actually "solved"
[2] There's no great metric for this. Assuming a police officer who just filed an incident report about a traffic stop for a broken taillight probably wasn't working on a murder case immediately before we can use incident reporting data. For ex, https://data.sfgov.org/d/wg3w-h783/visualization