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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."
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.
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
I'm part of a the NTBPT (No to Bike Parking Tax) demo group in London which protests at having to pay parking fees in Central London. The UK law stipulates that councils are not allowed to simply charge for parking as a revenue stream, there has to be some benefit to the local population/businesses such as relieveing congestion, and as bikes don't cause congestion we're currently fighting Westminster Counsil in the European Courts of the legality of the charges. http://www.notobikeparkingtax.com/
Westminster Council also employs CCTV cars that roam the streets of London spying on the populace & catching any "traffic violations", but we've caught on to that and now we follow the CCTV cars and we film them & alert motorists about them and occasionally post evidence of them committing their own traffic violations to Youtube :-)
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23883049-bikers-blow-cover-of-cctv-cars-snooping-on-drivers.do
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHOazGC7alk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QNfeL71ojg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cztfKB8SGCI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsZb9jIfGv0
If you don't like what your elected memebers are doing then 1] try and vote them out, 2] organise, protest & demonstrate 3] take direct action to hinder their effectiveness (all legal and above board direct action mind.
You are suffering from the failed logic that government actually acts rational.
In fact, the revenue streams won't decrease your tax burden, instead they just give raises to employees, elected officials, find a way to work bonuses or more/better benefits into the public sector, and end up spending more. Government is funny that way, they think once the money is in their hands, they have to spend it. Of course that's true to an extent, most jurisdictions (at least in the US) can only keep a certain percentage of revenue collected until a certain point is reached, the excess has to be spent or returned to the tax payer.
This is what has sparked most of the major budget problems we are seeing right now. You can't un-raise employees, so when the economy tanks and revenue drops, it's deficit hell or unpopular cuts in programs, or somehow raising taxes. None of which politicians want to do because it makes it hard to get reelected. Most governments went from "we need this to run" to how much can I spend. The later marks a shift in the deterioration of government and brings about favoritism, cronyism and the general environment of waste that seems embedded in the ineffective government we see today on most levels.
No, red light camera are not subsidizing your taxes, they are enabling government expansion.