One person's opinion is another person's "objectively stupid."
I have yet to see a reasonable proposition on how to do traffic enforcement that seems to sit right with the vast majority of people.
My point in making the above joke(s) is that this is the alternative that many people cried out for. It feels like goal-post moving when every way to enforce the law is "but not this way, a different way."
My guess at the common denominator that cannot possibly be objectively confirmed is that people simply don't want to be met with consequences for breaking the law, and no matter how that's done it will be rejected.
In other words, every way to enforce traffic has downsides - every single one. This is the one that does not involve cops. As you see, this is the downside. It's laughably easy to "THIS IS BAD" at it while proposing no alternatives, and very amusing when an alternative (like this one) is eventually picked apart for being "objectively stupid" when its downsides inevitably crop up.
You can thank the teeming legions of genuinely hateful people flooding platforms everywhere for their mods/admins/etc. investing less and less time in pruning each individual (suspected) instance of hate.
You were the baby that was thrown out with the bathwater. I doubt your absence will impact their shareholder value.
I did click around that exact page a week or so ago when someone was suggesting people leave Lemmy for Piefed, but similarly, I didn't see much that I was missing on Lemmy.
So far my only gripe with Lemmy has been that I keep stubbing my toes on not supporting communism/the CCP hard enough for the tastes of some communities' moderators. In their defense, one of them explains in their sidebar that the whole point of their community is to be propaganda for communism, but I never noticed it while browsing the front page. Ostensibly, that's on me, so the 3-day I caught was deserved.
My only gripe with hopping over to have at Piefed would be the mild hassle involved, so I'll probably get around to it eventually.
As previously mentioned, they simply bottle it up. It's not hard to "I've never had any suicidal ideations" your way out of any mandatory screening as currently implemented. Some are better at rooting out deception like that, but apparently that's not in the budget. I received an MMPI-style questionnaire and subsequent interview, but so did all three of those peers I mentioned who passed just the same as I did. Hell, one of my academy classmates told the psychologist he thought he was Batman. When pressed for why, he relented and said it was an outburst because he was distraught due to his goldfish dying. He obviously made it through with a Pass and I think is still on the force many years later? His social media is intentionally obscure so it's hard to say.
Truth be told, reforming law enforcement in this and other ways is simply not politically motivating for most Americans; they're generally either focused on other single issues, "The police are perfect and criticizing them is immoral," or "The police are all bastards and need to be abolished."
I'm not dumb enough to tell everyone I meet I was a cop so all of my discussions about the matter are generally relegated to the internet, but of the people I bump elbows with on the topic on Reddit, 90% of the time it turns into name-calling and other bad faith tactics. The other evidence I use is... -gestures broadly at the state of US politics-. Remember when people were marching in the streets to fix the police? Remember how it generally didn't?
Pedantically that doesn't take away from your point but asserting just for clarity because I see people bring it up a lot:
The infamous Killology lecture isn't taught to the vast majority of law enforcement in the US as I understand it. We certainly didn't receive it (or similar) at my academy.
I've heard it isn't quite as bad as cherry-picked-and-taken-out-of-context-to-malign, but I've personally never watched it, much like I haven't read Mein Kampf; "That seems like a soup sandwich of nasty, so I'm not going to waste my time."