We seem to have wandered away from my original point, which was to give up on using red-light cameras to enforce the law but keep them to advertise the the propensity of some cars to run red lights. When we get to watch them ourselves and make our own judgments we aren’t bound to the abuses you-all cite (I read about one in yesterday’s ‘Weird News’).
As for it getting political, it already is political, in the sense that people decide by means of government whether or not to have them. Many jurisdictions do, so I suspect they’ve been challenged in court on Constitutional grounds and haven’t been overturned yet.
Note that Mr @bing unintentionally endorses their use in Cedar Rapids (a place I have lived, but before RLCs), by warning us to be careful of our speed when we drive there. Cedar Rapidians are grateful for it.
In addition, traffic cameras are often installed and monitored for free by a for-profit corporation which promises the city a cut of the ticket revenue. This creates an incentive for the corporation to make more money by falsely tagging cars as having run the red light when they didn’t. It also creates an incentive for the city to look the other way, not only to make money but also because there’s often a clause in the contract that says if enough money isn’t made, the city will owe the corporation money.
That has resulted in some cities reducing the amount of time the yellow light stays on before turning red, resulting in people who previously would have easily made it through the intersection legally, now running the red light due to games played by the city and the camera corporation.
Any time a profit motive enters the justice system it should be vigorously opposed.
So then we should have let the Boston Marathon bomber (his brother never made it to trial) go free because the only evidence we have is video evidence from different security camera’s in the area?
A few years ago, I avoided being rear-ended by a daydreamer. I was stopped for a light in Northampton, MA on Route 5.
Car behind me was obviously NOT going to be able to stop. I quickly checked for traffic to the left and right, and drove forward a few feet. Car behind me missed me by inches, after screeching to a halt… Had this had been a photo - enforced intersection, I would have been mailed a violation. Had a cop seen it, the car behind me would would have been visible also, and at least I could have explained what happened.
No law is perfect. The Constitution charges the federal government to ‘promote the general welfare’. If RLCs would prevent 1,000 deaths/year at the cost of 10,000 unfair tickets, that would promote the general welfare. Cameras that capture all of the action, that one could subpoena in defense, would address many of these cases.
I didn’t call for legal scrutiny - I gave up on legal scrutiny, that’s my original suggestion - I called for public scrutiny. The public could watch your event and think, ‘that tom418, what a careful driver!’ (and ‘what cruel parents, to give him a name such as tom418 - not even capitalized’).
At the risk of turning this into a political firestorm, by that logic the Japanese internment camps during WWII were justified because a few of the 120,000 people imprisoned might have actually been an Axis spy and might have done something that got people killed.
We can prevent 32,000-odd traffic deaths per year by banning travel.
We can prevent 15,000 or so murders per year by deploying the military to every street corner and arresting anyone who doesn’t consent to a strip search every time they venture outside.
I’m guessing you’re not arguing that we do these things. That’s why “this prevents death and therefore it doesn’t matter if it’s justified” is far too simplistic an argument to apply to anything.
I understand all the arguments against red light cameras, but how hard is it to just stop at red lights? If you’re worried about the intangible ethical issues, that’s just another incentive to pay full attention to traffic and not to run red lights.
What about the rights of people who are injured and killed by red light runners? Don’t their rights matter?
They do indeed. I dunno how it is everywhere else, but where I live, Minnesota, red light running is an epidemic. Yet cops sit on the highways busting people for going 10 over instead of working the stop lights catching the light runners.
The really obnoxious thing is that in lots of cities in my area, cops went to city councils and got them to pony up the money to get special indicator lights installed at stop lights so that cops can easily see if someone is running a red light even if they can’t see the light. You’d think they’d use these new systems, but I’ve never seen a cop at any of them.
Quite honestly, I don’t care if someone’s going 65 in a 55. That’s a lot safer than someone going 55 through a red light, which happens continuously. In short, we don’t need dubiously-ethical and downright unconstitutional red light cameras - we need the cops to target enforcement on the things that are actually dangerous rather than the things that fill city coffers.
You make a straw man then light him on fire. What’s the cost of 10K ‘unfair’ traffic tickets? Greater than 1K deaths? A traffic ticket isn’t imprisonment; the cause of the ticket isn’t ethnicity: it’s a violation caught on camera.
We’ve decided that automobile travel is worth 32K deaths. You can’t compare 10K ‘unfair’ traffic tickets with the elimination of auto travel.
Cops do what governments tell them to do; we elect governments. We eliminated RLCs in Albuquerque because almost everyone capable of bleating bleated. The most popular complaint was that the RLC company was in Ohio, so we were sending money out-of-state.
I didn’t suggest legal scrutiny - that horse has left the barn on that - I suggested public scrutiny. Run all the RLCs you want - see you on Youtube.
I have to say I am thoroughly sick of the internet fad of dismissing arguments you can’t reasonably counter by calling them strawmen. It wasn’t a straw man. For your edification, here is an explanation of what a straw man is.
You claimed that preventing deaths was worth unjust and unconstitutional penalties. I showed you examples of unjust and unconstitutional penalties that would and did prevent deaths, yet were not worth it.
One of the oldest tricks in the book when trying to convince the masses to approve government overreach is “but it will save lives!” That argument has led not only to the internment camps I spoke of, but to TSA agents molesting people at the airport, and to extraordinary rendition, where people are kidnapped, flown to countries with lax human rights legislation to be tortured.
I’m sorry that you don’t like this, but it takes more than “it will save lives” to justify a law which subjects people to government overreach.
Whether you send them a ticket or shame them on youtube, if it’s a red light camera, government has to get involved because the cameras are being attached to the government’s stoplights. Whatever the penalty, red light cameras are governmental overreach.
That statement ignores the discretion afforded to every public servant. Most policies that govern public servants are quite vague, leaving a lot of room for interpretation by those who implement those policies. For example, when most police officers pulls you over, they have the option of issuing a warning, writing a ticket, or letting you go.
Regarding the definition of straw man arguments, I offer the following graphic.
Substituting the argument that preventing 1 death at the cost of interning 120K Japanese-Americans for mine, preventing 1K deaths at the cost of 10K ‘unfair’ traffic tickets fits the definition perfectly.
I did not. There’s nothing unConstitutional about RLCs. Fine the car, not the driver, the way we do for parking tickets. Many jurisdictions have RLCs; no court has found them unConstitutional. I’m thoroughly sick of people who characterize every law they don’t like as unConstitutional.
If they like running red lights then they aren’t shamed, so there is no punishment.
Interestingly, I had a boss that spent some of his teen years in one of the Japanese internment camps. He was born in the US of Japanese parents who were not US citizens. He said the camp was spartan, but no complaints…and never questioned its necessity.
His family had all their savings in a Japanese-owned bank in California. Several days before Pearl Harbor, the money disappeared…transferred back to the homeland.
After the WW2, he joined the US army and served in Korea. His story of the retreat from the Chosin Reservoir was hair-raising.
Car-related: He and a buddy were hot-rodding in a truck in Korea and went into a ditch. When officers showed up, he wandered off a bit and pretended to be a local (uniforms typically didn’t have ID markings and lots of Koreans wore khakis). He didn’t get disciplined.
He got the $20K for being in the camp. When I asked him what he would spend it on, he said, “My wife already spent it!”
No it doesn’t. It’s a reduction to the absurd, which is a perfectly legitimate technique of formal logic. Not a strawman, which would involve twisting what you said.
Of course it is. We have the right to face our accusers in court. Until you show me a talking camera that can go down to the courthouse…
Hey, why don’t we do that with other laws? Charge money with a crime and steal it from people, and require them to prove the money wasn’t the result of a crime to get it back.
And before you start assuming that’s a strawman, cops already do that, and steal thousands of dollars worth of cash and property from people every year. If you’re fine with that…
A video is the same as an eye witness. To throw out a video because everyone automatically believes them would be the same as throwing out the testimony of an eye witness.
If you run a red light, you broke the law, period. If you get caught, pay the fine. You do have redress in that you can fight the ticket in court, but good luck with that.
They do increase public safety.
There are just two issues that I see. First, most cities that use them started because they were in a financial crisis and needed a way to raise funds. It was not considered because of some public safety outcry. The second is that in order to increase revenues, the length of the yellow is shortened. I got one on a 4 second yellow in a 50 mph speed zone. Blink for just a second and you are screwed. I have heard of lights being reduced to 3 seconds to insure more revenues. BTW, I paid the fine, $50.
Actually it’s pretty common knowledge that eye witnesses are terribly unreliable. People tend to see what they want to see and then re-remember what they saw to fit their pre-conceived notions. Videos also can be very misleading because it is only one small portion of what is going on around the camera and can be taken totally out of context. Now a trained witness like a police officer is a little better at recalling precisely what happened.
What’s that old saying? Those that choose safety over liberty will have neither. Yep, bad things will happen and people will get away with breaking the law, but that’s why we fought the war and won-lest we throw it all away.
Think about it: in order to INCREASE revenues, they are manipulating the light cycle to catch people unawares. Not only is this ethically repugnant, but it actually DECREASES safety: if more people are getting tickets, more people are in the intersection when the light is green the other way, making the intersection more dangerous to every motorist (but keep that sweet, sweet money flowing!)
IMO, any “public works” official who assents to this has VIOLATED the trust We The People put in them to keep us safe, and should be REMOVED FROM OFFICE.
You have Reductio ad absurdum wrong: it starts with an argument’s premise and shows that it leads to an impossible conclusion. Instead you substituted your own premise and relied upon the reader to object to it: that’s a straw man. The very definition to which you pointed me said that a strawman could be an exaggeration, which your argument was.
What about parking tickets? A ticket on the basis of an RLC would be the same: you can continue to drive all you want, but your car needs some adult supervision, because we’ve caught it running red lights.
The red light has been run. Finding somebody with $10K in cash on him isn’t a crime. I’ve been against this since I saw an exposé of it on 60 Minutes some 30 years ago, a story about a nurseryman (Black - duh!) ‘caught’ at the Memphis airport with $11K on him.
Has that resulted in the rejection of eyewitness in court? In increased scrutiny?
Cops and governments have been abusing their powers forever. We don’t get rid of them but scrutinize them.
Random, is this a class project or something for poli sci or philosophy? Is this really of interest or are you just being contrary to stir the discussion? Kids . . .
