Saturday, 14 January 2017

That Time I Turned a Routine Traffic Ticket into the Constitutional Trial of the Century

quote [ Laws that give municipal officials and their private contractors power to issue tickets via traffic cameras confer powers of both criminal and civil law while excusing them from the due process duties of both criminal and civil law. ]

Hardly a trial of a century. I can't wait until self driving cars put speeding cameras and traffic cops out of business.
[SFW] [people] [+5 Interesting]
[by satanspenis666@3:41pmGMT]

Comments

Taxman said @ 4:01pm GMT on 14th Jan [Score:2 Interesting]
I can neither confirm nor deny that several federal agencies have been asked to calculate the lost revenue across the entire country that self driving cars will cause (no bias either way, just what the impact will be).

As is too often these day, several budgets have their foundation in part on the expectation of petty 'crime'. If everyone were to behave themselves (or have a robot do it for them) I believe a large number of planned 'justice' systems would crumble.

HP Lovekraftwerk said @ 5:27pm GMT on 14th Jan
To play devil's advocate, there's an area of several intersections near where I live that's in the middle of upper-middle-class conservative country, where red light cameras on their own would no doubt be destroyed out of some semblance of patriotism. These intersections were the first places to get them.

Even those who hate them to their core had to agree that the plummeting rate of accidents/injuries at these intersections after nice big signs announcing the cameras were in place was a good thing. It's kind of asinine that the threat of a ticket got people to stop trying to barrel through red lights as opposed to risking death.
mechanical contrivance said @ 11:53pm GMT on 14th Jan
Apparently, the city did not shorten the length of the yellow lights at those intersections when they put the cameras in. A lot of cities did that so that more drivers would inadvertently run red lights, thus increasing the number of citations issued. The downside is that it also increased the number of drivers who slammed on their brakes when the yellow light didn't last as long as they thought it would, causing more accidents from cars getting rear ended or cars sticking out into the intersection when they have a red light.
midden said @ 12:04am GMT on 15th Jan
On the other hand, how many millions or billions of dollars will local governments save from no longer constantly replacing downed signage and smashed safety barriers, from needing a smaller police force and road crews to deal with traffic accidents and the resulting backups, from needing less general bureaucracy to support the endlessly stupid things human drivers do? Perhaps they won't need that revenue.
HP Lovekraftwerk said @ 4:56pm GMT on 14th Jan [Score:2 Interesting]
I saw this article over on Metafilter, and one comment had some things worth noting:

FYI, the author is a morally repugnant conservative. He believes that a lesbian couple should not both be legally recognized as the parents of a child; That Texas courts should defy the Supreme Court and further restrict access to women's healthcare; and that colleges should be free to discriminate against LGBT students and employees; among many other positions.

He signed a statement calling on the local, state, and federal government to refuse to follow Obergefell (the case legalizing same sex marriage nationally).

The website this was published on is an outlet of the Witherspoon Institute.


The rest of the comments there are worth perusing, where a debate includes a city's interest in preventing speeding, the "truthfulness" of a speed/red light camera vs. police officers, etc.
midden said @ 10:15pm GMT on 14th Jan [Score:1 Underrated]
I don't really care if, "the author is a morally repugnant conservative," if his information is accurate.
HP Lovekraftwerk said @ 10:18pm GMT on 14th Jan
Except it's not all information. Part of it is opinion and his motivation. Are the usage of red light cameras corrupt or driven by revenue? Sometimes, sure. Does a municipality have an interest in preventing people from running red lights? Of course. Did his car run a red light? Unless the camera was malfunctioning, yes.

I mean, let's look at it this way: If all it takes is just driving a borrowed car to not obey traffic lights, you've opened up quite the loophole. The libertarian like the author might be pleased, but I wouldn't want to live in a city where that was the law of the land.
Bob Denver said @ 11:44pm GMT on 14th Jan
I don't think that it's as cut and dried. I believe that ultimately, he's addressing the surveillance state. There's little difference, on some levels, between a borrowed car running a red light and a stranger using an open wifi connection to pirate movies etc. (apart from the risk of injury/death). The crime is recorded but not necessarily the criminal. The presumption of innocence is what's under attack here.

Here's the reductio ad absurdum version...If the desire is to eliminate all crime then we must all be under total surveillance all the time so that we can be unambiguously innocent or the state/private parties can prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that the person in question is guilty. It must be completely unhackable and absolutely transparent to everybody. Citizens must monitor other citizens and report bad behaviour. Stalking must become a civic duty. Of course, because of the nature of people, I suspect that attractive men and women will suddenly be the criminal group that will show the greatest growth. Then we'll have to have a movement called Hot Lives Matter...
midden said @ 11:59pm GMT on 14th Jan
With all due respect to yourself, yes, but so what? As a relatively informed reader, what interests me in the article is the actual legal frameworks under which traffic cameras exist. The author seems to be very well informed on these matters; in fact, most would consider him an expert. The other stuff is, as you say, opinion. He is perfectly free to express his opinion about the various social ramifications of the situation. His opinions may influence my own ideas on the subject, and that's fine, too.

I say again with slightly altered words, as long as the factual elements of the article are clearly stated as such, and are, in fact, true, I don't really care if, "the author is a morally repugnant conservative."
sanepride said[1] @ 5:44pm GMT on 14th Jan
I definitely picked up a tone of smug libertarianism in the article ("I'm way smarter than all these civil service drones and I'm gonna rub their noses in it"), even if he does raise some interesting questions about the nature and hazards of automated justice. But since traffic enforcement cameras are still routinely employed throughout the country I'd say his boast of 'constitutional trial of the century' is mostly the smugness.
I think the subject is still addressed quite effectively in the Star Trek episode "Court Marshal". Makes me wonder though if Samuel T. Cogley would be a smug conservative in his time.
lilmookieesquire said[1] @ 9:29pm GMT on 14th Jan [Score:2]
I'm retry sure THIS was the routine traffic ticket/trial of the century:

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