Archive for January, 2008

Watch out for the traffic cameras!

Monday, January 28th, 2008

The city has installed traffic cameras at some intersections, and plans to expand to 20 or 30 sites.

Three of the initial intersections are on South Carrollton Avenue: at Canal Street, Earhart Boulevard and the Palmetto Street-Washington Avenue intersection. The fourth initial site is Poydras Street and Loyola Avenue.

By the end of the year, Mendoza said, 30 cameras should be in place at about 20 intersections.

These cameras will not only who don’t stop at a yellow light, but they’ll also photograph cars not stopping before turning right on red, and speeders.

This is another page out of the Giuliani method of crime-fighting, called the broken-window theory. There are a couple reasons why these cameras are a bad idea.

  • It turns justice on its head by putting the burden on the citizen to prove they weren’t guilty because they were moving out of the way of an emergency vehicle, for example, or weren’t the one driving the car.
  • The city has a bad record with managing public works cameras.
  • Pre-emptive surveillance of ordinary citizens is never a good idea, because it presumes those watching the cameras are incorruptible.

    I don’t know how they’ll make anything stick if you claim you weren’t the one driving and they can’t prove otherwise. I also don’t know how they’ll deal with all the temporary tags and “license applied for” situations.

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