This was inspired by a post I saw the other day.
In my city, there’s a fast food restaurant where people regularly use the drive through, park in a nearby neighborhood to eat, and when they’re done just toss their trash out the window.
What’s to be done about this in an ideal world? My initial thought is that “police” should stake it out and hand out littering tickets to those doing this.
Of course, these police would be unarmed, properly trained in deescalation, and maybe not even part of a greater police department (supposing such department even exists).
But I’m worried that this is just a super lib response, and wondering what your thoughts are. I’m a bit troubled by handing out these fines - these are potentially hundreds of dollars to people who can’t afford it. And an alternative sentence of community service to clean up trash, while there seems to be a sense of proportionate justice to it, is of course forced labor and would be unconstitutional under the 13th amendment but for that exception that people on this website love to quote and dunk on. Moreover, this is a deterrence-based approach which opens its own can of worms.
I think the best way to solve social ills to to best consider why anybody is acting on said ills in the first place. Back before plumbing, people shit into chamber pots and threw those pots out of the window because it was a socially acceptable way to dispose of waste. If I were to do that today, people would look at me as if I was either mentally ill or playing an extremely cruel "prank"; there would be immense social pressure for me to not do that.
When people litter, they do so because it's easy and there is not enough social pressure for them to not do that, and it therefore becomes acceptable. Exactly how we go about changing social norms for the better is really up for debate and I honestly don't know enough to suggest how to do that
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A small town in Spain was tired of people leaving dog poop everywhere and instituted a policy where instead of a cash fine or jail, they would identify the homeowner and just... mail it back. In a box. There are a lot of procedural flaws with this exact implementation, like the rather large amount of surveillance required to actually do it, but it seemed to have worked. Perhaps the best way is to keep people as aware as possible about the negative externalities of their actions by directly presenting it to them