This is not out in some rural town. This is in Portland, OR about 2 miles from downtown. Personal vehicles this large are simply incompatible with urban living and pressure their owners to continually break traffic law. Technically that Miata is parked as close to the stop sign as it can legally be, but as the Denali doesn’t fit in many places around here it’s owner is compelled to park across both the stop sign and the crosswalk.
It’s the exact same reason why Europe has better Labour Laws: decades ago the many fought to change the system so that they were not being constantly fucked up by the few.
The cops are just a mechanism for applying said good laws that people fought for in the past.
This is also why as many such laws have regressed in the last couple of decades, the utility of the cops for the general public regressed with them, and more and more what’s visible as the utility of the cops is the only kind of use of the powers of the state that has never wavered: the protection of the property and physical integrity of the wealthy and powerful.
None of this is transport specific, though it definitely gets reflected in transport (partly in terms of traffic laws, their application and the size of the penalties when they are broken, but even more so in general transportation policies such as public transportation and even the very design of streets putting more importance on non-car transportation and less on car transportation, which is why, for example, sidewalks are more common in Europe) because of its outsized impact in quality of life.
In fact I would say that the much broader availability of public transportation in Europe too is the product of the very same fights in the past to put the interest of the many above the interests of the few.
calling the cops about small things in the US can very easily destroy lives. Only do it when something is life or death.