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Chicago Red Light Cameras Issue Thousands of Bogus Tickets
mpicpp points out a report in the Chicago Tribune saying that thousands of the city's drivers have been wrongfully ticketed for red light violations because of "faulty equipment, human tinkering, or both." The Tribune's investigation uncovered the bogus tickets by analyzing the data from over 4 million tickets issued in the past seven years.
Cameras that for years generated just a few tickets daily suddenly caught dozens of drivers a day. One camera near the United Center rocketed from generating one ticket per day to 56 per day for a two-week period last summer before mysteriously dropping back to normal. Tickets for so-called rolling right turns on red shot up during some of the most dramatic spikes, suggesting an unannounced change in enforcement. One North Side camera generated only a dozen tickets for rolling rights out of 100 total tickets in the entire second half of 2011. Then, over a 12-day spike, it spewed 563 tickets — 560 of them for rolling rights. Many of the spikes were marked by periods immediately before or after when no tickets were issued — downtimes suggesting human intervention that should have been documented. City officials said they cannot explain the absence of such records.
English language has rules, such as capitalization of the first letter in a sentence. FOLLOW THE RULES, BOOTLICK!
So log the workorder, then repair the system, then close the workorder. Just like in the municipal code manuals.
:)
You, uh, didn't even make it through the summary, did you?
But hey, you got 1st p, so, I guess that counts for something.
1,000 out of 4,000,000 tickets makes a 0.025% error rate. That's a perfectly acceptable margin of error.
You need to discriminate between positive and negative error rates in situations like this.
If it failed to ticket 0.025% of red-light runners, we would consider it an amazing success.
If, however, it tickets even one law-abiding driver, then it very much needs an angry mob ripping these damned things down from the poles, throwing them on the front lawn of City Hall, and demanding an end to the outsourcing of "justice" to for-profit companies.
If it were only as simple as that. Invariably red light cameras lead to officials treating it as a revenue stream and trying various ways to "maximize" that revenue.
6 Cities That Were Caught Shortening Yellow Light Times For Profit
http://blog.motorists.org/6-cities-that-were-caught-shortening-yellow-light-times-for-profit/
City’s ‘gotcha’ traffic cameras use short yellow lights to increase ticket revenue
http://nypost.com/2012/10/08/citys-gotcha-traffic-cameras-use-short-yellow-lights-to-increase-ticket-revenue-study/
Florida Officials Shortened Yellow-Light Times to Increase Violations
http://archive.wtsp.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=316418
What do they call what they're doing?
"Business as usual."
The order of society is far more important than a single insignificant persons life.
You might want to re-think that stance - Not because I particularly value human life, but because it negates your own point.
A rolling-right-on-red doesn't threaten to undermine the order of society. Punishing people who haven't committed any crime, however, does. When people stop believing in at least the theory that our system of crime-and-punishment more-or-less works, the motivation to at least give lip-service to pointless laws completely vanishes.
That depends entirely on the state and municipality.
Most states allow you to turn on red when it is clear, but some don't. A few don't even require you to stop when making a right turn, if the way is clear. Conversely, municipalities in states that allow a turn on red can disallow it by posting notice at the intersection. And finally, a scant few states don't allow turns on red at all and are happy to ticket drivers for doing so.
Typically, people do 99% of their driving locally (or at least in their home state), so they know the relevant law. If not, err on the side of caution.
I doesn't matter if it is a .025% false ticket rate or a 95% false ticket rate. The article is pointing out that there are short-lived undocumented changes in camera behavior indicating either a faulty system as a whole or a direct manipulation of the equipment. Both of these are worthy of investigation, no where in the article (it is possible that I missed it) does it suggest that the system itself is failing and should be thrown away. Merely that it looks to either have a fault or is being abused by authorities.
Personally, I align with the later option.
But by all means continue to completely ignore the article.
I know "the city" is pretty big, but I don't believe it's made it all the way to Chicago, yet.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
By appealing and not agreeing to "settle" with the prosecution — in fact, I did not even want to "talk to them" other than during a hearing and in judge's presence. This made it necessary for the actual officer, who (supposedly) reviewed the ticket before it was issued, to appear in court — which he didn't do. Maybe, I was just "lucky" at that and, maybe, Chicago would've allowed the prosecution to avoid presenting the officer for testimony, but...
The automatic cameras allow for issuing a massive number of tickets — because human police don't need to do much work. If more people appealed — thus necessitating the human policemen's presence in court for each such ticket, maybe, they wouldn't be such a valuable proposition for the local authorities.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Chicago has a streamlined form of government, having one branch: finance.
It's worse in my town. they shortened the green light on busy cross streets along the main drag with the red light cameras. You are lucky to get two cars through now and if you are waiting for apposing traffic before turning left, you will be in the intersection when your light turns red. They did this right after the cameras went up.
Luckily, soon after the cameras went up, the state and a court said they couldn't be used pending a couple court cases over them. One judge already called it "criminal" in one of the cases and another called it racketeering so I think the state supreme court might not allow them either. The state (Ohio) is not banking on the courts, they are trying to pass legislation that would bar their use unless a cop was at the intersection witnessing the infraction.
One of the very first yellow light studies was conducted over Chillicothe Ohio's cams. I don't know if this is the original or not (I originally remember reading a PDF about it and from another site) but this explains a lot of the problem with short yellows.
http://www.shortyellowlights.c...
As much as I don't like these cameras, when you get a ticket in Chicago, and most of the suburbs I know of around here, you're provided w/ the means to actually watch your car commit the violation. I got a ticket for a rolling right turn on red last summer. You key your license and the citation number into a city website (google it, you'll find it) and you can watch an mpeg4 stream of your car passing through the intersection or turning on red or whatever - with a little curl magic you can download it as a keepsake.
Armed with the video, you should be able to appeal the ticket if you truly didn't commit the offense or if the camera went bonkers and ticketed everyone going through the intersection.
If it's a borderline case, most people don't bother with the hassle of appealing and just pay the fine...miss a day of work and sit in a traffic court for hours (and possibly pay court costs) or pay $100.
My observation around the Chicago area is that people are mostly just butthurt because they're getting ticketed for infractions that were lightly enforced before due to labor / manhour constraints of the police forces.
Yes it does. Any toleration of law breaking undermines the order of society.
Order of society flows from legitimacy rather than enforcement of law. While related the capability to enforce law is directly dependent on ability to obtain legitimacy.
Loss of legitimacy undermines the order of society. Unenforceable law erodes legitimacy.
Tolerance of law breaking is an important safety valve.
See the feedback loop?
If you need convincing you need only look into history of prohibition and war on drugs to see what happens when legitimacy is eroded.
Realities of environment in which people live matters. In extreme circumstance if enough people are desperate enough even normally universally agreeable rules against stealing can temporarily fall into the realm of unenforceable where the peoples only perceived choice is steal or starve/die. This is why governance is difficult and why zero tolerance is reserved for North Koreans, decapitated dictators and hypothetical alien overlords.
Actually there is proof the system wasn't perfect..
An example was provided where someone challenged two of her tickets. The judge reviewed the video and determined that the person had indeed come to a stop in both scenarios.The judge ruled in favor of the person, and dismissed the ticket.
Additionally, numerous tickets were thrown out at a significantly higher rate during traffic ticket spikes.
Most people are conditioned to not challenge automated tickets. The articled said 95% automatically paid. The remainder that challenged, 90% of them lost, until the traffic ticket spikes started occurring. In one instance, one location was challenged at a rate of 1 in 7 tickets for 242 challenges. 109 were thrown out.
At some point the courts will have reviewed enough footage at one location, that they just auto accepted.
And here-in lies the rub. Make the process tedious enough to challenge, and make the fine small and convenient to pay, and very few will question the accuracy of the system. "The incident was last week, and I was in a rush, did I come to a full stop? Forget it, pay the fine."
The problem is they changed something in the system, it triggered a volume where people realized the system can't be right.
As to the point of enforcement.
There are laws on the books that are meant for true good: Hey don't go killing people. Don't be stealing other people's stuff. Don't drink and drive.
There are laws on the books that are meant to guide people in safe conduct. Don't be speeding. Don't run red lights.
And there are byzantine laws on the books that when researched are for some obscure reason. No hanky panky on Tuesdays in the kitchen. Da heck?
Enforcement's job is to make sure the law is enforced, but to also exercise a level of reasonability in the enforcement of the law. So and so is speeding. Hey they are having a baby. We should help them. VS Hey, a-hole is doing 50 in a school zone. Bust 'em.
The reasonability measurement should have been occurring when the vendor and IBM were evaluating the infraction before sending it out. Somewhere along the lines, that fail safe wasn't being done.
These automatic tickets are CIVIL fines instead of criminal. No one has to show up. If you don't pay they just send you to a collection agency.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard