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Astroturfing For Speed Cameras
New submitter dalosla writes "Chicago's mayor is pushing to change red light cameras near schools and parks into speed cameras. Just about everybody sees it as a cash grab by the city. Today's Chicago Tribune has an article about how the expanded speed camera program would benefit Redflex, the company Greg Goldner, one of the mayor's long time political supporters, lobbies for. This is of merely local interest, but of wider interest in the article would be information about Goldner's astroturfing for Redflex around the country. Redflex is the sole financial supporter for the Traffic Safety Coalition, a 'grassroots' organization to promote more traffic camera usage and fight any attempts to restrict such cameras. Goldner has already successfully facilitated the killing of one anti-camera ballot measure in Texas."
This will probably continue for the same reason DUI laws keep getting more draconian - everyone is scared that if they speak against it they will be lambasted as uncaring assholes - which doesn't make for good campaigning. And good luck fighting any tickets you receive in a school zone, you insensitive bastard. You''re putting all of our kids at risk!
Say no more--oh, wait, just one more thing, that "Chicago mayor" is none other than Rahm Emanuel.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
For years Albuquerque had red light/speeding cameras at a lot of intersections. The public got tired of it, and the city council voted to drop the contract. After a long legal fight, the cameras finally got taken down.
Think that's the end of it? Hah.
See, because Redflex is a private citizen (thanks citizens united!), and not a governmental institution, the company couldn't file criminal cases against alleged speeders/red light runners, so any of the charges they brought forward were always civil cases. This also means that you don't have to go to court to fight the charges, pay any settlements, or essentially give a damn because no police officers saw the crime take place.
Why does this make a difference? Because Redflex was guaranteed something like 40% of the ticket price per incident. Which they're obviously not going to get. So what did they do? They sued the city for $4.5 million.
I wonder if it has already been tried in the US of A, but there's a solution to this speed camera problem, which is widespread here in Italy:
1. the community must actually buy the equipment in an open bidding contest;
2. payment for the equipment is upfront, and any variable fee, maintenance fee etc. is prohibited, to avoid the "tax farming" problem;
3.[this is the neat one] when writing the budget, the community is absolutely forbidden to write in a single penny of expected revenue from speed camera, and any revenue must be written in at the year end as general proportional tax credit for the citizens, and by citizens I mean the ones who paid the taxes to build the road in question; in the case of an Interstate, all the money goes to the federal government.
4. penalty for noncompliance is loss of eligibility for election or work in any goverment owned or controlled entity. If the decision was taken by a committee, all the members willbe subject to said penalty.
If you implement all these resolutions, the political morons will not put speed camera in place, because, to all intent and purposes, they cannot spend the money; to actually spend the speed tickets income as they like, they must first pass a rise in other taxes to accomodate that income, receive it, spend it , and then use the ticket fund to lower the taxation again without being able to move that money about at will. Moreover, they'll have to fight to own the roads, meaning being responsible for the upkeep, and liable for any defect.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
A friend of mine discovered that it is trivially easy to blind one of these cameras.
From his local grocery store, he bought an empty sprayer bottle and some white glue (like Elmer's); this cost like three bucks. He mixed up a 1:1 solution of glue and water, then screwed his sprayer bottle's nozzle to the "stream" mode.
My friend started carrying one of those reusable grocery bags to the store. He'd just leave the sprayer bottle in it. Every time he went to the store, he'd walk up behind the red-light camera, stand just underneath it but still outside its field of vision, and then spray glue all over the lens.
Note that the red light camera systems usually have two cameras: one is a video camera, mounted higher up, which does detection; the lower camera is a high-res still camera, designed to capture the image of the license plate. You don't need to bother with the video camera; just blind the still camera. The system will still keep running, but the photos will be all blurred out and unusable.
My friend said that he'd walk by the camera two or three times a week, and the lens was usually cleaned off by the time he came back. That means that the red-light camera company was sending someone out to clean it, over and over, every week, costing the company lots of money.
My friend told me that someone once approached him in the grocery store and asked what he had been doing; they'd seen him spraying the camera and were curious what he was up to. When he explained how easy it was to disable a red-light camera, the person was delighted and decided to go start doing it herself, too.
The accepted method in the UK is to loop an old tire over the camera, fill it with gasoline, and set fire to it.
http://www.speedcam.co.uk/gatso2.htm
Don't forget the current President is also a Chicagoan, and he's obviously corrupt.
Conveniently he's a Chicagoan when discussing corrupt Chicago politics, a Washington insider (former Senator) when discussing national politics, and a secret Kenyan when discussing whether he should even be president. Welcome to "Newspin" on the Faux News Network.