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California Officials Admit To Using License Plate Readers To Monitor Welfare Recipients (gizmodo.com)
According to a report from the Sacramento Bee, officials in Sacramento County have been accessing license plate reader data to track welfare recipients suspected of fraud. The practice dates back to 2016. Gizmodo reports: Sacramento County Department of Human Assistance Director Ann Edwards confirmed to the paper that welfare fraud investigators working under the DHA have used the data for two years on a "case-by-case" basis. Edwards said the DHA pays about $5,000 annually for access to the database. Abbreviated LPR, license plate readers are essentially cameras that upload photographs to a searchable database of images of license plates. If a driver passed by an LPR four times throughout a city, an officer with access would know where and at what time of day. Anyone with access to that data could use it track where someone drove and when, provided they were scanned by the LPR.
It's not immediately clear how travel patterns might reveal welfare fraud. As noted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, welfare fraud is statistically speaking, extremely rare. In 2012, the DHA found only 500 cases of fraud among Sacramento's 193,000 recipients. Following an inquiry from the EFF, the DHA has instituted a privacy policy (one that didn't exist before their initial inquiry) requiring investigators to justify each request for LPR data. The Sacramento Bee reports the DHA accessed the data over a thousand times in two years.
It's not immediately clear how travel patterns might reveal welfare fraud. As noted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, welfare fraud is statistically speaking, extremely rare. In 2012, the DHA found only 500 cases of fraud among Sacramento's 193,000 recipients. Following an inquiry from the EFF, the DHA has instituted a privacy policy (one that didn't exist before their initial inquiry) requiring investigators to justify each request for LPR data. The Sacramento Bee reports the DHA accessed the data over a thousand times in two years.
from the ./ summary:
"welfare fraud is statistically speaking, extremely rare. In 2012, the DHA found only 500 cases of fraud among Sacramento's 193,000 recipients."
To be precise, detecting welfare fraud is extremely rare.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Department of Human Assistance
Alert: I have officially found a new name for the "helpdesk".
And I am hearing that in the voice of Mr. Spacely now.
"You must have fucked up somewhere..."
This space unintentionally left blank.
Don't want to be monitored? Get a job. The rest of the country (at least the parts that Made America Great Again) have record unemployment.
I do note that the law should recognize such things as full-time care for a sick or disabled family member as unpaid-work, the system is actually saving money by not having these people in long-term rehab facilities
That would mean actually solving real problems and that's hard and not usually politically rewarding in a short timespan.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
They're spending more money on tracking these people down than they were likely receiving in benefits. It's spending good money after bad.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
This is totally different from the far more prevalent welfare abuse, where recipients don't actually try to look for work as they are supposed to under the law, content to live a meaningless existence with the meager assistance that welfare provides.
This quote demonstrates just how dumb the various plans by Democrats to compromise on an issue so it will be "off the table" forever.
Bill Clinton and the Republicans in Congress ended Welfare. Yet you still believe it exists more than 20 years after it ended.
It was replaced with a program called "TANF". It has a lifetime limit of 5 years. So no, it's not possible to live a meaningless existence with the meager assistance that welfare provides. Because the money gets cut off. Even if you're unlucky enough to hit a "rough patch" more than once in your life. Or want to get a degree so you can do the whole "pull up by your bootstraps" thing. That typically takes more than 5 years since usually the person has to also work in order to support themselves because it turns out welfare never was much money.
But don't worry, soon there will be another time that a compromise with Republicans will take an issue off the table forever. Like Obamacare.
Little experiment for those at home: Look up the Kelly Blue Book value for a 5-year-old C-class Mercedes, and a 5-year-old Toyota Camry. If you don't want to look, you'll find out the Toyota costs more.
You're doing well and driving a paid-off Mercedes. And then shit hits the fan. Selling the Mercedes is a bad idea because resale value on luxury cars is terrible. Drive it into the ground, because it will last quite a few more years without maintenance and you've already paid it off.
Even though people like this poster will insist you must be committing welfare fraud because you are driving what was once an expensive car.
They should hire DMV employees to do that job.
I can see how LPR data can be used to correlate charges on a SNAP debit card with location of the registered receipient. However, IMHO it should not be used without a warrant, so should not be used for "fishing expeditions".
No! They should require a seach warrant!
benefit cliffs make it better for some people not to work.
also people on disability who get better healthcare then say the shit that mcdonalds mini med is.
Welfare is used as an umbrella term for all kinds of government assistance programs.Including things like SNAP benefits, Section 8 or public housing. Medicaid, TANF, SSI, etc. Go on pretending we are dumb and talking about some program that ended 20 years ago
right?
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have you? I've had family who, due to illness, have. It's damn near impossible to game the system for long. There's enormous scrutiny on everything you do in exchange for the pittance your given. Virtually every financial transaction you make is scrutinized. If we put half the effort into finding Wallstreet cheats we do the occasional welfare cheat we'd never have another market crash again.
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If you ever lose your job and are near-bankrupt...keep your car. It's not going to pay to sell it in the short or long term.
And nobody's forcing you to ride the subway either. These recipients are also the public. They are also citizens with rights to privacy. They are only looking with reasonable suspicion, but they appear to not be getting a warrant and thinking that's OK just because it's a database that they pay for access to.
It wants its lame GOP "job creator" talking points back. Every massive crash we've had is the result of those you are defending. No one has killed themselves over the decisions of welfare recipients.
Park the car. Take the bus. I might not sell my car. But I'm going to cut back on driving and maybe switch to a pay-per-mile insurance program. One effect will be to make tracking me by license plate scanning practically useless.
Have gnu, will travel.
Don't California welfare participants read the EULA?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The Gizmodo article misstates EFF's claim about frequency of welfare fraud:
EFF says "The use of powerful ALPR data is disproportionate to the need. As Sacramento DHA officials acknowledged in 2013: “the percentage of fraud cases is statistically low.”. So, EFF is quoting Sacramento DHA saying "statistically low". Ctrl-F on EFF does not hit on 'rare'. EFF never said fraud was rare.
Sacramento Bee did not want to attribute the 'rare' quote to Gizmodo, so they dishonestly implied that EFF said this. It wouldn't be as persuasive or inflammatory, I suppose, to quote EFF as saying "use is disproportionate to the need", which is what EFF said.
Is is so hard to simply tell the truth, as to who said what? Sacramento Bee fail.
You mean 50 years, and actually after steadily rising under the last administration, the number of Americans on welfare/snap benefits is shrinking under the current administration, in large part because of record-low unemployment figures across several demographic groups (blacks, women, Latino, etc.).
Ken
I generally agree but there are always caveats. Is the car already paid for? Is it more car than you need? I've known people that struggled to put food on the table but were driving giant trucks or late model sports cars. You can buy a 10-20 year old Toyota Corolla or something similar that'll get you where you need to go reliably for a couple grand, and as a bonus you get better fuel economy and cheaper insurance rates. If your vehicle is unnecessarily expensive sell it, use part of the money to buy the small car, and use the extra to survive until you find another job.
The anti-poor people narrative is working so well that the parent got modded down twice. Maybe we can adopt a similar philosophy here at / . and give more mod points to white men from wealthy suburbs.
In 2012, the DHA found only 500 cases of fraud among Sacramento's 193,000 recipients.
Sacramento has a population of about 500,000 and there are 193,000 welfare recipients? So over 38% of the population is on welfare? Please tell me that this is not correct. If true, I think there are bigger issues than welfare fraud.
Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity!
you have regular (and random) checkups every 2-3 months. You have to provide access to your bank accounts so they can validate what you have. If you have more than about $200 in your account you will get denied until you have nothing. This is one of the problems, folks can never get out of poverty because as soon as they start to get ahead they lose the little bit of assistance they have and it all falls apart.
As for how much you're paid, it's a few hundred amount in cash and another few hundred in food stamps. You haven't seen anyone with $40k a year in benefits. You either made that up or someone else did.
When folks talk about "alternative facts" and "fake news" this sort of stuff is exactly what they're talking about. It's outright lies. If your making the lies yourself, stop. It will hurt you in the long run. The ruling class you're pitching for will eventually abandon you. If you're buying into somebody elses lies then try spending a bit of time at your local food pantry talking to the kinds of people who show up. Or volunteer at a children's hospital and talk to people who have children with severe illnesses about what it's like trying to make ends meet and care for a sick kid full time.
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Social security disability is perpetrated by doctors. It's done because they see folks in their 50s and 60s who can't really work anymore but don't qualify for any other form of assistance. This happened more often after the 2008 crash. Doctors saw people who were going to be homeless in their 50s and 60s without some help, and they saw there was no help. So they wrote questionable disability claims. The at the time left wing administration allowed them through because the alternative was reams of homeless old people. None of these folks had the money for a lawyer. It was well meaning doctors taking pity on desperate old men and women.
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or Credit Derivative Swaps. Period. This is not up for debate. And CDSes were only possible because they hid toxic debt in them. That's cheating. It was illegal until Clinton & Bush Jr eliminated the laws protecting them.
You're being had. A small group of people are making off with everything to your detriment. The sooner you realize this the sooner you can join me and help fix it.
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