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French City To Use CCTV For Parking Fines
horza writes "The city of Nice, France is rolling out 626 CCTV cameras throughout town, giving it one of the highest levels of surveillance in the world (1.8 cameras per 1000 inhabitants). The usual rhetoric was given — that they will be used solely for reducing violent crime — but the city will now begin sending out parking tickets solely based on the CCTV video evidence."
Not so Nice after all...
Here we go again, one of my greatest fears and the next logical step for law enforcement: Shifting focus from public safety to revenue collection. Fixed DHS checkpoints are running random searches for petty drug possesion and proper vehicle paperwork, in the name of "keeping $HOME_COUNTRY safe." Random police "DUI" checkpoints are impounding far more sober than drunk drivers, not even making a dent in drunk driving statistics.
The solution to the problem lies with a past state of a red-light camera in San Diego, near the Aero drive exit right off the 8 freeway - One of the cameras was dangling from its support post, literally hanging by a few threads. Some brave hero must have seen the tell-tale flash of a $400 citation, got out of his or her vehicle, and decapitated the fucking camera with a baseball bat.
And now, we must do the same. With fake license plates, motorized, retractable license plate covers for the red-light cameras, and heapin' helpins of baseball bat.
The excuse in this case will probably be how many fist-fights break out over parking spaces.
What they say it's about ________
(a) Terrorism
(b) Violent Crime
(c) Child Pornography
What it's really about.
(a) Power
(b) Money
(c) Control
We could use CCTV surveillance to prevent corruption :)
Two words: Laser Pointers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0TgaGePhJA
Once enough people get tired of their governments setting up privacy-invading surveillance networks, all it takes is a dedicated few people who run around and aim laser pointers at all the CCD cameras. Eventually the governments would get tired of replacing them.
Nice's mayor is C. Estrosi, a member of the government that, if I remember correctly, used to be close to the "Front National" (far right party) at some point. No real surprise there.
Fun times will be had.
... I'd rather live in a city with CCTV cameras than a city with poorly-trained armed police ready to start shooting at any moment, privately-run prisons that require a constant stream of new inmates to keep the workshops running and the profits up, and drug and alcohol laws that even the Taliban think are a tad excessive.
This is the doing of Christian Estrosi, mayor of Nice and minister of Industry, whose education consisted in winning motorcycle races. He's at the forefront of applying repression at the city level, and actually wanted to fine mayors of other cities where crime is not sufficiantly fought in his eyes. Funny coming from the guy in charge of the city where the Russian Mafia is rampant... anyway the summary has is wrong, in terms of politically correct French. The French government wants everyone to stop using the ugly word 'videosurveillance' and instead opt for the friendly, wonderfully orwellian 'videoprotection'.
~~~ Paf. Le chien.
This is not the first time I've heard "this is for your own safety" arguments only to have them turn out as thinly veiled guises of trying to make money at your expense. Details escape me, but not too long ago, somewhere in the US, a town added red light cameras which took a snapshot of your car and sent you the fine for running a red light. In a matter of months, it was so successful that very few, if anybody, ran red lights anymore. You think they'd be happy - after all, they probably DID save lives. So why did they take them down? Because the revenue from tickets (those types anyway) was reduced to a big, fat 0
This also makes you wonder what else is being done "for our safety", when in reality it's just a way to take your money. Surely at least speeding enforcement must be exempt from this. Oh wait...
Rothbard was right when he said that governments only have destructive ways of making money (of course, he was referring to taxation at the time, but a valid point non the less)
...but that isn't very Nice.
You do not want this ... It is worse than living in East Germany under the Stazi. (or similar to the "great Terror" after the French revolution)
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Sounds like a jobs program more than anything else.
Are there any sources for this besides a blog post?
Except I've already commented (twice) on this thread. Parent isn't just Funny, but also Insightful.
Feel better now?
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
Just read about this in the paper today, a Norwegian parking company just started with this practice and the guy caught was quite surprised as he was not notified about his wrongdoings until the ticket came in the mail (he parked there several times thus getting several tickets). The Norwegian Data Inspectorate is looking into this practice.
(Google translate of article)
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=no&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aftenposten.no%2Fnyheter%2Foslo%2Farticle3851620.ece
I think the core of the reaction to this is, the traffic system isn't and has never been built around everyone keeping every speed limit and rule all the time, implicitly?
Emotions! In your brain!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came...
The problem is the direction this is headed, it seems fairly harmless when it is all introduced one step at a time. First they use it to reduce crime, then to catch parking offenders, sure we protest a bit now but we will all come to accept it in the end. But then what will be next, once we accepted that surveying parking is acceptable perhaps looking for petty offenses or indecent behavior should also be acceptable?
Not to mention that these new systems usually undermines the basic principle of innocent until proven guilty, because most of the processing is done by a machine. To maximize profits most if it is automated and as few operators as possible will be used to skim through the recorded offenses and send out tickets. "It looks like this person is guilty of a crime so they probably are, send out a ticket".
I am usually not one for fear mongering or totalitarian conspiracy theories, however things are rapidly moving in a direction I don't like.
Parking tickets are like Vegas Casinos. If they make the table odds too high, then they lose a lot of customers. Installing cameras will just mean that people won't be willing to take risks any more since there's a certainty that they will be caught. Cities catch people because people can actually get away with a lot of red meters, but they end up getting caught more in the long run.
This system is already in use for awhile in Cannes (the film festival city) and for sure in other cities in south of France... And the enforcement is drastic. You stop in front of a shop to pick up some ordered goods, you've got a ticket coming home...
With all that's going on in the World today, isn't about time we got back to hating the French?
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
So, travelling through the French cities on public transport can be a pain. The streets are "littered" by double parked cars. When there's no parking space available in a two lane road (that is, two lanes in one direction) one of the two lanes is often used as parking as well. Add in the fact that the streets are only as wide as needed for the buses this cause major traffic jams daily.
Fine the misparked vehicles by any means possible please as it will be good short term. Paris in particular needs some serious underground parkings to be able to solve this issue long term.
With all those cameras, maybe we'll get to see what's in the case.
Well said.
That, however, is worse than cameras (which does not diminish how bad cameras are). It's well known (from the examples of WWII Germany and so on) that states which encourage citizens to report each other become very nasty places to be.
What do I have to do to get that in my town?
It is stalking, however. Or why then is it illegal for people to follow others (especially important people) in public day in, day out?
And, according to the police, even public officials doing public work in public to the public with the public looking on, is a privacy issue for people taking videos.
The idea goes that people who tend to break big rules tend to also break little rules. So cracking down on minor infractions is supposed to do several things: give the police an opportunity for habitual criminals to become known to them; give them an opportunity to actually catch the bigger fish using minor offences as holding charges; and also drastically reduce "broken windows", or the casual rulebreaking that sends a signal to everybody that "anything goes".
Given what I've seen of France (and much of southern Europe) though, casual rulebreaking and low-level disorder is everywhere, and makes for a very uncomfortable environment. Organised crime thrives in the south of France (always has), and the lax and overly tolerant attitudes of the authorities in Barcelona and Madrid have made them hazardous places indeed, since the morons there think that effective law enforcement == Franco.
I lived in France for 6 months and their idea of a violent crime was American coffee. Something about it being an assault on the palette.
Well this seems fairly easy: - Get one of those INFRARED HATS and wear them around town: http://hacknmod.com/hack/blind-cameras-with-an-infrared-led-hat/ - After you park at a meter or illegally, cover your license plates and window registration They are probably doing this to cut costs AND increase profitability (no more foot soldiers and wrote more summonses!), but if the minority starts protecting themselves thusly, there won't be much they can do about it since they will have pulled the foot soldiers.
There used to be a lot of privacy in 'public' places where now I can be viewed by camera. Even in a crowd it doesn't follow that the people around you are scrutinising you but you know for sure that the camera is looking at someone, searching for something and given time and a change of legislation you cannot predict which particular behaviour it will be used to identify next.
In chicago when they switched to a private company for parking meters, who then jacked the prices up by 5-10 times what they originally were and couldn't be bothered to fix them when they broke, the public was furious. Practically no one would park at the meters anymore and there were rampant accounts of people purposely breaking the meters. What do you think is going to happen here? Now the company will have to pay for upkeep and repairs on the cameras as well as the meters so they'll charge even more. How long before the retaliation?
London still beats that 1.8 cameras per 1000 people stat hands down. It has 1 camera per 14 people.
So you get all these cameras and the government promised you that they will only use them so they can fight violent crime. Thank god "we" (and "we" apparently means YOU.) can trust the government.
... uhh, but... well... hmmm...
But after the bait and switch you get parking tickets... Probably followed by jaywalking and littering tickets.
Thank god we have developed the machine vision technology to completely automate this process. You buy a little biometric software and and add it to some shape recognition software and the computer can pump out some revenue enhancement at an amazingly profitable margin.
Outlandish? All of this is easy with the available technology and with governments that actually think that YOU are THEIR source of income about the only thing stopping them is... uhh... Well at least they promised it would only be used to combat violent crime!!!
Once we add the software upgrade on the back end your government can cover their serious shortfalls by letting the machine automatically send you citations for both littering and jaywalking when you drop a 10 dollar bill and chase it when the wind blows it into the empty street.
Or maybe you just stepped out of the painted crosswalk one step before the curb. Thank god the machine noticed and you have to admit it, it is a violation. (cha-Ching!)
So...
For those people in Nice, here is how you combat this: Acquire a few license plates of city officials and put some magnets on them so they can be interchanged easily. After the brains of the operation realize that having someone there to actually verify things has value then this should revert back to a sensible face to face system.
--
Politics is just popularity that's gone pro.
Don't go to Nice. I bet all those parking tickets will do well to encourage tourism, business, and shopping.
So as not to be complete lying bastards, they will only be issuing tickets for _violent_ parking offenses.
We all know that these cameras have a true, important purpose: To provide quick identification of any German soldiers that may be getting too hot and/or thirsty as they march through town, so that refreshments can be provided quickly.
...for the right reason -- the owner of the car was being issued a criminal citation regardless who was driving the car, shifting the burden of proof to the owner rather than the state to prove the owner committed the violation or permitted the violation to take place.
I think some states don't issue citations with their traffic cameras unless they have a good photo of the driver in case someone challenges the citation.
So your argument is basically that you break the law all the time, but you'd rather not have anyone notice that you do it? I abhor litter, and I don't think "jaywalking" is illegal in this country as far as I know.
which is totally what she said
Won't that cause some confusion with Paris?
Well, Paris gets a bad rap. But if we actually take a step back and think about this, it's not actually such a bad idea.
If I'm going to be busted for the heinous crime of leaving my car parked in a clearway, it's clearly better if this is done with (nearly) incontrovertible evidence of my guilt. Sure, it sucks for me to have to pay a fine (especially if one happens to be French, in which case even participating in such ignoble activities as the taxation system is quite rightly frowned upon), but if there is a rule, one should be prepared to enforce it.
They already give parking tickets in London (UK) based entirely on CCTV evidence. My poor wife got stung by this.
The argument is that laws are currently made with the idea that they will not be enforced 100% of the time. Because currently it takes an actual law officer to cite someone for an infraction. This means that they can apply their judgment instead of mindlessly sticking to the letter of the law despite any mitigating circumstances.
If you're going to move to a 100% automated, letter-of-the-law system, you HAVE to revisit any law that such a system is going to enforce and rewrite it. Because that's absolutely not what was intended when the laws were originally written.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
OK, I suppose I should comment on this since I live in that city, and am only two blocks from the building where cops watch those video cameras. Actually, there are pros and cons to this idea (but mainly cons):
In short, this is a truly bad idea, but since no one cares (and since ethnic issues and the accompanying fear-mongering run high at the moment), politicians can happily bamboozle people into thinking they should accept any weird proposal in the name of security. Trying to explain the underlying issues to the average city dweller (which are basically seniors and right-wingers) will just get you a “think-of-the-children”-like answer (the best line I've found is pointing out how the cameras won't do shit to prevent an attacker from hitting them, and that their tax money would have been better spent on more policemen on the beat). I suspect it will be some time before people actually realise the dangers of this global surveillance system, and when they do, it may well be much too late. Just like all those people that go around yelling that the law “protects too much the criminals' rights”—until of course, a relative of them gets beaten at the hands of the police *sigh*
Xenu brings order!
If this isn't modded "Insightful" then I don't know what should be.
--
Politics is just popularity that's gone pro.
Confused to your question?
If you're referring to the "Offtopic" rating...well that makes sense sorta. Supposed to be V for Vendetta quote but I actually never even mentioned that it was...
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
At 1.8 cameras per 1000 inhabitants, that is not that high. RailCorp in Sydney has at least 8600 cameras (http://www.cityrail.info/faqs/security). In a city of 4.4 million, this works out at 1.9 cameras per 1000 inhabitants. This only covers the city's 200 odd railway stations. Maybe the Nice figure is considered is high because it only covers street surveillance.