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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.
We could use CCTV surveillance to prevent corruption :)
... 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)
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
Mess with the police's equipment and see how long it'll take them to care. Do you want to be thrown into prison for that?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Here is an article in the main local news paper. Although I wouldn't be too sure it's better than a blog...
not that French politics are any easier to summarize than anywhere else, but to be fair with the GP, we have seen lately that the current governement has more and more of a tendency to use far-right (or what we call far-right here in France anyway) rethorics, such as blaming immigrants for economical and crime problems, for instance.
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...
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.
so if you ruin one line like the laser in the video, they only have several hundred left to identify you ...
Yeah, try using that as a defence the next time you're nicked.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You forgot the "boiling a frog" analogy that is traditionally inserted by lunatic libertarians at this point, just before explaining how they will shoot the next postman they see in order to prevent socialism destroying America.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You are supposing that the enforcement end of the police are actually happy about these systems.
Personally, I think that every time a community installs shit like this, each officer becomes worried about job security. After all, the end result is not needing traffic cops, which most of them are.
"His name was James Damore."
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?
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!