The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit yesterday issued a ruling in defense of the lucrative red light camera program in Chicago, Illinois. Mayor Richard Daley (D) has made it clear that expansion of the existing 136 cameras, which so far have generated $110 million, is designed to increase the number of citations issued and close a gap in the 2009 budget. The three-judge federal court panel found this to be a good reason to install cameras. “A system of photographic evidence reduces the costs of law enforcement and increases the proportion of all traffic offenses detected; these benefits can be achieved only if the owner is held responsible,” Chief Judge Frank H. Easterbrook wrote for the unanimous panel. “That the city’s system raises revenue does not condemn it.”
Lawyers for motorist Parveen Idris challenged Chicago’s system, arguing that it violated the due process rights of vehicle owners held responsible for offenses they did not commit. The court brushed aside the concern by pointing out that the US Supreme Court has already upheld the seizure of automobiles even in cases where, “the owner may have nothing to do with the offense.” Likewise, the taxpayer is held responsible for the math errors of an accountant who files a tax return with mistakes. Given these results, the appeals court saw no need to provide any due process protection in red light camera cases where the fine is comparatively small.
“The interest at stake is a $90 fine for a traffic infraction, and the Supreme Court has never held that a property interest so modest is a fundamental right,” Easterbrook wrote.
The court suggested that a challenge to procedures used in Chicago’s administrative red light camera hearings would be better heard in state courts. The opinion cited the Minnesota Supreme Court decision that found red light cameras in violation of the state constitution (view opinion).
There’s nothing really wrong with the following points:
* It is more cost-effective than having a cop sit in a running cruiser doing the same thing
* It does catch more people than ‘blitzes” using actual police
* Consistent, always-on enforcement is always better than “blitzes”. This also means consistency in light timings, by the way.
* As long as it’s a fine and not a demerit, there’s nothing wrong with sending it to the owner of the vehicle and making him/her track down the driver at the time.
* Without a cop present, there’s no possibility for “fishing expeditions”, otherwise known as “driving while young and/or brown and/or at the wrong time of the day and/or if the officer is in a bad mood or has a quota to fill”
Where these go awry is when:
* They start screwing with yellow times to generate revenue
* They attempt to demerit the owner of the car
* They start trying to photograph the driver
What this means is that it’s ok to generate revenue from more efficient enforcement. It’s not ok to incentivize enforcement, either through things like yellow timings, quotas or disingenuous speed limit signage.
The courts reasoning is blatantly elitist and strikes me as difficult to defend; I realize they are basing their decison on precedent struck by the high court but the assumption that a $90 fine is modest ignores the perpetrators income. $90 may be modest if your a federal judge bring home just over 100k a year, but for some working stiff who makes $10 an hour or less it is a days pay or a weeks worth of groceries. If the court see this form of taxation as fair, it should at least recognize the fundamental unfairness of its regressive structure.
At least when you are pulled over by a living and breathing police officer you have the right to due process and the right to confront your accuser. A person of limited means can at least have the option to fight,even if their chance of success is slim. The fact that there is no way out of a ticket generated by a camera other than to ignore it exemplifies the unfairness of this practice.
Why am I talking about income and regressive forms of taxation? Because they exceptionally relevant when the governments main interest is revenue generation.( as opposed to safety) Any policy discussion of tax policy will usually have some element of regressive vs. progressive schemes, and this way of taxing people (using speed cameras) is highly, highly regressive, even more so than sales tax or a VAT tax. Why? Because at least with a sales tax I can influence how much I buy and thus how much i’m taxed.
Atmos: Courts will generally not mess with the legislatures decisions in this sort of area. You’d have to be doing something really bad before the courts will check it. The court will give the legislature the full benefit of the doubt on questions like this.
At least when you are pulled over by a living and breathing police officer you have the right to due process and the right to confront your accuser.
Bull.
So you can go to court and day its your word against the police officer’s? In a court that’s blatantly slanted against you? “Due process” is all well and good, but more than a little jargonistic. Traffic court is not a full-blown criminal trial, it’s a sham. Personally, I’d rather have a photo taken by a machine because then I’d have actual evidence.
Have you ever tried fighting a parking ticket? Unless you get off on a technicality, you’re going to pay it, one way or another. Personally, after my few introductions to the traffic system, I think that we’re wasting huge amounts of money paying police to snap photos and write tickets, on a quota, for an incentive. Thanks, but I’ll take a faceless, emotionless camera over a cop’s “discretion”.
Plus, we’d free up police for actual crime prevention.
this way of taxing people (using speed cameras) is highly, highly regressive, even more so than sales tax or a VAT tax
And like a VAT, you can avoid it. Don’t speed, and be prepared to stop at an intersection. I’ve gotten exactly one “fail to stop” ticket and it was my fault. When I went to traffic court, I saw rows of scumbags all trying to bargain down the ticket they did get, or hoping the cop doesn’t show up. That’s not “due process”, that’s a waste of time, money and effort. And in no way is it better than a camera.
If you can’t afford the fine, don’t drive like you can. Don’t speed, don’t rush yellows. Easy. Why is this so hard for people to understand?
That’s a death blow to the myth enforcement relates to traffic safety. Most jurisdictions do not assess demerit points largely removing the motivation to improve. Motorists with deep pockets simply pay a fee to speed, disobey automatic traffic signals or whatever. It is stealth taxation.
When 1% of traffic lights have red light cameras, people don’t pay much attention. The city can make a lot of money by catching people unaware. As more cameras are added in the city of Chicago and in the adjoining suburbs, awareness will rise and revenue per camera will fall. Eventually there will be no ROI for installing a camera system. That, and intersections will be much safer. Isn’t that what everyone said they wanted all along?
I live in the suburbs of Chicago. As of 2007 I had never seen a red light camera. My normal route to work involves 42 traffic lights. Six of them now have cameras. I expect over 25% of them to have cameras by the end of 2009.
George Orwell would be impressed.
Government spy cameras automatically collecting government revenue for minor infractions by the people.
Now if they can just get rid of that stupid voting system it would be a lot easier to implement more of this government wealth generating kinda stuff. Most of the elected officials are quite jealous of Castro.
Most jurisdictions do not assess demerit points largely removing the motivation to improve
And well they should not. The camera should not attempt to prove who is driving the car (it can’t do it well, and it’s a privacy issue to try). I don’t think there are many people who would callously disregard a ticket. Even if you’re well off, this isn’t a twenty-dollar parking infraction.
And given the number of scumbags who go to court to bargain for a fine but not points (and the number of judges that will accept that plea) means the point is moot.
psarhjinian;
So then people who are less affluent should be forced to drive differently than others? Some enforcement zones are pure revenue generators, i.e the sudden 25 MPH speed limit imposed on a four lane road in a rural area…and we all know cities have been known to reduce yellow light times.
My point is that cameras are 100% about revenues, or taxation, not safety. And if a policy is designed purely for revenue generation, it should be progressive and accountable to the people. Schools don’t just arbitrarily raise your taxes, they put a levy to vote. When we vote for politicians theres almost always a debate about taxes. Yet people don’t seem to recognize that these tickets are yet another form of taxation- one that we can’t vote on.
Judge Frank H. Easterbrook – Appointed because he is close personal friends with Mayor Dal…..I mean most qualified person for the job.
I don’t know that I have a problem with this (I am a resident of the City of Chicago). What I do have a problem with is the lights are noticeably short on yellows. Its either slam the brakes or get nailed on a lot of them. They do a good job of posting signs, and I know the lights on my drives that have them, so I’m careful. But I do find that just seeing the blinking red no-walk sign for pedestrians on a photo light gets me really nervous EVERY time. Nervousness and slamming on brakes can’t be good for safety.
At least the city isn’t lying that its about safety. Gotta give them props for that.
And finally, I’ve gotten 3 parking tickets in the last 5 months, all questionable and all have been contested and in process (the city has been issuing tickets whenever there’s a CHANCE you parked illegally). I think my fines were $60 if I don’t get them thrown out. I went out to the west side to drop off one of my tickets at the city offices. Then you start to realize what these crackdowns and red light cameras are doing. People who can barely make ends meet, with cars that barely run, to get them to a job that pays nothing, and they get busted with the same fines I do. Now one could say that breaking the law should cost the same regardless of your income, but while there, I saw people having to go on payment plans. A lot of us can pay the fines if we have to. To a lot of Chicagoans, $50-$90 is a huge financial burden. People shouldn’t have to go on a payment plan to pay for a parking ticket or a red light fine that could be avoided by just extending yellows. I know breaking the law is breaking the law. But something about the “gotcha” way this city gives out tickets makes it really disgusting to see what these people have to go through when they get “caught”.
From that perspective, I gotta say the Euro country that bases fines on income levels (Norway?) might just be on to something….
I should clearify my argument:
1) The court decides that it doesn’t matter that the motive is profit/revenue
2) The court falls back on two arguments for denying due process A) The USSC has ruled that one’s property can be siezed even if it is by no fault of the owner (i.e. someone steals your car and commits a crime with it) States conducting automotive seizure rely on a doctrine found in a 1931 Supreme Court ruling stating “It is the property which is preceded against, and, by resort to a legal fiction, held guilty and condemned as though it were conscious instead of inanimate and insentient.” – thus, your car committed the offense, and is responsible for the ticket, even if you weren’t the driver…
and B)That due process is not necessary for ‘small’ sanctions, with little regard as to what constitutes ‘small’. This is where the argument falls apart. Due process should not be denied based on some number or valuation because numbers don’t mean anything in a society composed of wide and extremely diverse income levels, but rather percentages matter. For some, a loss of $25 is a crisis.
Basically the court is saying “big deal it’s a mere pittance…” based on an assumption of income…
It’s appalling that the courts find it acceptable to turn justice into a profit center. That was clearly not the intent of the Constitution.
Justice is a cost of doing business in a democracy. If laws are structured to make money, then laws will be created with the express purpose of making money, no matter what injustice is done.
Let’s hope that the Supremes do something about it. Of course, they won’t.
So then people who are less affluent should be forced to drive differently than others?
That’s a red herring argument. People who are less affluent already do just that: they drive less nice cars, avoid tolls, don’t waste fuel and don’t garner the kind of driving record that results in eight thousand dollar a year insurance premiums.
Most people stop for reds, including the rich. Most people go the accepted limit, including the rich.
Some enforcement zones are pure revenue generators, i.e the sudden 25 MPH speed limit imposed on a four lane road in a rural area…and we all know cities have been known to reduce yellow light times.
I’m not disputing you there, I’m just saying that either:
a) if we are going to use enforcement as revenue, you may as well use cameras as they’re cheaper, a hell of a lot more fair, and less likely to be jackasses than a cop on the quota system
b) the problem isn’t the camera, or the generation of revenue, but the compromising of safety. Protesting the camera gets you nowhere; protesting the shortened yellow or the speed trap zone is effort better spent, especially if you can prove it’s unsafe and get a lawyer to help you. There’s nothing like a lawsuit for wiping out revenue.
Yet people don’t seem to recognize that these tickets are yet another form of taxation- one that we can’t vote on.
Yes, you can. You can vote in a candidate who doesn’t support them, or organize an effort to campaign against them and present that voting block to your elected officials.
That enough people either don’t care or don’t agree with you about the issue does not mean there is no democratic process available to you.
I don’t agree that Chicago is screwing around with the yellows or somehow cheating with the red light cameras only because I can’t leave my house without driving through a few and the expected citations never arrive. I don’t slam on my brakes if I see a yellow either.
Honestly if $90 is a “huge financial burden” sell your car and get on the CTA. Sorry if that makes me an elitist but when you are behind the wheel of a car you assume a lot of responsibility/liability.
I am happy to subsidize the CTA with my tax dollars. I’m less happy about the number of trashed crapmobiles I see on the streets. A comprehensive roadworthiness test would halve the car population in Chicago (and perhaps save the auto industry)
It’s appalling that the courts find it acceptable to turn justice into a profit center.
Justice has been a profit centre for a long, long time. Between lobbying, legislating, enforcing, arbitrating and adjudicating, a lot of people are making a lot of money. The system is already being abused—any time spent in any traffic court in the last fifty or sixty years should make that obvious.
This is just streamlining and reducing cost.
The thin edge of the wedge here is between garnering revenue from infractions, which is ok, and tweaking enforcement to make ordinary people into criminals because they cannot help but break the law. The first is ok; the second is not. The cameras are ok, but tweaking the yellows is not. Forbid the cameras and they’ll just find another, more oblique way to extract money from you.
Again, if they’re decreasing the yellow times, or creating badly-signed or impossible speed zones, then a good lawyer, not to mention the local media, will be more than happy to make the city’s life hell for what is, effectively, an abuse of power.
The system is already being abused—any time spent in any traffic court in the last fifty or sixty years should make that obvious.
Agreed. So the answer is to fix the injustices in the system, not to make it cheaper to be unjust.
Not to violate Godwin’s Law here, but I’m advocating that we shut down the concentration camps, while you’re arguing that the trains run faster and be more energy efficient.
Your priorities are in the wrong place, and the court’s inclination to side with revenue production presents an obvious conflict of interest. If government officials don’t have the guts to raise taxes, I shouldn’t be expected to forfeit my 4th and 5th Amendment rights to offset their lack of intestinal fortitude.
I don’t understand people’s surprise at this. Rather than reducing spending, the City of Chicago elected to tax more. This is SOP in most states, especially in the blue states (see CA, IL, NY).
Here in the City of Angels, mayor Tony V. said that the ONLY way to make up for budget shortfalls was to increase homeowners’ fees for trash collection. The ONLY way. No discussion on the multi-million ‘pet project’ for expanding the zoo during an economic downturn.
Our tax dollars hard at work…
Agreed. So the answer is to fix the injustices in the system, not to make it cheaper to be unjust.
Not to violate Godwin’s Law here, but I’m advocating that we shut down the concentration camps, while you’re arguing that the trains run faster and be more energy efficient.
Oh, total Godwin moment. Not unjustified, but Godwin nonetheless.
I think we’re talking about the same thing, just from different points of view. To extend the train analogy: most people here are protesting the trains existence, but ignoring the camps that they’re going to. Somehow busing or marching people is better?
The cameras are not the problem. Reducing cost of enforcement is not the problem. Expecting that enforcement will generate some revenue is not the problem.
Degrading safety for the sake of revenue, or enforcing laws for the sake of revenue alone, is a problem. Crying “Big Brother!” about a camera allows the authorities to write you off as a libertarian nutjob; presenting a comprehensive safety analysis and/or suing because you got into an accident caused by a short light works much better, and addresses the real cause.
The flipside of this, of course, is that people need to take an interest in local politics. With voter turnout at ~20%, a tendency to just vote in incumbents automatically and an electorate that consists mostly of curtain-twitchers, cronies and vested interests instead of the whole population, we have only ourselves to blame.
There really is a simple solution- as demonstrated not long ago by the clever teenagers of Maryland. Just duplicate the license plates of your favourite revenue-collecting elected official (instead of your high school rival) and run red lights with reckless abandon. It’s a win/win.
The cameras are not the problem.
They are the problem, because they encourage excessive enforcement and turn the justice system into a profit center, which is not its intent.
The convicted are fined and punished in order to punish them appropriately for what they have done, and to discourage others from following in their footsteps. The fines are supposed to reflect the severity of the crime, not a budget shortfall.
The government is supposed to raise revenue that it needs through taxes and fees, not by punishing people. To do what you are advocating is tyrannical by definition.
When the Supremes have already ruled that it was OK to take someone’s home/business by eminent domain just to provide more revenue for the locality, is anyone really surprised?
Justice is always about the money. If you have enough cash, you will likely get away with most anything including murder. At least once.
To do what you are advocating is tyrannical by definition.
That would imply that you don’t have a choice not to pay, or that you don’t have the opportunity to elect a representative to address your concern. That is not the case here. As above, if people don’t care enough to change the system, or—god forbid—support these kinds of measures, you can’t fault the system.
You can also choose not to speed or run red lights.
You’re focusing on the cameras as the problem. To extend another analogy, this is like dealing with terrorism by creating arduous security processes, and then directing criticism against the security processes rather than the reason people are trying to blow you up.
Fines always become revenue, and budgeting always includes revenue. It would imprudent fiscal planning to do otherwise. If revenue from enforcement falls, it’s then up to the citizenry to ensure that the kind of short-term thinking that results in short yellows does not occur.
There’s a certain amount of manipulation happening here: instead of asking the right questions:
* Why are we sacrificing safety for revenue?
* Why aren’t people concerned about this?
…we’re attacking a symptom. I don’t think the municipal governments are quite this shrewd, but it seems like they’ve done a fantastic job in deflecting criticism of the actual problem.
You’re focusing on the cameras as the problem.
Because they are the problem. A surveillance society and a police state are synonymous with each other.
Traffic laws are supposed to promote safety and mobility. They are not supposed to be used to erect an Orwellian monitoring structure that effectively presumes guilt before a kangaroo court.
This is the slippery slope in action. Once upon a time, those accused of traffic offenses were provided jury trials and legal representation when they couldn’t afford it. Just a few decades later, we are effectively presumed guilty and can’t even subpoena those who operate the electronic equipment to testify.
There’s no problem here at all, what are you all on about?
The court is merely responding to the desires of the voters. The electoral system, directly or indirectly, is the determiner of who becomes a judge, whether it’s a local traffic court or one of the “Circus” courts…
I say the people are getting their money’s worth…in so many neat and wonderful ways!
psarhjinian :
You can also choose not to speed or run red lights.
Well, you could be punished for obeying the spirit of the law, while accidentally infracting (is that a word?) the letter of the law.
Case in point: You stop on that short-yellow-light-dime, but your bumper slips over the line; or maybe you are stuck with your “parts” hanging out (in the intersection).
You are in violation, bunkie! It doesn’t matter if you did pretty well and your car isn’t in the crosswalk; YOU ARE OVER THE LINE.
Most of the time, cops won’t write you a ticket if you end up in the middle of the intersection and have to put the car into reverse to get out of the right-of-way for the crosstraffic. After all, they’re human too.
But with a camera, it doesn’t matter if you tried your best to follow the spirit of the law. Doesn’t matter if the road was slippery or the weather was inclement.
With a camera system, “Click!” You are busted. There is no understanding, for machines cannot understand.
But as I said in my post above, this is EXACTLY what we have decided we want, so that’s what we have!
This is the slippery slope in action.
The slippery slope is the indifference of the populace who don’t turn out for elections and don’t complain.
The device and it’s use are separate. As gun-liberty** and anti-circumvention activists are wont to claim, the existence of a device or technology isn’t good or bad, it’s the use that matters. By demonizing the device, you’re making it easier to be dismissed out of hand by the people who would abuse it, and ignored by the moderates you need to convince
Once upon a time, those accused of traffic offenses were provided jury trials and legal representation when they couldn’t afford it. Just a few decades later, we are effectively presumed guilty and can’t even subpoena those who operate the electronic equipment to testify.
So the problem is that we don’t have jury trials, and that we don’t have access to the operating code of the cameras and their controlling electronics. Again, that’s not the camera, but the legal system that’s the problem, and even then it’s not an issue.
If you believe the camera is incorrect, you should be able, with a very quick set of controlled tests, prove it’s inaccuracy to a degree sufficient for review in a court of law. With a police officer and traditional traffic court, you don’t have a hope in hell unless you have a witness, and in my experience there are few people who are at all eager to make the police look bad in court.
** I can’t believe I’m coming on the side of gun nuts. I just can’t believe it. Its time I handed in my Club Leftie membership card.
So the problem is that we don’t have jury trials, and that we don’t have access to the operating code of the cameras and their controlling electronics.
The problem is that by dismantling the mechanisms of due process, the government increasingly prioritizes low hanging fruit instead of the stuff that matters.
If prosecutions required time and money, government would avoid dealing with the petty, because it would consume resources that would be needed elsewhere, and because reasonable fines that fit the crime would be too low to permit a profit. Prosecutions should be costly, so that the government thinks twice before prosecuting citizens for any trivial infraction that the revenue producers can concoct.
With cameras and EZ courts, you can see what happens. The trend is for it to get worse.
Most of the time, cops won’t write you a ticket if you end up in the middle of the intersection and have to put the car into reverse to get out of the right-of-way for the crosstraffic. After all, they’re human too.
In my experience—and perhaps this is colouring my opinion—once a police officer pulls you over, the human aspect gets ugly. To whit:
For making a right turn on a green light on Christmas eve, I was subject to an officer’s searching my license and insurance records for any inconsistency because my street address was wrong. I was fined for that, by that way. $105 on top of the $105 for the turn. I’d later read that the Toronto police had a yearly quota.
Did you know that, when my wife was run down (as a pedestrian) buy a guy who proceeded through an intersection, he was fined the same amount by a police officer who let him off? What fresh bullsh_t is that?
I’ve been cited over four hundred dollars for being out in a canoe, in knee-high water, at eight in the morning on Victoria day (no bailer, no whistle, no flashlight, no life jacket) by OPP Marine officers who were getting a start on their quota for the day and wanted to go home early.
I took no small amount of harassment from a parking officer whom I photographed ticketing early—by ten minutes—before the 6:00am parking reset on my street. I’d done this because I was pretty sure they were ticketing early in hopes of either raising revenue or knocking off early.
I’m not brown-skinned, but I’ve been in the car during a “driving while brown” fishing expedition. I’ve heard more than a few cases of that from colleagues who are of either African or South-Asian descent.
Again, it’s little things like this that sour me on traffic enforcement by human beings when a machine can do the same job more cheaply, and without bias. If I’m taking away some officer’s cushy speed-trap duty, pardon me if I’m not upset.
It’s also why I don’t think cameras are the problem. The system is sick, and needs core-level reworking. Focusing efforts on cameras just because it causes libertarians to twitch, without addressing the more significantly broken parts of the system, is effort wasted.
Prosecutions should be costly, so that the government thinks twice before prosecuting citizens for any trivial infraction that the revenue producers can concoct.
That’s an admirable idea, but is has serious issues of scalability.
Either you stop enforcing the petty stuff, which leads to inconsistent enforcement, which leads to trouble because there is a reason we enforce things like speed limits and red lights, or you expand the judicial system to address the volume because people challenging tickets are not going to stop doing so.
If you want them to prosecute the stuff that matters, and I agree this is important, you need to free them up from dealing with the petty stuff. Cameras allow this. If you want to keep their eye on the ball and not on the bottom line, that’s what the ballot box is for. If you have a concern with the openness of the camera’s collected data, then you should be pressing government to make the records available, or you should work to verify their accuracy yourself.
You’ll see the same issue with voting machines: they could be inaccurate, they could be corrupted, but they’re a necessary thing in a democratic country of three hundred million, and a lot more reliable than the alternative: hand-counted ballots. The problem isn’t the eliminate voting machines, it’s to get access to their code, test their reliability, and ensure they leave a fair and accessible audit trail.
If you want them to prosecute the stuff that matters, and I agree this is important, you need to free them up from dealing with the petty stuff. Cameras allow this.
It’s the opposite. Cameras encourage them to wrongly allocate resources. This is apparent, because when they have been given cameras, we can see what they do with them.
Psar,
Your police officer is acting precisely as should be expected after his treatment by his bosses, who include you among their many number.
The solution you should be looking for is to get rid of the quotas by getting rid of the politicians who allow them to continue.
When Calgary tried to up their revenue by simply budgeting for more ticket revenue from the police, the Chief got out in front of the cameras and simply made a public statement that he would never make ticketing about revenue rather than safety. It was positively brilliant. Everyone in town, other than the pols, was instantly a huge supporter of the Chief. He instantly became untouchable by the pols. I am getting all happy just remembering the joy I felt listening to him that day.
Sorry for your incident, I know it really does suck. It’s stuff like that which makes me a small government guy.
What make/model/year vehicle does this judge drive?
What’s his license plate number?
How would he deal with 10,000 tickets? Let’s find out how he does…
Your police officer is acting precisely as should be expected after his treatment by his bosses, who include you among their many number.
Fair point: Toronto (where I lived at the time) has one of the sickest municipal governments I’ve ever seen. Not corrupt, not exactly, but utterly dysfunctional. The apathetic citizenry didn’t help matters.
My opinion of the police force and it’s management dropped considerably after those incidents and the pair of corruption trails that just “stopped”. Individual officers I’ve met tend to be generally decent people, but the leadership is lacking.
It’s rather like watching, oh, General Motors and the UAW.
The solution you should be looking for is to get rid of the quotas by getting rid of the politicians who allow them to continue.
Oh, yes. Believe you me I make a right pest of myself with regards to the local politicians. The problem is that precious few people do get involved in government. I don’t think it’s a big government thing per se, as much as it is a government that is no longer accountable. They’ll find another incorrect way to garner revenue unless we do otherwise. We’re not.
I believe I’m actually agreeing with you. Strange.
psarhjinian,
At the risk of sounding a bit nutty…
An armed citizenry is the final check-and-balance.
History is filled with failed governments. This constitutional republic thing we do in America has only been going for 200 years.
It’s sad that you have experienced what you have. And that is only going to get worse as long as people everywhere continue the “we’re so overtaxed” BS.
But it is a very slippery slope. Those cameras are 99.9999% inherently evil. As the numbers of cameras grow, there will be more watching of citizens on them. The trend is there, the Feds have already said that they want to. Instead of making the world a slightly better place so people don’t want to spend their time and money trying to attack us, we’re going to spends orders of magnitude more to try to pretend that we can defeat any and all comers.
Ever heard of Carnivore?
Psar,
Things like this make you cynical, and that will make it easier to agree with me.
:)
“Case in point: You stop on that short-yellow-light-dime, but your bumper slips over the line; or maybe you are stuck with your “parts” hanging out (in the intersection).
You are in violation, bunkie! It doesn’t matter if you did pretty well and your car isn’t in the crosswalk; YOU ARE OVER THE LINE.
Most of the time, cops won’t write you a ticket if you end up in the middle of the intersection and have to put the car into reverse to get out of the right-of-way for the crosstraffic. After all, they’re human too.
But with a camera, it doesn’t matter if you tried your best to follow the spirit of the law. Doesn’t matter if the road was slippery or the weather was inclement.
With a camera system, “Click!” You are busted. There is no understanding, for machines cannot understand.”
Actually ZoomZoom, all of the cameras I have seen and heard about (admittedly few, but they were consistent) take two pictures in rapid succession. Measuring the distance between plate positions and knowing the time between exposures they report a speed of travel at the time of the infraction (a buddy of mine once received such a ticket while following me through a light I couldn’t stop for). I somehow doubt that a speed of zero MPH would indicate to the system to issue a citation. A very similar and similarly illegal situation is getting caught sitting in the intersection (on a green) when the light turns. You’re now guilty of blocking the intersection but you probably wouldn’t even have your picture taken.