Who guards the guards?

It really depends on the area and execution. Though this has been abused heavily by money-hungry police departments, if they solely set their sights on stopping the pieces of shit who weave wildly between cars while going 40+ kph faster than the flow of traffic, which is going 30+ kph faster than the speed limit, I’d welcome the stealthy police presence.
I’d like to go a week without nearly being run off the road by some fucker with a death wish, but the police have decided their priorities.
- We should tell the people who write tickets to go and enforce safe roads instead.
  
  We still need both. Even the safest design of a road could still let someone drive recklessly and dangerously.
  
  There is no safe road if someone decides that the red line is the target.
- Recent 2hr drive in California: five or six cars were an order of magnitude more dangerous than any of the other thousands of vehicles. Incredible.
  Speeding? Okay yeah people are gonna speed.
  Racing at 90MPH for a quarter mile in the right lane to cut off a truck and get one car ahead, then tailgating until you can cut another big rig off? That has to be the cause of a decent number of crashes we see on the shoulder.
  I’d try leaving speeders alone a while if it meant catching more of the tailgate->cut off->speed->tailgate->cut off drivers. (I know this is all been studied, just complaining)
  
  See, I don’t even understand tailgating. How’re you supposed to see far enough ahead to cut off the next person if your view is exclusively the trunk of an over-tall SUV? It’s just poorly thought out from beginning to end.
- I propose a new law where in order for a speeding ticket to stick, the cop has to document that the violation happened within proximity of another driver. That other driver can be the cop when they are traveling along the roadway, but not when they are hidden and nobody is around.
  We would never actually do it, both because it’s still dangerous to speed on your own and because money.
  But I figure that there are so many cases of speeding every day that the cops won’t even be aware of 1% of violations. Why not focus on the most dangerous ones?

Yeah, that hiding in the bushes bullshit is some wil-e-coyote nonsense.
- There's a spot by me that has a tiny dirt path leading into a small crop of bushes and trees that the fuckers cut a portion out of so it will cover everything but their window lol it's absurd...
  
  Reminds of the kind of place I'd probably spread a bunch of nails... wouldn't want people to be without building supplies near those bushes.
  
  And as soon as you found out about it you littered the area with nails and broken glass, right? ...right?
- Drivers will slow down an behave when they see a marked cruiser. For traffic enforcement i don't mind undercover cruisers.
  
  Getting people to slow down and behave is the entire point though?
  
  Shouldn't that be the whole point? Get people to slow down and behave? Or is punishment the entire purpose?
  
  I feel like the people doing traffic enforcement should be different than the police. Like, they shouldn't have guns and authority to search and murder. Just, like, a radar gun. and the authority to issue tickets and direct traffic.
  
  Behave? Causing people to suddenly slow down or slam on their brakes, and go 5-10 mph under the speed limit is infinitely more dangerous

My “favorite” are those ghost cars where you only see the police markings if light hits it the right way. “Protect and serve” my ass.
- Honestly I'll take that over unmarked anyway. It can be impossible to tell an unmarked police car from any random government fleet vehicle
  
  The spot lights are sometimes a good clue

Let's be honest, police trying to catch speeding cars or compulsive phone users with unmarked or hidden cruisers is not the reason why people don't trust the US police.
- I can only speak for myself, but I absolutely add any form of hidden speed traps to the list. Cops know they can perform "traffic calming" by parking a marked cruiser in an easily seen location, be it on a highway or a city street. People see the car and slow down. This works anywhere it's clear they can join traffic and pull you over. The officer effortlessly achieves a local bump in traffic safety just by sitting there, and cops don't need to do risky traffic stops unless someone is really not paying attention. So that's gotta be the preferred method, right?
  Meanwhile, hidden traps and unmarked cars have only one purpose: generate ticket revenue. The only mass "calming" that happens is kinda/sorta in the area where a cop has someone pulled over - and that's after the car is clearly visible.
  Edit: We can also solve speeding and reckless behavior by engineering calming measures into the road itself. The freaking DOT wrote a manual for it. IMO, it's hard to view speed traps as anything more than a band-aid fix with this in mind.
  
  Eh, if enforcement was actually consistent then traffic behavior would still change over time, even with unmarked cars. I don't really have sympathy for drivers who disregard traffic safety rules and I'm not interested in giving folks a fair shake at evading enforcement. Driving is a privilege and speeding imposes risks to society at large.
  Frankly, I'd be fine if we forced cops to fund themselves through ticket revenue, up until traffic safety stats improved.
  
  Are the speed/ red light cameras hidden where you are.
  Our red light cameras are usually at intersections and people tend to know about them because they are always trying to vandalise them.
  
  Meanwhile, hidden traps and unmarked cars have only one purpose: generate ticket revenue.
  That's not true - knowing that there could be a speed trap hidden anywhere makes drivers more likely to actually follow the law. Hidden traps are only an issue for people who believe that breaking the speed limit should be the norm.

Once on vacation with my wife, we were on a highway and saw a woman painting her fingernails while driving. She was doing this for a few mins and we heard a police motorcycle coming up from behind and we thought “Oh nice, go get her”… but they pulled us over instead! Apparently where the highway ends it goes from like 75mph to 30mph. Turns out cops hide in the area to catch people. It was a hefty ticket too since we were technically going “40mph” over (like everyone else). During the rest of our stay we noticed motorcycle cops everywhere! They were just camped out all over with radar guns in pairs trying to catch people. We ended up hiring a local lawyer to appear in court (since we had to appear in court for the ticket as well), since we obviously weren’t from the area. It was dismissed and we paid less for the lawyer than it would have been to pay the ticket plus insurance would have gone up each month.
- Same except I paid the ticket because idk how lawyers work
  
  My wife was very determined to not mess up her car insurance and her clean record. So she spent a while looking up and calling lawyers. It’s not time she got back, but in the grand scheme of things, very worth it.
- In my area we often have oversized speed limit signs and maybe even a flashing light to indicate such a drastic drop in speed, did this area have similar signage?
  
  No flashing lights or anything that stood out. I am usually the one that points that stuff out. I’ve never seen that many cops on bikes hiding around, so I have to assume it’s just how this town was setup.
- There's actually a neat trick to avoid traps like this, and it works anywhere in the country - what you do is: slow the fuck down and obey the fucking speed limit 🤷
  
  You must be ignorant of the reality of speed traps. Towns where it drops from 65 to 35 and the sign is hard to see. Andy Griffith, the twilight zone version, makes his living off people not from town. Also look up sundown towns. The signs are gone but they still exist, black folks generally know about them, there are probably still guides.
  
  You can also get a ticket for impeding the flow of traffic even if you obey the fucking speed limit depending on the state and mood of the pig.
  
  I am a stickler for going to speed limit everywhere, which drives my wife crazy, but being out of town there is no way to know some local things, so you just follow the flow of traffic. We were even going slower than some people around us, we were just the lucky ones the cop picked out. Those areas are created to be speed traps on purpose.
  
  Y'know, no matter how much you love and lick them boots, they'll never love you back.

Toronto police tried to pull this crap with the cars. They got so much heat they had to cancel and repaint the cars back. Rightfully the argument is that police are supposed to be highly visible. If someone needs help, how is camouflaging the response vehicle productive?
- Trick question, they're not actually there to help
  
  They're not there to help us.
  
  We can frustrate them by making them pretend they are at the very least.
  
  If someone broke your arm, the police will show up, and they might break your arm in the process of, whatever it is you call their job... terrorism?
- Visibility is like their biggest deterrent lol
- At least they're (often) required to wear high vis

I am of the firm stance that ghost police cars should never exist. If you need to be undercover to do a thing, then have a plain car.
But ghost cars are literally there to hide for "normal" everyday enforcement. And that type of police work should not involve hiding.

This is dumb, police have been hiding behind roadside billboards to catch speeders since the advent of the car. It's nothing new.
I for one am glad for speed enforcement, I fucking hate people who race on highways or city streets, dodging between cars with half a car-length to spare in front and back. Before texting, speeding caused the majority of highway fatalities.
I don't know who I hate more, cops or fucking asshole drivers.
- I'm with you on this one. I don't support the corrupt/abusive actions of many police, but people who removed and moan about being targeted for speeding and/or driving like assholes fucking deserve it. Now sure, getting popped for going just slightly over is garbage, but those aren't the drivers or the incidents I'm talking about. There's a weird sentiment among a lot of drivers that traffic laws are just arbritray and optional. I will always cheer for police who catch the worst of them, and I wish it happened more often.
  
  I don’t object to speed limits in the abstract. I do object to speed limits not being set to reasonable levels, such as the 85th percentile. I definitely object to the assholes careening along at breakneck speeds, and I have no problem with police deterring them.
  Now if we could just get traffic stops to stop being fishing expeditions for other stuff. The war on drugs was always made to be the war against minorities… that needs to end.
- Hate bad designers. US has some egregious road design.
  Don't make stroads. Either make streets with traffic calming or roads. This will reduce most of the need for speed checks.
  And instead of hiding, just put that car in plain view. People will slow down automatically. You can even cheap our and out a cardboard car to fake a police car, studies have show this works😂
  
  hiding and being visible are very different philosophies on speed enforcement:
  hidden cars and cameras are intended to slow people down in general; marked cars and cameras are intended to slow people down in specific areas
  neither are particularly right or wrong imo, and in fact where i live in australia both are used regularly
  
  I live in the Netherlands with streets full of traffic calming measures people speed here all the time.
- My take on this is, why hide? The mere presence of a police car typically makes people behave in traffic, and if they don’t then they can still get nabbed. Wouldn’t it be better to be visible and a looming threat without the profit incentive of just getting people for tickets?
  
  Most of them don't hide. Not really. That bike cop behind the bush is something I've never seen. They are almost always in obvious sight, doing exaxtly what you're suggesting: deterring speeders.
  As for the black-on-black markings. Yeah, I wish they were more obvious. Mostly so I can be sure I stay out of their way on the highway.

Every time I see police markings on American cars, they look to me like the cops are trying to be cool and hip with their sick fonts. But to me it just screams unprofessional.
- They didn't used to look like this. The shift happened sometime in the late '90s - early aughts. The fonts and designs until then were gradually modernized but it was similar to corporate letterhead. They also shifted from baby blue shirts to all black around the same time.
  The image went from stressful/powerful bureaucrat in a funny uniform to GI Joe action figure.
  
  The shift happened in direct response to the ruling of Harlow V Fitzgerald in 1982. That case fucked up a lot of things, because SCOTUS was, unknown to them, handed an illegally amended version of the law in question that was relevant to the case. The law is § 1983 of the federal code. When an unnamed secretary was tasked with copying the Congressional Record of 1871 into the Federal Register in 1874, said unnamed secretary illegally removed a 16 word clause that completely reversed the intent of the law.
  http://web.archive.org/web/20230520080201/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/us/politics/qualified-immunity-supreme-court.html
  
  GI Joe action figure.
  I don't think that's a coincidence. Consider when Jeeps started showing up with all the off-road accessory options. I've seen some that were just short a Cobra/Joe logo on the side. Gen-X is has been in the management and disposable-capital age bracket for a while now, making all the decisions that drive these aesthetics, and we were all raised on that stuff.
  
  late '90s - early aughts.
  Around that time, the show "Cops" became one of the most popular shows on television and people believed it was real and unedited. As well as a slew of "realistic and gritty" cop shows hit the airwaves (ask your parents what an "airwave" is) and there was a wave of pro-cop sentiment after the LA riots because media selectively showed cops being "heroes against the mobs" which at the time, was very new to see playing out on live-ish television.
  There was some pushback because of the Rodney King beating and others that were being caught on video, the term "police brutality" became a buzzword, but it also seemed like it was a small, isolated problem that went away because people carried cameras all the time and "a few bad apples" and all that. (Not shown before body-cams: cops beating or shooting the people carrying cameras.)
- Can confirm. I moved from the US to Canada nearly ten years ago, and it's been approximately that long since I found a cop's presence intimidating. I don't ever feel like the RCs are out to get me.

I can see different degrees of this. I agree that I'd rather have a visible presence in traffic monitoring that helps remind people they are being watched for adherence to the rules of the road, and give people who are pushing the limits an opportunity to fix it rather than catch them. So speed traps for money quotas or a door to gain access to vehicles to find or "create" issues (usually based on profiling) is the problem here. As well as abuse of the power to be able to speed and ignore the same rules when an emergency isn't pending, or escalating a traffic stop beyond what it was originally for again because of the power trip.
My response to the typical complaining about speed traps isn't usually first to focus on the police, but to ask, "well, were you speeding or driving recklessly?" When someone gets mad from that question, then the problem may not be (just) the police.
- That last part really sounds like "Well, what did you do to deserve getting hit in the first place?" to me.
  We have rights to privacy and willfully giving them up for policing activities should be met with resistance. As Ben Franklin intimated, those that would give up liberty for security or power deserve none of those things. The founding fathers were pretty pro-privacy and went to a lot of trouble to be very outspoken about it. Not only in the Constitution, but in lots of original state's Declarations of Rights, and they seem pretty into the idea that people shouldn't be being targeted for punitive legal action unless there's a warrant or probable cause, and passive surveillance is targeting anyone and everyone that passes by it all the time.
  ETA an Upton Sinclair quote that seems relevant: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." I think about that a lot. Others should, too.
  One more edit, a link to the actual Sinclair text: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1558/1558-h/1558-h.htm#link2H_4_0047
  
  So what do you propose for the narrow subject of speed limits or other rules of the road? It seems enforcement of them (which btw is very lacking otherwise people wouldn't speed so much) is off the table since that's a violation of privacy in your opinion. So honor system?
  I agree with you on a broad scale, privacy is more important and government doesn't belong in many places. But using a speeding post to bounce that off of is a weird take. There are many rules and regulations written in blood, and road laws are included in that. And without someone enforcing the laws (but not using that enforcement as a way to abuse power) it's a free-for-all.
  We could certainly discuss the details of traffic stops, speed trap designs and motives, and of course abuse of power. My little comment was simply that if you aren't speeding, and there isn't that abuse going on, why would they pull you over, and why would you care if they are watching for others who are going too fast?

me just assuming every V8 Charger less than five years old, white, red or black and clean is a cop by default
- Same for black, white or red Ford Exploders.
  
  This is why I believe people who buy white Ford Explorers are likely dicks. Don't act like you don't know.
- This is part of why they run undercover cars. Now you think every black charger could be a cop and thus you try to drive following the rules nearby those models, even when it isn't a cop.

Define irony.
- What am I looking at
  
  A truck that's about to gain some good ol' American Freedom™.

Why do we have pictures of a cop when there are so many of plain clothed, mask wearing, and unidentifiable ICE guys?

Camouflage is one of the five physical traits of a predator, the others more or less apply with enough hand waving
its the five behavior traits all apply very obviously. Stealth, strategy (attack together), territorial (protect their jurisdiction), patience (speed traps), adaptability

In Canada police vehicles are visible as all hell. A blind person can know there is a police car there.
- In my area in ontario i dont think i have seen any unmarked cars in a few years at least, but for a while about 5-10 years ago they were pulling all sorts of shit, i saw an unmarked pickup truck, like 4 different models of unmarked suvs, and at least a couple different unmarked cruiser designs. They were being sneaky as hell with it for a bit.
  
  Also in Ontario. My local police force has unmarked cars, trucks and SUVs. I regularly see unmarked opp when traveling outside of town.
  
  I'm in Quebec and I never saw them. Or maybe I did but never noticed. But the SPVM always seemed to have very clearly marked vehicles.

Why not use Comic Sans ? :)

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

For something like traffic enforcement it makes sense to hide

That's one of those sayings that sounds good on paper but completely falls apart when you think about it for two seconds.
We need undercover police to investigate crime organizations.
We need unmarked police vehicle to catch dangerous drivers who put everyone at risk.
...
- Except police don't actually do their jobs.
  
  Depends on the country your are living in
- We need undercover police to investigate crime organizations.
  We need unmarked police vehicle to catch dangerous drivers who put everyone at risk.
  If that's all they did, and they were transparent about even their undercover operations to catch actual threats to our community, I would have a lot more support for them.
  The reality is that cops are brute-squad who serve their own interests more times than not. I often find it telling about the state of the narrative that when police "accidentally" shoot some black kid in the back nine times, it's a scandal that disappears and there are people coming out of the woodwork to say "that kid shouldn't have run."
  But as soon as someone posts a story or clip of a cop shooting their dog in their own house without warning or pause, it's massive outcry and cop-hate. Fun fact, cops kill 10000 or more pets a year
  If you ever had a beloved pet in your life, imagine for a moment a cop coming in your home for unrelated reasons and then drawing their gun and shooting your dog in the head for barking and then carrying on like nothing happened.
  (If this doesn't make your blood boil, you would make an ideal cop.)
- If the mere visible presence of a police vehicle makes people drive less recklessly (because if it didn't these vehicles would be pointless), is that not already accomplishing the goal of road safety? You would give up the broader effect of people seeing the vehicle and slowing down, just so a cop can write a couple tickets for whoever they choose out of the group? To me that sounds more like exacting revenge for a perceived slight (ntm a HUGE opportunity for police to abuse power and profile targets) than simply being concerned for safety.
  Also if a driver is truly reckless, would it really matter if the police vehicle is marked or not? Reckless drivers aren't known for their perceptive ability or for that matter their respect for authority... This only allows police to catch drivers that would have taken their presence as a reminder to verify that they are following the laws.
  So to that end, this expansion of the police state is only to promote rule abiding by instilling into drivers, at least the ones that care to follow the law, the constant paranoia that police could be watching. This will inevitably fail and result in less safe roads, because humans aren't machines that can go on forever operating on an exact set of instructions. But at least some of those drivers will have expensive tickets to pay when they slip up, and at least the police get to say they did something.
  Rather than just having sensible rules that you would have to go out of your way to break, along with implementing other safer means of transport so that there are fewer people at risk for driving incidents. I would much rather see promotion and investment into a bus line than a swanky new stealth police vehicle, for example.
- We don't need police. All Cops Are Criminals

The USA should use the same speed traps we use in the EU, along with the draconian fines and punishments for screwing up.

"If you're not doing anything wrong then you don't have anything to hide!"