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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.
Wow. Who could possibly have seen this coming?
(yes, that was sarcasm)
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
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,
The driver should just tell the Officer "That information is incorrect, the debt is in dispute. Do you have a warrant for this?"
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
One thing I noted from the description was that the 25% goes to Vigilant, pure profit for them. But if the person can't pay, it's arrest and probably jail, bail, and all that - which is a public cost. I'm sure vigilant isn't seeing any of those costs.
Not that I like the idea of people not paying their fines and judgements, but it's my understanding that in many cases they can't pay, not that they don't want to. In some cases they don't even know.
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.
I don't read AC A human right
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?
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.
What do you do when you encounter somebody that has $20 but not $1k? Toss them in jail, crediting them $100/day, while spending ~$100/day in expenses to keep them in jail?
Doesn't take many of them to exceed the money gotten from those who actually have it.
That's not how the modern for-profit justice system works, you don't get *credit* for serving time, instead you *pay* for serving time:
http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/1...
The cops just threaten the person to force them to pay Vigilient the fine + 25% "processing fee", that fee has no basis in law. If they pay the fine, that's the payment made.
The copy DOESN'T threaten to arrest them if they don't pay the FINE, he threatens to arrest them if they don't pay the FINE+Vigilents 25%.
The problem isn't that the police detect unpaid court fees or scan license plates. Such scanners have been used in the UK for years where they mainly trigger on cars with no insurance. A car with no insurance is 5 times as likely to end up in a crash than an insured car, which is why impounding uninsured cars is a matter of road safety. If people drive, their cars should be ok and they should pay what they owe according to the court.
The problem is elsewhere in the article. "Texas police fund it by gouging people who have outstanding court fines and handing Vigilant all of the data they gather on drivers for nearly unlimited commercial use." and "the ALPR data system Vigilant says contains more than 2.8-billion plate scans and is growing by more than 70 million scans a month. This also includes a wide variety of analytical and predictive software tools."
This mean the police builds a database for a private company telling where each car is whenever the police just happens to pass by. This can then make a history of positions for each car, which they can use for whatever they want or sell. Most countries ban private people/companies from having such databases.
I just happen to read on ALPR cameras yesterday. Real ones the police pay for and the police keep the data in police records and nowhere else. It saves each license plate it detects together with a timestamp and location. If there is no hit, then it will be deleted within 24 hours. If there is a hit, then it can be stored in 5 years as it may be used as court evidence. If something unusual happens and the police knows the criminals escaped in a car, but not which one, then they can keep non-hits for more than 24 hours until they know which license plate to look for. Specifics on who can order a non-delete and precisely why wasn't specified, but the examples were a bit extreme and sort of went into state of emergency. I would like to know the other end and ask what is the minimal it takes to trigger such a decision.
The computer connected to the cameras has a list of license plates to trigger on, but there is nothing technical in the system telling why the police should be interested in the car. This mean the hit list can be filled with cars wanted from crime scenes or where owners are wanted and so on. In other words it is possible it will react if the car driving past the police is driven by somebody wanted for assault, but without the ALPR system, the police wouldn't have noticed.
It sounds to me like a great tool for the police, but it should be for the police only and there should be a watch on it to prevent abuse, because it's clearly possible to abuse this, just like it is possible to abuse nearly all other technology.
It might seem like a good idea, but personally I hate the idea that a minor glitch in a database somewhere and I'm getting halued off to jail or pay for a fee I don't actually owe. Just for driving down the street.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
I have a delinquent client in Texas that owes me money. It's inconvenient for me to try to get payment from him through the courts. Maybe I can just contract with Vigilant to have him pulled over or jailed....
This is only an issue until they make a mistake and arrest the wrong person for a debt that may or may not even exist. ( The courts never make a mistake right ? Like the parking ticket I received in Lubbock, yet have never set foot anywhere near it :| )
Then the police, the city and the company will understand how costly that mistake will be.
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.]
They get a free and presumably effective tool to enforce the law and the fines go to pay the company that provides them the tool.
The flip side of this tool is also that the company can provide analytics to seniors in the political system on how the police are using their tool, and they won't get the tool dropped. Why? Because the agency knows that Podunk Jurisdiction ain't going to pay huge licensing fees in this economy to replace the system with a competitor's tool because the company responded to a request from the Attorney General or the legislature on how the police were using their product. It's a captive audience.
Owing someone is different than owing a punitive debt, and having to decide between "do I eat more than ketchup packets and saltine crackers for the next week and pay this fine?" These types of arrangements between the police and the private sector have been shown again and again to keep the poor in a perpetually poor state. See John Oliver's episode about this.
until some minority driver tries to speed away and the cops chase him down and shoot him over an unpaid parking ticket.
I hope your name isn't 'Buttle'
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Here in Tulsa, that's exactly the way it is. In fact, the Judge always tells whomever they can talk to the court clerk and work out a payment plan. I've had to do this before, they said $50 a month until it was all paid. They even sent a monthly statement / payment sheet to remind you. I'm assuming many people who get caught up in this just don't bother to talk to the clerks and are just so angry about it all they refuse to pay anything to anyone on it. "Sovereign Citizen" movements and such.
It sounds like the police have hired Vigilant to provide automated licence place scanners for cop cars, as well as running the backend servers, so that police can catch people who owe the government court fees. But instead of getting paid upfront Vigilant works for the 25% mark up that is charged to people who made the police look for them instead of paying on their own. While there is definitely privacy concerns with the government allowing some potentially confidential information (though LPs are publicly visible and often court results are as well, I think) out of their hands, it actually sounds like a decent arrangement. Its pure profit for the police, they get better tech that allows them to easily track down people who owe the government money, and they do not even have to pay for it. And 25% is actually a far far smaller late-fee/threaten-fee then you normally see.
I think Vigilant got a pretty raw deal here, and are probably betting that their will be far far more things automated licence plate readers can be used for, and they are hoping to be on the ground flour when the market opens up. A camera on a police car, with the right backend, could almost completely replace police officers, so there is pretty unlimited growth potential for this technology.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I am sorry you think it is unhelpful; I intended to put it in historical terms. In context, though, to be fair, Mussolini said this before Hitler came to power. His was an Italian Fascism, and, as you say, it was based on brutality. Nonetheless, it is his definition, and it explains to me how, once fascists achieve power, they are corrupted by it.
Fuck this country.
"Hey boss! How's this for an idea? We partner up with this company that will give us a bunch of free equipment to do unlimited data collection and then we get to pull over everyone they say owes monies. Then we get to pull them over and either arrest them or force them to cough up the monies plus more monies. Our arrest records will soar! And then if they can pay the monies we can use civil forfeiture to take the rest of the monies they have!"
Don't think they're not already rubbing their hands together with glee over all the money they can collect by stacking up the processes. It's all about the money and when they complain that they don't have enough officers to do the work up go the fines.
Sounds like it's time for the citizens to do a whole bunch of letter writing and protesting to make that go away.
Someone should make a dazzling laser that is invisible to humans but can "blind" cameras. Mount it on your dashboard.
Cut a deal with Uber and Lyft and the whole public/private thing goes away.For that matter, just go full public, I'm sure lot of people would allow one in their car for a slice of the action as they drive around.
I agree that additional surveillance is a bad idea, but, is the underlying idea here that the government is levying fines for all sorts of topics that shouldnt be laws? If the legal code is the problem, lets fix that, not the symptom.