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EFF: License Plate Scanner Deal Turns Texas Cops Into Debt Collectors (eff.org)
An anonymous reader writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation is sounding the alarm about a deal between Texas law enforcement agencies and Vigilant Solutions — a company that provides vehicle surveillance tech. The deal will give Texas police access to a bunch of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), and access to the company's data and analytic tools. For free. How is Vigilant making money? "The government agency in turn gives Vigilant access to information about all its outstanding court fees, which the company then turns into a hot list to feed into the free ALPR systems. As police cars patrol the city, they ping on license plates associated with the fees. The officer then pulls the driver over and offers them a devil's bargain: get arrested, or pay the original fine with an extra 25% processing fee tacked on, all of which goes to Vigilant. In other words, the driver is paying Vigilant to provide the local police with the technology used to identify and then detain the driver. If the ALPR pings on a parked car, the officer can get out and leave a note to visit Vigilant's payment website." Vigilant also gets to keep the data collected on citizens while the ALPRs are in use.
The rest of us are glad that the cops are easily collecting fines that the government has already levied.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Surveillance should be aggressively monetized as early and as often and as obtrusively as possible. It's the only way people will understand what it means for people to spy on you.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Fight every accusation against you in court, however minor. $10 parking ticket? Fight it.
If everyone contested every civil fine, then there wouldn't be civil fines. There aren't enough hours in the day to adjudicate every fine, and courts know it. They expect you to pay it, and they love for you to pay it online.
If you must pay, for example, a $10 parking ticket, go into the office of the entity during business hours and pay with a $100 bill. If the ticket is some amount of money like 55 or 65 dollars, pay in singles. Do not use the Internet, mail, a credit card, or a drop box. Waste the maximum amount of time possible. If you want to speak with the cashier's supervisor, do it. If you got your ticket in a small town, get the mayor on the phone and have a discussion about it, seeing if he can do something to help you.
These are all things that I do, and they work great. When it costs more than a small percentage of $x to collect $x, people have second thoughts. Nobody wants the hassle of having to look a human being in the eyes. It makes people very uncomfortable.
Why do this? Because when you don't show up they hound you to pay them. Turn the tables and annoy the shit out of them instead. They'll get their money eventually, but there is always the chance that they'll make it go away just to make you go away.
So, basically the police are now funding their activities by running a shakedown racket?
Is this shit even legal? Or have we gotten past the point where we pretend the cops give a shit about legal?
This is extortion, plain and simple. Congratulations, Texas, your entire fucking law enforcement needs to be indicted under the RICO Act.
Fuck the police, they're all crooks these days.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This is a perfect example of government and private industry working together. These are COURT fees that are either going to go uncollected, or
will cost more to collect than the debt is worth. Many people are scofflaws; this partnership catches them.
The alternative is to do away with fines as they are in essence "uncollectible." Or raise the traffic tickets from $15 to $1000 to make them worthwhile to collect.
You don't see any problem with police telling you: pay the fine *and* a 25% surcharge to a private company or I'm taking you to jail?
One thing I noted from the description was that the 25% goes to Vigilant, pure profit for them.
It is not pure profit as Vigilant pays for the following.
1. The scanners in the police cars.
2. The servers to handle the database and the queries.
3. The data entry and administration of the database
4. The dispute process for transactions.
but it's my understanding that in many cases they can't pay, not that they don't want to.
They should have gone to court and dealt with the issue. There are many programs to reduce fines for low income offenders.
Given the disparity between fees and jail, I wouldn't be surprised if the county ends up seeing this system cost more in jail and processing expenses than it gains in fines being paid.
It is at least as possible that the word will get around about this process and many more fines will be paid when people realize that they can be found much more easily.
This is merely another way to send poor people to jail. If a person couldn't pay the original fine, what makes us believe they can pay the original fine plus 25%? So, the result is they go to jail, and the tax payers then pay even more money to house and feed them, but ...still never get the original fine, do we?
Someone has not thought this through, completely.
Meanwhile, when they're in jail, they're being housed likely by a 3rd party whose making money on keeping people in jail, because they're providing security or food, or the physical facilities, or the parole services you offer when they get out, but they can't pay that either...so they go back to jail, where the cycle never ends.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
until some minority driver tries to speed away and the cops chase him down and shoot him over an unpaid parking ticket.
Granted, the 8th amendment does say that we are not a country of debtors prisons and as such unreasonable fines shall not be levied, so assuming that the majority of people who don't pay the fines simply can't afford it, one does wonder how it doesn't violate the 8th amendment.
It does violate the 8th amendment, but the courts don't care.
The US Constitution hasn't been properly followed since the Civil War, and perhaps not even before then.
It is a nice concept, but we really don't pay that much heed to it.
But isn't this exactly how chrony capitalism is supposed to work?
I agree with none of it, and here's why: data from license plate scanners that does NOT produce a hit should be discarded immediately and never saved. They're not doing that.
The driving habits of innocent parties should never be recorded en masse. Period. I know 'you're in public, people can see your car, blah, blah, blah'. Not the same thing and you know it.
This technology and the use of it by law enforcement should be heavily regulated with severe criminal penalties for misuse, or it should be banned entirely. In addition, it's time for some privacy laws in the US to protect citizens from corporate predators.