Maybe this piece by a friend and neighbor of mine will get that jump-started:
On April 16, I became a criminal almost without realizing it.
I let my dog off his leash in a public park.
(...)
Our area has its share of petty crimes. An occasional minor burglary, vandalism or attempted scam seem to be common nearly everywhere.
But on Easter weekend, someone was arrested on my street for selling heroin out of his mother's house. A woman was attacked on a jogging trail a few weeks ago. We've seen discarded condoms on the path to the dog park. An abandoned car sat across from a church for nearly a week before the police finally tagged it. (It took at least three phone calls.) And there are strong suspicions of drug deals happening in the park at night.
So the zeal of the Durham police officer who spotted us and pursued us through the park was particularly galling.
By the time he caught up with us he was out of breath, pale and determined. We were issued citations with $25 fines, plus $110 in court costs, and given trial dates. Yes, we could just pay the fines. Why was the court cost necessary if we didn't go to court? "You'll have to speak to the magistrate about that" was the answer.
It goes on.
I can see the point of leash laws in the abstract...but the reality is that there are hundreds (thousands?) of "nuisance" laws on the books that are almost never enforced unless, you know...someone is actually creating a nuisance. And this was not the case.
We usually walk our dog with Richard and the woman with him who got ticketed...if not for being elsewhere that evening, either my wife or I would have been cited, too. And it wouldn't have been because our dogs were causing a problem for anyone. If a leashed dog we don't know or anyone with kids comes within 100 feet, everybody hooks up. If the park is busy, the dogs stay leashed. We don't let them off anywhere near a street.
The only reason they got cited was because the officer didn't have to chase these otherwise law-abiding citizens down, didn't have to worry about a violent confrontation, didn't have to do anything resembling--police work.
2 comments:
The cardinal failing of democracy is that it does consider strength of preference. So what you got here is a bunch of people with a very weak preference for leash laws (led by a vanguard of people with strong preferences) and a minority of people who really want their dog off-leash.
In a perfect world of no transactions costs, baragining could solve this problem. Kind of like what the Nature Conservancy did with wolf reintroductions when they created a fund to compensate people who lost livestock to wolves. You could have the same thing for dog bites and everyone who wanted to run their dog off-leash could contribute.
Then the off-leashers would police themselves. An offending owner whose dog attacked someone would threaten the pot and raise "premiums."
Punish outcomes not inputs. Of course - this has its own set of complications. Namely - the inability of people to properly weigh low probability events.
Blah Blah Blah.
Peripherally related...
The dog park referred to in the piece (which is now open) is an old softball field set back about 100 yards from any road along the bike/jogging path in the neighborhood.
Before the city decided to make it a dog park, the neighborhood was already using it as one. And I thought it was a great example of a spontaneous, self-policing community. Peer pressure pretty much kept the ill-behaved dogs (well, their owners) out. Plus, the fact that there was a large gap in the fence meant that only people with at least some degree of voice control over their dogs could really let them off-leash there.
When the city locked it up to upgrade it (effectively closing the "dog park") the frequency with which that area was used for drug deals and probable prostitution (or at least sex) went noticeably up, because no one was back there on a regular basis.
Now that it is officially open, I think the petty crime will probably move elsewhere again, but what's funny is that the owners and dogs that patronize the park are not as well-behaved as before. People are lulled into a false sense of security just because the fence is fixed and because all the dogs have to have their shots to be there. Neither of which prevents their dog from being an asshole or ignoring you when they are called.
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