Are the police efficient law enforcers or efficient bribe extractors?

Insert your own allegedl-ys / ies?

I often drive in South Africa and noticed something that struck me as rather strange. I regularly see two police officers hiding behind a tree or bridge with a radar gun trying to catch speeding motorists. (This doesn’t, it seems, discourage many motorists from speeding despite the fact that there appear to be a lot of police with speed guns around.) Nothing strange about that, but often a few kilometres either before or after the police with speed guns, there is a large group of police who appear to be hanging around not doing too much.

One explanation might be that they are there to offer backup in case the two who are out on a limb get themselves into a sticky situation. But they always seem too far away to me to be of much assistance. Wouldn’t it be better if there were more police officers to catch offending motorists and enforce the fine?

I’m no traffic cop, but it seems to me that if catching speeders and fining them is the aim, there should be more than two of them around. So I searched for another explanation.

It seems that when you are caught speeding, it is possible to negotiate to pay an ‘on-the-spot’ fine which is related in some way to the official fine schedule (the more over the limit you are, the larger the official fine). Would these mutually beneficial (to the individual police officer and the individual driver) be possible with a large group of police officers? I suspect not. That is rather a lot of blind eyes being turned at once.

My suspicion is that there is a tacit agreement to take it in turns to be one of the guys with the speed gun and arrange ‘on-the-spot’ fines. This would be beneficial to all drivers caught speeding and to all police officers who participate, and I suspect, also to those who dislike corruption but whose life would be made hard if they officially witnessed it and felt compelled to act.

The official fine schedule is pretty harsh, but the fact that it rarely seems to be imposed might explain its lack of deterrence. Everyone’s a winner?