Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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.