[Vision2020] Question for the Vision

[Andreas Schou]

On 11/20/06, Jennifer McFarland <jmcfarland at latah.id.us> wrote:
>
>   Dear Visionaries,
>
> I hope you are all doing well as we enter the holiday season.  I issued a
> press release a little over a week ago alerting the public of our "Click It
> Don't Risk It!" seat belt compliance campaign.  I'm happy to say that of the
> 15 cars I pulled over yesterday, only one person was not in compliance with
> Idaho's seat belt laws.  However, I was just visited by a friend form the
> Lewiston Police Department (our partner in this year's campaign), and he and
> I talked about our laws relative to Washington's laws.  In Idaho, an officer
> must pull a car over for a "greater" offense (speeding, having a
> registration sticker in the wrong place, not having a front plate, etc.) in
> order to enforce the seat belt laws.  In other words, I cannot pull over a
> car just because I see a small child standing up in the back seat—I'd have
> to have other probable cause to pull over said vehicle.  The Lewiston
> officer I've been working with has spent a lot of time trying to change
> Idaho's laws regarding seat belt use to: 1. make it a primary offense, and
> 2. raise the fines so they are commensurate with other states' fines for the
> same.  I've heard arguments supporting both sides to this, but I am curious
> as to what Latah County's citizens think about our seat belt laws—whether
> they are adequate as they are, if they should change, how they should
> change, etc.  My own views on seat belt usage have as much to do with how I
> was raised as they do with a general aversion to the gruesome scenes I've
> experienced responding to collisions wherein the passenger(s) were not
> properly restrained (and having to notify next of kin).  But I also realize
> that my experience is just that—mine.  What are your thoughts?
>

On balance, while I support the enforcement of seatbelt laws, it's simply
poor public policy to set such a low standard for probable cause, especially
when that probable cause is something that could easily be misperceived by a
police officer glimpsing the inside of a moving vehicle. Having such an
easy-to-establish probable cause that can be established by an unfalsifiable
mistake circumvents the purpose of probable cause to begin with, which is,
in this case, to prevent people from being pulled over on a pretext.

I trust the Latah County deputies and the MPD to not abuse their powers in
this regard, but I don't trust, for instance, the Boise police to do so, and
wouldn't support the unequivocal increase of police powers across the state.

-- ACS
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20061120/c787bd12/attachment.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 2743 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20061120/c787bd12/attachment.jpg