Red Lights and Registration Cards

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Red Lights and Registration Cards

When I was living in Montenegro, formerly part of the former dictatorship of ex-Yugoslavia, I learned that they still had an archaic law which required tourists to register with the police each time they changed hotels. Here is my original writing on that law.

I was thinking about the law here in Montenegro that tourists are supposed to register with the police when they visit here. I was wondering why this law was ever created. I wondered if it was to help the society function more smoothly, like a traffic light, or if it was to control people.

I have been to around fifty countries and I have never had to register with the police before. So it would seem to me that this law is not necessary for things to function smoothly in a country.

Then I started thinking about why people do or don’t follow a law. One of my first thoughts is that if a law makes sense, people are more likely to follow it. When I say “making sense” I mean does it serve an obvious purpose? Is the reason for the law immediately clear to most people?

Several, even many, people have told me not to worry about the law which says that I and my hostel guests have to register with the police. This implies to me that they have come to a general consensus that the law isn’t really necessary or important. Evidently the police share this opinion because if they did not, then they would be punishing people, fining them, deporting them etc. Of course, deporting tourists is not a good way to attract them, and now tourism is one of the brightest spots in the Montenegrin economy, so it could be that the police are using their judgment in when to enforce this law.

This is actually one of the many things I like about Montenegro. Things are not set in stone. You can even argue with the police here and they will not immediately call ten squad cars or the SWAT team.

I want to keep this short, but I feel a need to say something about punishment and motivation. My question is this: What motivates a person to stop at a red light? (Assuming there are no cars coming and it would not be dangerous to enter the intersection.)

Is it a voluntary action based on the understanding that traffic lights serve a useful purpose? Or is it out of fear for getting punished if they do not stop. I just would like to say that I believe our social relations, actions and interactions function more smoothly when people act based more on the former kind of motivation and less on the latter. One conclusion I have reached is that it is therefore better to educate people so they understand the reason for laws or rules than it is to simply threaten them with punishment. I would, by the way, like to see more education of this sort in schools, where education could logically be expected to be highly valued, and less use of threats, fear and punishment as a means of controlling students.

S. Hein
Feb 18, 2009

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Note:

I was told by several people who worked in the government that the reason you are required to register with the police is so you won’t have any problems when you leave the country. I found this explanation very unsatisfying. It was also frustrating when I asked several people who worked in the tourist information office, in other words people you would expect would know, and they each gave me different answers. Some said you only have to do it once during your visit to the country, some said you were supposed to do it each time you changed hotels (or the hotels would do it for you) and some said don't worry about it at all.

In the beginning I didn't worry about it, or even know about it. Then one day I met a girl from Russia who told me of being hassled by a police officer. She had a mohawk hairdo and could easily be stereotyped as an anarchist or something, so I think that is why she was singled out. She was asked about her registration card when she was still in the country. She was warned that if he saw her again without a registration card, he would have her deported.

After the exchange with the police officer she felt threatened and intimidated. If the officer would have been concerned about her having problems at the border when she left the country, he could have told her this in a helpful, concerned caring way. I would call this an abuse of power.

In any case, my first thought about this is that the whole registration card thing was some kind of security or in other words, control, measure. The more I learned about this law and laws in general in dictatorships or former dictatorships, the more I feel sure the laws are based on controlling the people, not protecting them or caring about them.

Apparently for example, in former times in Yugoslavia, foreigners and Balkan citizens who visited other Balkan countries were required to show the border police where they had stayed while in the country. For example, if someone from Serbia visited Croatia, they might have been asked by the Croatian border police where they had stayed. I suspect this is because there were, let’s say, not the best of relations between the countries. And also, those in power felt insecure and felt a big need to be in control of everything. They felt insecure because they knew the people weren't being treated well and had many reasons to rebel.

Above I asked the question: What motivates a person to stop at a stop light if there are no cars coming? Now I would like people to think about what motivates a student to turn to page 23 when a teacher tells them to? Or what motivates a student to be quiet when they are told to?

I believe these questions are worth giving a lot of thought to, especially in a country which is truly, or even, ideally based on freedom and democracy.

Democracy