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.

:)

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?

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.

What’s his license plate number?

How would he deal with 10,000 tickets? Let’s find out how he does…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

Justice is always about the money. If you have enough cash, you will likely get away with most anything including murder. At least once.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.