Too Many Police Officers in Tuscaloosa

I (Peter) have been to many major cities in the United States. I have been to major cities in foreign countries. I have never seen as many police on a daily basis as I do in Tuscaloosa Alabama. The only comparable place for the amount of police I have seen each day is Saint-Petersburg, Russia, where they had armed police in front of every bank.

I actually started counting the police last summer that I would see each day, and it averaged between 10 and 15 cops a day. They are just continually driving around the streets or something. I was a political science major and studied the affects of police officers in cities. The mere presence of police officers does not have an effect of reducing crimes. More police officer presence does cause the people to feel safer, even though the police do not make much of a difference. This is only referring to the presence of police walking or driving a beat to just be there and make a presence.

Obviously if the police are doing undercover work, investigations, or solving crimes, or keeping an eye on threatening individuals and preventing crimes from occurring, then this does reduce crime.

When I see a lot of police just driving around on the streets, when I can count 10 to 15 a day my thoughts are that these police officers are not making much of a difference. They are not reducing crime in the city of Tuscaloosa. They may be making some of the citizens feel safer, but only because the citizens don't understand that the presence of the police officers alone is not going to have any effect on the actual crime levels. Really all these police are doing is giving out tickets for minor traffic infractions all of the time, mainly to good citizens.

Personally, I feel like some of the police in Tuscaloosa are causing more problems then they are solving. I had my car broken into a month ago and had some stuff stolen out of it. It cost a bit to replace everything and it was irritating to cancel my credit cards, but that was it, I took a hit and then I dealt with it. It was over. A week and a half later I received some questionable tickets from some irrational police officers in Tuscaloosa. The tickets would cost more than the money lost from being robbed. Not only that but they would go on my permanent record, raising my insurance rates potentially costing me hundreds or even thousands of dollars over the long run, and I could get a misdemeanor which would be on my criminal record for potential employers to see. I would rather have that petty robber on the streets than those cops. What the Tuscaloosa police did was much, much, much worse than what that robber did. Sometimes the biggest thief is government.

The police argument is that pulling people over often leads to the discovery of other crimes. That is very possible. But, if that is the reason, why should a lot of good citizens have to pay exorbitant fees and deal with being treated as criminals and having their insurance rates raised, because the cops want to catch other criminals? The cops could easily keep using that strategy, but the courts should lower the costs for tickets and provide more leeway for people to contest their tickets. The cops could still catch real criminals who are a threat to society without ticking off all of the good citizens of Alabama.

I think tickets have little impact on people's driving other than being an occasional nuissance/reminder. When Alabama does their "take back the roads" campaigns where they give out a certain high amount of tickets a day for a couple weeks, the people start driving slower for a couple weeks. After that they normal speed rates go right back to normal for the rest of the year. All the take back the roads campaigns do is increase government revenues from ticket fees by several million dollars. This also decreases the spending power of Alabama citizens by the same amount. Also, all of those citizens that got tickets have to pay higher insurance rates, further decreasing their spending power over several years by hundreds or thousands of dollars per citizen.