> I'd also ask exactly what you want to do with your "fast feedback loop to catch people driving without a license".
Unless the vehicle is stolen, seize and impound the vehicle. If the driver is the owner, auction it off and give them back the proceeds, minus costs.
I feel like I'm living in some different world where drunk driving is a-okay when I face these types of objections to actually enforcing the rules around it.
I don’t think the pendulum has ever really swung towards high-effectiveness interventions, only, as you call them, harsh ones.
As far as DUIs are concerned I’m specifically not in favour of harsh jail time and fines due to their lack of effectiveness and collateral damage.
Interventions to allow a short feedback loop to stop the crimes being prevented simply haven’t been tried at scale for DUIs - think efforts like NYC’s anti-idling laws where you can collect a portion of the fine for reporting idling trucks.
Based on, among other things, my experience living for years without a car in both a medium-sized city and a small town, I find it unpersuasive to claim that anyone, including poor and minorities are better served by having community members drive drunk rather than not driving at all. We’ve quantified the costs of drunk driving (hundreds of billions of $) - I’d welcome anyone to quantify the economic benefits we get from allowing those with DUIs to continue to drive.
It's more that you don't seem to engage much with the trade-offs of all of the possible options. This debate has been going on for decades and society has swung back and forth multiple times already. "Let's enforce things much more harshly" is not at all a new take. Enforcing things harshly enough to actually cut down on the rates of DWI will most definitely cause serious damage to a bunch of lives, including many poor and minorities, and there isn't going to be some clever way around that.
It is a possible position at the end of the day though. You may come across as more honest and experienced if you just explicitly say that you think it's worth that damage to cut down on DWI related accidents. I would even agree that we should probably swing that pendulum a bit more towards enforcement. It seems kind of silly and naive to me though to pretend that you can just hand-wave the resulting damage away,