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He's correct.

After all there are corrupt cops almost everywhere you turn around.

Read the DMN article more closely and ask yourself why the violations went down. From the article:

"City records indicate Dallas has lengthened yellow-light intervals on 12 of its 62 monitored traffic signal."

and

"Dallas City Hall has idled more than one-fourth of the 62 cameras that monitor busy intersections"

Your presumption, and that of the DMN, which never prints a negative word about cameras, is that the ~15 cameras were idled because they were working too well. The alternative theory is that tickets went down when the yellow went up. *Side note: violations also go down when a camera goes out of service, there's construction at or near a camera intersection or the city/vendor just turn the thing off to goose the "success" numbers -- it's a worthless measurement.)

Did the yellow go up because Dallas City Hall was concerned about safety? Nope. Because they got busted using yellows shorter than allowed under a 2007 Texas law:
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/20/2068.asp

A story, by the way, on which the DMN never reported.

Yes. Union City. Caught in 2005. The thenewspaper link refers to an earlier article that is not now available. Perhaps the wayback machine still has it, though...

The analysis shows that the number of crashes at locations with cameras more than doubled, from 365 collisions in 1998 to 755 last year. Injury and fatal crashes climbed 81 percent, from 144 such wrecks to 262. Broadside crashes, also known as right-angle or T-bone collisions, rose 30 percent, from 81 to 106 during that time frame. Traffic specialists say broadside collisions are especially dangerous because the sides are the most vulnerable areas of cars.

Red light cameras can work to protect the public. Unfortunately, the Baltimore City Red Light Camera Enforcement System (RLCES), as it is presently operated, can be seen as a revenue-producing measure instead of safety-oriented when examined against the following:

1. Contract between Baltimore City and Affiliated Computer Services, Inc. (ACS)
2. Contingency vs. Flat-fee Arrangement
3. Unclear Standards for Yellow Light Settings
4. Inconsistent and Short Yellow Light Times
5. Lack of Delay Times/Grace Period
6. Decreased Minimum Threshold Speed Limits
7. Lack of Clear Objectives and Measurement Data (especially accident data)

                      These concerns greatly reduce the credibility of the RLCES and the City governing its operability. Therefore, each of these concerns should be addressed in a timely manner to ensure citizen confidence in the use of the RLCES, the City, the police department, and the judicial body that enforces the citations.[2]

Dallas recently installed red-light cameras. I'll testify that red-light runners were a major problem here, but I didn't support the cameras because of the potential for abuse. There was concern at City Hall, too, especially from the city's most with-it councilperson, Angela Hunt.

To the surprise of just about everyone, the cameras worked! People actually started slowing down in time to stop if the light turned yellow. The city became safer.

But there was an inevitable downside... the cameras' revenue no longer supported their operating cost.

Once again, the unexpected happened. Dallas did NOT tweak yellow light timing to generate more tickets. Instead, they turned off some of the cameras. Apparently, the contract with the third-party camera operator has a clause that reduces the monthly charge from $3,800 per camera to "a fraction" of that cost (blame the Morning News for failing to tell whether that fraction is 1/10 or 9/10). So they're turning some of them off, noting that "most motorists won't realize this and behave as if the cameras are operational."

Which is what we wanted all along.

The city of Dallas is mired in several messes of its own making, resulting in high-profile FBI probes and even a suicide pact between two of its best-known (and most-troubled) behind-the-scenes power brokers. But in this case, the city comes shining through. And the Rangers won a double-header last night, too. Wonders never cease.

More info available from the Dallas Morning News article.

More info NOT available from "theNewspaper.com", a self-described "journal of the politics of driving" that never hesitates to pass on a story of red light camera *abuse*. I sent a link to the DMN story, but it never showed up. Agenda much?

The speed cameras have not all been taken down (the city tried to appeal the court's decision that they were unconstitutional unsuccessfully) but none of them are active.

http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/16/1688.asp
Minnesota Supreme Court Strikes Down Red Light Cameras
April 5, 2007
The Minnesota Supreme Court delivers a unanimous decision striking down the legality of red light cameras.

The Minnesota Supreme Court today delivered the highest-level court rebuke to photo enforcement to date with a unanimous decision against the Minneapolis red light camera program. The high court upheld last September's Court of Appeals decision that found the city's program had violated state law.

The court also struck down the "rebutable presumption" doctrine that lies at the heart of every civil photo enforcement ordinance across the country.

"The problem with the presumption that the owner was the driver is that it eliminates the presumption of innocence and shifts the burden of proof from that required by the rules of criminal procedure," the court concluded. "Therefore the ordinance provides less procedural protection to a person charged with an ordinance violation than is provided to a person charged with a violation of the Act. Accordingly, the ordinance conflicts with the Act and is invalid."

Funny, that list left out Albuquerque (which also has some occasional issues with speed cameras).

I think that argument is bunk, but agree that there needs to be oversight on people in authoritative positions. The site is not illegal, it is making use of the Freedom of Information Act to gain public knowledge about police officers. Of course there may be trolls who just post "fuck pigs" or whatever, but it's in essence a review of officers, much like a review of auto shops. If you think one is unreliable and underhanded you will know to cover all your bases if you happen to cross paths with that cop. It's the ones who have that above the law mentality who are the ones this is designed for. It's weird that from forum that cops are worried about people having their public information, yet at their fingertips is a database of private information, that has the potential to be abused. (and to save some people the trouble, this isn't bashing all cops so don't post "not all cops are like that" responses)

"It's critical that we retain the right to record, videotape or photograph the police while they're on duty. Not only for symbolic reasons (when agents of the state can confiscate evidence of their own wrongdoing, you're treading on seriously perilous ground), but as an important check on police excesses."http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,284075,00.html

http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/07/740.asp
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/04/430.asp
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/03/AR2005100301844.html

I'll stop there, but you can google for dozens more, because every experiment with red-light cameras has had the same effect: Increased rear-end collisions when people stop fast to avoid a ticket.

http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/07/740.asp
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/04/430.asp
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/03/AR2005100301844.html

I'll stop there, but you can google for dozens more, because every experiment with red-light cameras has had the same effect: Increased rear-end collisions when people stop fast to avoid a ticket.

I'd be curious to see whether these geniuses analyzed the impact of HOV lanes? http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/02/292.asp

Sounds like a great opportunity for the law enforcement officers of Barrow Gurney to make some money issuing fines.

To me, it sounds like a rare instance of authorities caring more about safety than money. Unfortunately, your attitude seems to be more common - to the point that some communities (*cough*Union City, CA*cough) have been caught deliberately and illegally causing unsafe situations in order to increase revenue from traffic violations.

I also found the transcript of that encounter very handy.

Also note what the cop initially said about the kid's camera: "I really don't care about your camera system cause I'm about ready to tow your car. Then we can tear them all apart..." O.o

The official police dashcam video and audio "was lost", according to the cops. Hmmmmm.

Mark me as a troll as much as you want but anyone who's been through a Terry stop (or, for that matter, any sort of police stop) in the US will want this recorded along with a few well-placed mics for audio. At least 45 minutes' recording. Just in case you missed it, here's a good example of the reason why. I've been through such stops in Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania and Maryland and I've never been guilty of Driving While Black.

Here's a one-time $100,000 speeding ticket, and one country now has a standard $10,000 ticket for anyone eager to earn it. That same hoser nation issued a $288,500 beauty for speeding in a 40kph zone. Although I am not in favor of such extreme fines (despite my father being struck in a 40kph zone in said police state, ultimately dying), they are the Big Brother future.

One consolation. By the time any of us are being asked to pay such an enormous fine we will all be implanted with an RFID chip that will automatically suck the funds from us as we earn them so we won't even have to lift a finger from our game paddle to write a check!

I am right there with you. Being an auto enthusiast. haha, the username makes sense after all. I have heard horror stories about what cops can do when they want to be pricks, or are just crazy. would you guys like some proof. here's a link to the youtube video, hosted elsewhere. Read the transcript. the cop threatens to make up charges against the kid. now, lets imagine that the cop had started beating the kid and when the kid escaped to his car, the cop had it disable and the doors unlocked so he could finish "arresting" him.

this one.

some followup.

i actually couldnt find it on youtube this time aroung, but thats where i saw it the first time. a quick youtube search for 'police harassment' brings up dozens of entries.

not only that, but it appears that the harassment has continuted even after the offending officer was fired.

the cops know no bounds.

It appears to be true for red-light cameras. Accidents don't increase, but they may actually increase. What actually decreases accidents (and also profit for the governmental authority) are longer yellow light periods.

One could argue that an increased yellow duration is actually an increased 'freedom', too. The drivers get more time to decide what action they will take with less threat of retribution from authority.

I don't think the traffic light them selfs are running on x86 hardware they more likely running on a Embedded system and yes they are networked / linked to other lights, railroad crossings, and some times back to some control center.
The camera system may be running x86 hardware.

and you want source code and/or the "version info"/ bugfix list, along with the version for the lights and the camera system as well the light timing settings. Also some times LED lights have a some lag before they are fully on this is more likely on light that used to be the non led type that have led installed in to them. Also some cameras go off on amber / Yellow and some the amber time is too short for the speed limit.

http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/16/1621.asp
http://www.ite.org/standards/atc/
http://www.trafficsignalmuseum.com/

And a related link from that page, http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/18/1886.asp

Now that it's been brought to my attention, I realise that the local (Antelope Valley) redlight cameras are not at the busiest intersections, but at the intersections that are gang hangouts. Hmmm...

It has already been used abused in Arlington, Virginia and in several Connecticut cities. Sure finding stolen cars sounds great, and that's just what it takes to get the lemmings to give the thumbs up to this technology. But let's be real about the true purpose: to make money. Arlington will tow away your car for overdue library books. In Connecticut, the off-duty marshals -- who get paid a bounty for each car towed away -- trawled the WalMart parking lots to find people with a few overdue parking tickets. A woman in Bridgeport had her car towed out of her driveway while she was home over $85 in parking tickets. Is that the kind of world you want to live in? References: Connecticut Arlington

Hook up a video camera to your car and start videotaping the police. It is your right and is 100% legal. Federal Judge: Videotaping Police Legal

Except that those camera-enforcement systems actually cause more accidents, not less. So if you're OK with the automatic license-plate system, I'd probably try to distance them from the red-light cameras. They're a disaster, and the only reason they're around is because they generate revenue.

E.g.: 2007 Virginia DOT Report Shows Red Light Cameras Increase Accidents

"Don't take any field tests...they are just trying to collect evidence on you.

Also, refuse to take any tests at the station..."

unless your in Dalworthington Gardens, Texas.

http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/06/651.asp

they have judges on-call to sign warents.

How about not using automated enforcement because it makes the roads more dangerous? For those too lazy to click, it shows that roads in the UK are actually less safe than they were after the more than 5000 traffic cameras were installed. The injury and death rates both went up! People behave around courts, they do not around cameras. The only thing the cameras were good at, (quite good at actually) was revenue generation. What government of, by, and for the people would want to tax its people at the cost of their lives?

We really need more people filming the police.

It seems that police brutality is getting so common now that they are willing to beat members of the media on camera . (The clip begins with the narrator suggesting that the protestors were "asking for it" by throwing rocks at the police, but they can't spin the footage of their own camerapeople getting beaten up.)

What's worse, is that police now tend to focus on people with cameras , as you can also see in the above video.

The tapes are very helpful in prosecuting police misconduct , so we neeed more people taping.

Otherwise, the police tend to lie about the incidents , even going so far to claim in the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in Britain that 5 different cameras watching the action were all somehow not functioning .

In a Missouri case, a teenager was being harassed by the police at a DUI checkpoint for not telling them where he was going -- when he asked why he was being detained, he was told "If you don't stop running your mouth, we're going to find a reason to lock you up tonight".

Cameras are getting tinier and tinier all the time, and now we have Wi-Fi enabled storage cards. When cameras get so small the cops can't see them, and people can record the content wirelessly to hidden devices, it will be a lot harder for the bad cops to stop the filming of the brutality.

This liquid lens technology sounds like it might really help create tiny and cheap cameras that people can use to bring more justice to the world.

It seems that police brutality is getting so common now that they are willing to beat members of the media on camera . (The clip begins with the narrator suggesting that the protestors were "asking for it" by throwing rocks at the police, but they can't spin the footage of their own camerapeople getting beaten up.)

What's worse, is that police now tend to focus on people with cameras , as you can also see in the above video.

The tapes are very helpful in prosecuting police misconduct , so we neeed more people taping.

Otherwise, the police tend to lie about the incidents , even going so far to claim in the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in Britain that 5 different cameras watching the action were all somehow not functioning .

In a Missouri case, a teenager was being harassed by the police at a DUI checkpoint for not telling them where he was going -- when he asked why he was being detained, he was told If you don't stop running your mouth, we're going to find a reason to lock you up tonight.

Stuff like this happens all the time, and it will be a great day when we can start getting more of it on tape. Then the police can keep policing the citizens, but the citizens can also police the police.

Traffic cameras are terrible because they require they expect humans, naturally imprecise creatures, to conform to precise machine conditions. Here's what I mean. According to this article, the state of California determined that 77% of all their traffic camera tickets were issued when the light had been red for less than a second. While there are certainly people who try to beat yellow lights, what fraction of these tickets were issued to people who made the split decision not to stop, for reasons of safety? Half? A third? If that's the case, then somewhere between about 25% and 35% of all tickets are issued to people trying to obey the law!

sometimes they get you on yellow

Here in Iowa, red light cameras have been shut down because the courts ruled they were illegal. The story can be found here. There is even a proposal to ban all camera-based ticketing in the state.

Minnesota's highest court recently struck down the use of these cameras, as practiced in the Twin Cities, because the ticket automatically charged the owner of the car, without concern for whether they were actually driving or not when the picture was taken.

Red Light Cameras

Not much more detail, but it does include snippets of Georgia Stalking Law.

Where I live in Minneapolis the police put up cameras in various locations around the city. They were in operation for a few scant months when a court case decided that they were illegal, because they couldn't prove beyond doubt who the driver of the car at the time was. So our city spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to put up cameras that aren't being used. Great planning, huh? Maybe the city should consider a new legal department...

"Photo enforcement suffered a double blow today as judges in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Steubenville, Ohio struck down new ordinances that have allowed red light and speed cameras to operate in each city.

Hennepin County District Judge Mark S. Wernick struck down the Minneapolis red light camera program on constitutional grounds. The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota had brought suit, charging the program violated the due process rights of citizens. One man, for example, was falsely accused twice and only had his cases dismissed after he contacted the media. The Minneapolis program will no longer issue tickets pending the outcome of a likely appeal."

http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/10/1014.asp

the speed limit thing (although it's nationally 65 now . . .

Sorry. I included a link to an article discussing the independant study, but not a link to the study itself. Here's the study (PDF link).

'It has been shown that cameras increase car accident rates by between 7 and 24 percent.' ? says who?

I'd heard that before, too. Then my city got those cameras at a bunch of intersections. Years later, an independant study showed that the city police were lying to the populace when they kept insisting that the cameras are there to promote safety and not to generate income and that the police were using misleading statistics to trick people into accepting the cameras as making the roads safer:

As seen in the charts, the number of collisions increased 58 percent after cameras were introduced at the twelve intersections selected by Winnipeg. These extra accidents were not minor ones. Injuries increased 64 percent and property damage claims between 60 and 113 percent, with the largest claims increasing the most. These effects were specific to the camera intersections, as the number of accidents citywide increased only 7 percent during the same period.

A 58% percent increase in serious accidents at intersections with cameras. Fifty-eight percent. To our city's police, income is more important than safety.

Hah, joke's on you!

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006050295,00 .html
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/09/978.asp

There is a great document put together by a lawyer called Photographers' Rights. http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm

There is a great document put together by a lawyer called Photographers' Rights. http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm

http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/05-vdot.pdf

from Winipeg, Canada

http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/2006/winnipeg audit.pdf

and a North Carolina A & T study

http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/burkeyobeng.p df

http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/05-vdot.pdf

from Winipeg, Canada

http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/2006/winnipeg audit.pdf

and a North Carolina A & T study

http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/burkeyobeng.p df

http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/05-vdot.pdf

from Winipeg, Canada

http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/2006/winnipeg audit.pdf

and a North Carolina A & T study

http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/burkeyobeng.p df

Yes, I do.

several in fact.

http://www.caranddriver.com/columns/11185/fish-sto ries-from-the-operators-of-traffic-scameras.html

http://thenewspaper.com/news/11/1189.asp

http://thenewspaper.com/news/01/117.asp

and that took me 10 minutes to dig up.

Yes, I do.

several in fact.

http://www.caranddriver.com/columns/11185/fish-sto ries-from-the-operators-of-traffic-scameras.html

http://thenewspaper.com/news/11/1189.asp

http://thenewspaper.com/news/01/117.asp

and that took me 10 minutes to dig up.

http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/06/687.asp

http://pubsindex.trb.org/document/view/default.asp ?lbid=776666

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/06/technology/circu its/06came.html?en=8bc6df38e1042a40&ex=1262667600& amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;am p;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;ei=5090&partner= rssuserland&pagewanted=print&position=

Felonies are major or "permanent" crimes such as theft, maim, and murder.

You forgot jaywalking, unauthorized wi-fi access and other heinous crimes.

Like you say, no-one's perfect. So when the government or Big Business wants to smear an activist, or a homophobic police commander wants to avoid having them orrible faggots on his force, it'll be fairly easy for them to find some reason to kick these people out.

My worry isn't that this'll be used against anyone - as many people have pointed out, that's technologically impractical at present. My worry is that, when someone in power is already pissed off with you, they have one more tool to help destroy your life on top of the usual ones.

Of course, these cameras never make mistakes like the issuing of a 800 MPH (in a 30 zone!) speeding ticket to 73 year old Adalat Khan.

From the article (my emboldification):
Khan, a retiree, received a letter from the police claiming they had photographic and video evidence of his supersonic offense. Khan denies traveling beyond the speed of sound, which is approximately 750 MPH at sea level.

Read about it here "After testing American-specifcation laser speed guns, London's Daily Mail newspaper concludes that the popular LTI 20-20 Ultralyte model is prone to "wild" errors. Specifically, a wall was found to travel at 44 MPH, an empty road 33 MPH, a parked car 22 MPH, and a slow-moving bicycle at 66 MPH. These findings match those of the BBC who investigated the same device in March and September."

One would be STUPID to think that our devices can't be wrong, defective, etc. Just look at how many defective computer parts have been shipped in the brief history of Computing.