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."

Comments

Not so Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so Nice after all...

Re:Not so Nice

[worx101]

Parking where-ever you please and hoping a traffic cop doesn't pass by isn't a privilege. Because YOU want to run around and break laws does not make CCTV evil, it just means your easier to catch. Freedom getting away with criminal behavior(no matter how small and insignificant the "crime")

Re:Not so Nice

[Mr. Freeman]

Your argument is "well, if you're not breaking the law then why do you care?"

Let's extrapolate:
Why can't we put a camera in your house? I mean, you're not breaking the law, so why should you care? Obviously you don't want cameras in your house because you just want to break laws.

Re:Not so Nice

[KDR_11k]

A camera in a house turns it from private space into public space where common morality demands different behaviour. CCTV in public spaces has significantly less impact.

Re:Not so Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

A better analogy would be to say every citizen now has to have a personal overseer follow them 24/7 and observe all their movements and actions within public spaces - any law-abiding citizens have no grounds for complaint, therefore if you do complain you must be a criminal. That's tantamount what this law plus GGP post are saying. Most people don't mind being observed in public, but they would mind their entire day being observed by one set of people - this technology enables such observation and its justification is the sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut excuse of preventing illegal parking. Here's an idea - deputise the public to report illegal parking and give them a percentage of the fee for every ticket issued based on their information, that way you raise public awareness, make efficient use of your limited pool of wardens (since they're responding to specific information not just wandering at random) and everyone else gets to hang onto the last shreds of their privacy.

Re:Not so Nice

[teh kurisu]

Oh the irony.

Videoprotection

[bedonnant]

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'.

Re:Videoprotection

[Anonymous Coward]

seriously have you ever driven in Nice? People are double parked everywhere and at any time. The entire city is constantly jammed because two lanes streets are turned into a narrow one lane street. People just stop their car and leave them in the middle of the street blocking traffic and those parked into the proper parking zones. They even double park in intersections blocking two streets for the price of one.

Cops in Nice are useless or never to be seen and only the gendarmes seem to care about traffic violation, but they can only operate on the highway. I live on the outskirts of Nice and never ever drive into the centre, I'd even drive miles to end up in Italy where things are quieter than going inside Nice on a Saturday afternoon.

What's the other stuff they've done. They've put cameras on traffic lights so that people stop running thru red lights because 50% of all scooters and two-wheelers just run thru red lights like it was only for cars. And guess what: people complain because they've been caught doing it.

Anyone who has learned how to drive in the US, Canada, UK, EIRE, Switzerland, Germany,etc... will have a heart attack driving here.

London

[Anne Thwacks]

We have this in London, and I personally have had ticekets while asking for directions, waiting to do a U-turn and while waiting to reverse into a parking bay.

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)

Re:London

[Anonymous Coward]

It is worse than living in East Germany under the Stazi.

Rule of thumb: if parking tickets are a big grievance for you then your life isn't as bad as living in East Germany under the Stasi.

Re:London

[Galvatron]

Rule of thumb: if parking tickets are a big grievance for you then your life isn't as bad as living in East Germany under the Stasi.

This is obviously true. No one will be executed, tortured, or held in secret prisons in Nice for parking violations. However, the GP's point isn't totally trivial either. Certainly a surveillance apparatus is being implemented that is vastly greater than anything envisioned by the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, and it is being aimed at punishing citizens who generally are trying to live their lives without harming others. Yes, people are breaking laws (usually, though there's plenty of stories of systems implemented in such a way that they catch even law abiders), but we all have occasions where we need to stop in a bus zone for a minute to drop something off, or realize that we left our change in our other pants and can't pay the meter. The notion of having eyes on us at all times, watching for us to make the smallest mistake and pouncing on it, does contribute to a sense of alienation, a feeling that government is working against us, rather than for us. Working for the citizens, rather than against them, is supposed to be the very essence of what separates liberal democracies from totalitarian autocracies. Just because a government demonstrates its hostility through annoyance, rather than brutality, doesn't mean it's not a disturbing attitude.

Re:Revenue Collection

[MPAB]

There was a recent scandal here in Spain because the picture that comes with the fine showed the car passing in yellow, not red. Nobody was found responsible and nothing happened.
There's also been known cases of shortened yellow lights in the US that give the victims no time to stop before getting caught in camera.

Speed cameras are easier to use as bait, though, because as soon as the revenue goes down the "authorities" just set a lower speed limit, even far below the safe limit.

Re:Revenue Collection

[Ponyegg]

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.

Re:Revenue Collection

[sumdumass]

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.

Re:Revenue Collection

[cptdondo]

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.

You need to take off your teabagger hat. I work in the public sector, and I tell you that the last thing an elected official will do is give public employees a raise. We advertised for a traffic engineer; even in this horrendous job market it took 3 months to get 4 qualified applicants. Public sector pay is, for the most part, crap. I get about 75 cents on the dollar compared to private sector work. Most public service employees I know have some sort of side income - rentals, side business, etc - that increase their take home pay.

Government is funny that way, they think once the money is in their hands, they have to spend it.

You're right there, but the money is spent on pet projects, pie in the sky dreams, and stuff like that. They spend the money on what gets them re-elected, what YOU demand they provide YOU. They don't spend a dime on their own employees unless they have to. Any politician that would champion raises to staff, either as pay increases or better benefits, would not be re-elected next time around.

Once the economy improves, there will be a huge exodus of qualified public sector employees into the private sector, to the detriment of public service. Heck, I'm on my way out.

What happens is that once all the good people leave for better paying jobs, leaving mostly the lazy, indolent, and stupid, and a handful of people truly dedicated to service to the public. Then the politicians notice, run around in a panic, give everyone raises, thus rewarding the unqualified for their inability to find a better job.