Pet Peeve.

[Editorial]

Okay this has nothing to do with trans. Those who follow this blog knows that I think Speed Cameras and Red Light Cameras should be done away with.

Now those of you who have had kids, tell me would you do this? You tell your child not to ride his bike through the flower bed and two weeks after you told him not to do it you punish him for doing it two weeks ago and because he did it every day after you told him you add two weeks of “Time Outs”

You wanted to correct him of a bad habit (Riding his bike trough the flower garden.) did it work? No because for two weeks he did it. Now if the first time you saw him ride his bike through the flower bed after you told him, you gave him a time out and he never did it again. So which was more effective in curing bad behavior?

Speed Camera are the same way.

Problem: cars are driving too fast through school zones so you want to bring down the speed of drivers going through the school zone.

Solution: enforcement of the school zone.

Method 1: More officers handing out tickets.

Method 2: Speed Cameras

Using Method 1, the police department makes sure that there is at least one officers in the school zone enforcing the speed limit. The results are immediate… speed and you get a $100 ticket!

Using Method 2, the police department erects speed cameras. The results for two weeks you drove through the school zone thinking you were only keeping up with traffic and then after two weeks (I say two weeks because that is about the time it takes to get the bill for driving on a toll road.) you get 10 $100 speeding tickets. 

Or you thought you made a complete stop at the red light before you made a right turn on red then two weeks latter you get a ticket in the mail. How can you contests the tickets you can’t even remember back what you did at the light two weeks ago. If there was an officers there you could have told him you thought you stopped completely. Punishment delayed does not correct bad habits.

Opposite of what Florida police chief expected: Speed cameras issue 1,300 tickets in 5 weeks

Cameras were set up at a school zone

WKNG Ch 6

By Erik von Ancken

May 29, 2024

The chief of police in Eustis, the first-ever city in Florida to install speed cameras in a school zone and send out tickets, got a surprise after activating the cameras on April 3.

Eustis Police Chief Craig Capri first installed the cameras in front of Eustis Elementary School on Feb. 21 because speeding was so bad he worried for students’ safety.

Capri said some drivers were tearing through the school zone at 80 miles per hour.

At first, the cameras only issued warnings. After reviewing the cars caught on camera speeding, the police department mailed out 800 warnings in about five weeks.

Now the cameras have been active and issuing $100 tickets for almost two months.

Capri expected drivers would have gotten the message from the warnings or heard the news that the cameras would be activated resulting in tickets.

But drivers did not stop speeding.

Do you think that might be because the drivers are only just now getting the speeding tickets in the mail? That they never realized that they were speeding until the tickets stated arriving by mail?

And to prove my point…

Capri said in the five weeks after the cameras were activated for tickets, the police department mailed out 1,300 citations. And those include several hundred questionable tickets that were voided because the department “gives the driver the benefit of the doubt,” according to Capri.

Capri said he was blown away.

“I didn’t think it would be that high honestly,” Capri said. “I figured the warning would have sent the message. Hopefully, the warning would have curtailed that behavior. Evidently, the warning didn’t do the job. I think once we hit the wallet, the pocketbook, you’ll realize $100 is a lot of money.

And if they use the same road everyday? (BTW: 1,300 tickets time $100 = $130,000, now there is a big incentive for having speed cameras, especially for the company that runs the cameras, they get 20%.)

“And let me tell you some of my cops have had tickets, city crews have had tickets, elected officials have had tickets,” Capri said. “They all got to pay.”

One driver was cited five times in two days.

“Sounds like a guy that doesn’t know what’s going on and that’s a problem,” Capri said.

Yup, and I rest my case, right out of the mouth of the Police Chief. The driver didn’t even know that he was speeding until the tickets started arriving in the mail.

Do Red Light cameras and Speed Camera working? Or does everyone else walk away counting the money that they are racking in while we are wondering what happened?

For the towns and the companies they walk away counting their money versus costing more money to hire extra officers or paying them overtime.

And I am not even talking about how red light cameras increases rear-end accidents. Yes, they do cut down on "T-bone" accidents but the number of rear-end accidents skyrockets causing life long neck and back injuries.

Last word: How long is the data from the cameras kept, who owns the data and can they sell it, and who gets to see it?

 

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And one court is going to be hearing a case about those license plate reader illegal invasion of privacy,

Illinois' use of cameras that read license plates amounts to 'dragnet surveillance,' lawsuit alleges
A lawsuit filed in federal court in Illinois seeks to end the state’s use of cameras that record license plates, geolocation and photos, saying they are a violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth amendments.
Chicago Sun Times
By  Emmanuel Camarillo
June 2, 2024

A lawsuit accuses Illinois State Police and state officials of operating an unconstitutional “system of dragnet surveillance” through license plate reading cameras which track motorist’s whereabouts.

The suit, filed last week by Cook County residents Stephanie Scholl and Frank Bednarz, names the state police, Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Atty. Gen. Kwame Raoul as defendants.

“Defendants are tracking anyone who drives to work in Cook County — or to school, or a grocery store, or a doctor’s office, or a pharmacy, or a political rally, or a romantic encounter, or family gathering — every day, without any reason to suspect anyone of anything, and are holding onto those whereabouts just in case they decide in the future that some citizen might be an appropriate target of law enforcement,” the suit states.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, “challenges the warrantless, suspicion less, and entirely unreasonable” tracking as a violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth amendments.

My guess is the courts will finally ruling that it does not. That it is just like an officer looking up a plate on a “Hot List.”

[/Editorial]