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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.
Yes Using Cops as Debit Collectors.
What Could go wrong?
See Ferguson.
The Citizens hate the Cops. Treat them like crap.
The Cops Hate the Citizens for Treating them like crap.
The Police Need to be liked and trusted by the Citizens to be effective.
Bad Idea, But they may go for it.
So a sort of... debtors prison where the in debt person who cannot pay on the outside, is sure to find a way to earn enough while in jail to pay the fines... while also possibly costing the municipality even more to house & feed them.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
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 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.]
Jesus christ you are another one of those smug assholes whose ignorance of the real world is indistinguishable from evil.
You've mistaken your good luck for good citizenship. You live in neighborhoods where policing for penny ante shit is low unlike poor neighborhoods where that's practically all they do.
Fool for thought it is more like it. You need some real life experience of walking in the shoes of those you judge.
"While that is largely true, it is also true that the poor tend to do more things that are stupid and land them in court in the first place."
Yea, those poor were stupid enough to fleece Enron investors, and it was the poor who overleveraged housing derivatives out of greed, and the poor habitually hire teams of accountants to help them hide income from the tax system...
Oh wait. No, the poor do none of that. The only reason the poor are overrepresented in criminal cases is because they don't have wads of cash to pad their fall when they do stupid things. Thinking that doing stupid things is a poor person's thing is nothing but ignorant, bratty, first world, overentitled fuckery.
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.