10 minutes before the murder: Expect to get an accusation of accessory to murder, conspiracy to murder and a few additional tomes of the penal code. We all know you are innocent, but you should better find a good lawyer just in case instead of wasting your last free minutes arguing on the internet.
But if you'd like to tell the fall, I'm sure some prosecutors wouldn't dig too hard to find the guilty party.
Edit: subpoena is not a criminal charge afaik is what I’m saying
While a bit more extreme than your example, there have been multiple cases where the parents of a school shooter have been held responsible because they provided access to a weapon when there were warning signs.
On the less extreme end of the spectrum, this is the same reason why you have to pretend that you are buying a "water pipe for tobacco" and not a bong if you don't want to get kicked out of the headshop (in places where that is still illegal).
If they used the car with your permission, you should either be responsible for what they do with it, or be able to point to the person who was using it.
Sure, but I still don't know who they are, so I can't give their name over for either investigating the theft or reassigning the speeding/red light/parking fine.
If your car was magically stolen and returned, and you have no idea that it happened, or who could have done this... Well, that's certainly an interesting legal argument that you could make to a judge. I doubt he'll believe you.
> Although nominally civil, traffic infraction proceedings retain every substantive hallmark of criminal prosecution...
Is going to matter here. A moving violation (ex: red light) is quite different from a non-moving violation (ex: parking) in how they're handled, and often how they're classified.
Ex - my in state, a moving violation is a criminal misdemeanor, while a non-moving violation is entirely civil.
It feels like any civil case brought against an individual by a government is quasi-criminal.
disclaimer: I write software for court houses and am intimately familiar with the proceedings etc. in some jurisdictions these tickets will be outright dismissed and in others you may have to put up a bit of fight :)
But what about things like red flag laws, child support (like the cited case law), etc?
This is good suggestion in general even if you get a ticket by Officer because if Officer does not show up in Court (this happens more that you’d think) the ticket will be dismissed
>The substance of particular contempt proceedings determines whether they are civil or criminal, regardless of the label attached by the court conducting the proceedings.
>See Shillitani v. United States, 384 U. S. 364, 384 U. S. 368 -370 (1966); Penfield Co. v. SEC, 330 U. S. 585, 330 U. S. 590 (1947); Nye v. United States, 313 U. S. 33, 313 U. S. 42 -43 (1941); Lamb v. Cramer, 285 U. S. 217, 285 U. S. 220 -221 (1932); Gompers v. Bucks Stove & Range Co., 221 U. S. 418, 221 U. S. 441 -443 (1911).
>Civil contempt proceedings are primarily coercive; criminal contempt proceedings are punitive. As the Court explained in Gompers:
>The distinction between refusing to do an act commanded -remedied by imprisonment until the party performs the required act; and doing an act forbidden -punished by imprisonment for a definite term, is sound in principle and generally, if not universally, affords a test by which to determine the character of the punishment.
>221 U.S. at 221 U. S. 443. Failure to pay alimony is an example of the type of act cognizable in an action for civil contempt. Id. at 221 U. S. 442.
>Whether a particular contempt proceeding is civil or criminal can be inferred from objective features of the proceeding and the sanction imposed. The most important indication is whether the judgment inures to the benefit of another party to the proceeding. A fine payable to the complaining party and proportioned to the complainant's loss is compensatory and civil. United States v. Mine Workers, 330 U. S. 258, 330 U. S. 304 (1947). Because the compensatory purpose limits the amount of the fine, the contemnor is not exposed to a risk of punitive sanctions that would make criminal safeguards necessary. By contrast, a fixed fine payable to the court is punitive and criminal in character.
The question in those cases came down to if the operators of the cam can be considered "accusers."
They widely considered that of course the cam itself didn't count as an accuser, but the question was how "automated" the system was. If there was a human who flagged it, the system was fine, if it was fully automated, they were unconstitutional.
Many states don't share this opinion, but an interesting argument nonetheless.
[0] Unless the defendant waives that right and stipulates to the prosecutor's statement about the machine.
So in essence, if you know this is what they're doing, you're good. But they're not telling people so the money grift continues unabated and in place.
You could file a civil action for violation of constitutional rights, but under Roberts, SCOTUS has basically been ripping out all of the mechanisms that would let you file such suits.
You can file with the police, if they take it. You can also file as a private criminal complaint in many jurisdictions. However, it's up to the DA to approve it most of the time. There can be an appeal process where a judge would make a determination.
But yes, if the whole system is corrupt, then there's not much to do.
Georgia and a handful of other states absolutely allow this.
IIRC there was a point in time roughly around ~2017 when it happened in Redmond WA (i.e., in the town that the Microsoft HQ is in). I might be off by a year or two, but it doesn't really change the overall point.
TLDR: in under 2 years, that whole red light cam initiative got canceled and reverted, because the local stats showed that it just made things more dangerous on the roads (by significantly increasing the rate of rear-ending accidents at traffic lights).
Tickets issued by these cameras are civil penalties issued to the owner of the vehicle, like parking tickets, rather than a criminal moving violation. This means the tickets are just as constitutional as parking tickets. It also means penalties are limited to fines and can't impact your driving privilege or insurance.
Hopefully other states can follow this pattern. Consistent, low-impact enforcement is better at preventing unwanted behavior than the rare and severe but also capricious enforcement performed by human police.
It can also give permission for unwanted behavior. Cf. the Haifa study, where the rate of late pickups increased when daycares added a fine. One explanation is the fine turned a complex moral obligation into an ordinary financial transaction.
They fined parents (IIRC) ~$3 per late pickup. Rerun the study with a $300 fine and let’s see how it pans out. It’s an interesting finding, but that then people take it to mean that fines don’t work (no matter their size) is insane.
We had to keep two staff there, and they would split the fine.
Many times we got stiffed.
Edit: for reference, our fee was about $14/day to keep the kid, so it was a pretty stiff penalty.
(apologies for the immediate edit, changed my wording)
I understand that you could not keep the child till you were paid (kidnapping and ransom shouldn't be a business plan!), but you could refuse them future service until they paid.
One person had a $180 fine (half of that was mine) and they were asked not to come back when they refused to pay it.
Smaller amounts were ignored.
I had a situation twice were I was late. Didn't have to pay, but would have without hesitation. Doesn't matter the cause.
I don't think our society is ready for the combination of automatic enforcement and truly punitive penalties. We readily demonize the accused; just having your mugshot taken can end your employability. Yet many of us break laws daily -- speeding, jaywalking, watering the lawn during the day, even plugging in a microwave oven without a building permit in some jurisdictions -- and society still works because we don't expect much enforcement. We are heading toward a future where everyone will have marks on their permanent record, but today our society tut-tuts, or much worse, at anyone who does.
I see people all the time on the Internet (and even IRL once) make claims like, "oh, carbon taxes will just increase CO2 output, you know like in that Israeli daycare study." Drives me nuts.
Are fines the best possible solution to this particularly traffic problem? I have no idea. I'm not an expert in this area. But I am highly confident that whatever relation it has to the Haifa daycare study is so incredibly tenuous that it is not worth mentioning.
The reason I said anything in the first place is that I object to automatically administered punishment. Either separately can be OK. Automatically administered? No problem, that's called a tax (including use taxes like tolls). Punishment? Then we'd better have due process, and yeah, it's going to be expensive and labor-intensive to administer, but that's critical in a free country. That's why I called out the "is better than" quote. I think it's strictly worse.
"Domino’s confirmed it knew of 20 people who died in crashes involving its drivers in 1988 (the National Safe Workplace Institute would later claim Domino’s delivery drivers had about the same death rate as miners, who had a fatality rate of ~35 per 100k)."
For that same period, the death rate per 100k of young drivers was 46 per 100k https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00044682.htm
And to compare truck drivers 27 per 100k: https://www.malmanlaw.com/malman-law-injury-blog/is-being-a-...
Is this a dominos problem, or a young drivers problem or...
Australia, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, etc, have well-enforced traffic laws. Speeding is the exception rather than the rule, unlike the United States, where one can expect the flow of traffic to be 10-20 miles per hour over the posted limit. Yet these societies don't suffer from an excess of enforcement or consequences in other areas. For example, it is legal to walk around in public with a bottle of beer in virtually all of Europe.
What we have seen in the United States is a reduction of many hardly-enforced laws. Jaywalking and minor drug possession have been decriminalized in several US states. This is due to voter interest. It will continue to be up to the public to decide what do to when enforcement can catch up to excessive laws.
Yes, you can sometimes walk around legally with a beer bottle here.
And then there's the challenge of keeping people on staff at all when parents consistently make the staff work late.
Beyond that, it seems like a good way to achieve the objective of convincing parents to not offload externalities onto others by being late.
Let's say you have a job interview. You're 5min late, so they either don't hire you, or the receptionist says the interviewer is now not available. Are you now due the salary, because you being this late 5min cost you a lot of money?
If you in a private contract reject the terms of paying $5 per minute late, well then the other party now knows you plan to be late a lot, so they'll be glad if you take your business elsewhere.
Keeping people from being able to go home after their workday, effectively forced overtime, is incredibly disrespectful. And even if "it's not your fault", you are the only one that could have prevented it. So incentives should be in place that you don't. $5 per minute sounds fair.
If you force me to stay late for a full hour you'd BETTER pay me triple digits. But in this case the $300 for an hour may have to be shared among several people.
The issue is that they can't just close when they want if there's a child still there. So they have to have some way of enforcing these rules on parents. A "per minute" fine seems appropriate, so that it's more the later you are. And you need the fine to be enough that it is punitive enough, when considered against the income of your parents. Otherwise it provides no incentive. Ours is not $300 (more like $30), but it seems fair.
I can't understand how one can treat people like servants, forcing them into unpaid overtime, to wait until I'm good and ready to show up. And to be upset and call it "unacceptable" to compensate people when you mistreat them.
I'm shocked by your question. I honestly would like to hear why you think this should not be acceptable. Why should they continue working overtime and cut into their own personal/family time because of the parent's failure?
The point is to encourage people to NOT make use of the service.
If the ticketing decision made by an automated camera system is deemed acceptable when issuing mere fines akin to parking tickets, but deemed unacceptable when issuing other penalties (which don't have this wealth inequity issue we are discussing now, at least not exclusively), that's effectively a poor tax.
There’s a lot of compelling evidence that these systems are just revenue machines.
Make it a tiny % of net worth, with a modest minimum and watch EVERYONE obey. Or at least something meaningful to everyone, or don't make it a fine. Use some other carrot or stick.
Enlightenment and utopia across that simple bridge
I lack the context and knowledge to understand how this would work, but I am curious (enough to ask but not enough to google it, admittedly).
One thing about daycares is that you will essentially never find "someone who's barely making ends meet" and "a billionaire" with kids at the same daycare, so a surcharge for out-of-normal-expectations service does not need to be designed to address both cases.
(In fact, you'll probably not find a billionaire with kids at any daycare, their hired childcare workers won't be shared with other people, and will probably be adequately compensated up front in a way which anticipates a fair degree of schedule variability.)
OTOH, with red light cameras, you also don't need to scale the fine to work with both, because the entire purpose is to bind the lower classes while exempting the upper from any substantial burden. (The least cynical explanation is that it is to discourage behavior which might incur liability grossly exceeding the mandatory level of insurance company by those least able to cover the cost of that liability, thereby avoiding uncompensated harms, but the realistic explanation is...not so generous.)
I grew up with the children of a multi-billionaire. His kids went to the same daycare as I did, and it wasn’t particularly fancy.
Some ultra-wealthy people live fairly normal-looking lives.
Steve Jobs's kids drew on an eMac with markers or something. He made them make an appoint for the store's Genius Bar and wait in line to have it looked at like everyone else. I don't know anything about how the staff tried to clean it or the outcome.
Kind of like if enough parents paid the late pickup fee, eventually the daycare could afford a van for dropoffs.
No one, gun to their head and hand on a Bible, should defend a status quo where the only way to afford a median house is to have twice the median income.
> Raise the prices. Then raise the prices. Then when you're done with that, raise the prices.
1st offence = base fee
2nd offence = base fee + minimal % of wealth fee
3rd offence = base fee + higher % of wealth fee
offences thereafter = goto 3rd offence until some breaking point condition like gaol/jail.
Otherwise the rich will happily pay to do whatever the hell they want.
> prove your claim by providing some evidence that the richer you are the more speeding tickets you get.
How/where did the grandparent comment claim that the rich get more speeding tickets? Even if the rich speed at a lower rate, would that make %-based fines a negative improvement?
> a problem that doesn’t exist
My assumption was the speeding is a problem no matter whether rich or poor, and that both exist. Is there disagreement there?
Instead, I think their point was that even a $100 fine for a poor person may impact their ability to pay for groceries, childcare, etc, whereas for someone who has $10 million, etc., even a $1,000 fine will not impact their ability to pay for groceries, childcare, etc as they still have $9,999,000.
You may note that a first offence makes no difference.
It's only 2nd offences have a token minimal % - which should put a rich person on notice that such can occur.
It's only 3rd and further offences that could seriously differentiate rich vs poor in penalty.
This is very common outside of the US, btw.
You know what they say: a fine makes something legal for an amount of money.
And for daycares, I think a lot of parents saw it just like that: a cheap way to keep the kid away from them for longer.
I then moved to Amsterdam and became the biggest fan of continuous, always-on ANPR speed cameras. On some freeways, your car is recorded at certain checkpoints and EVERYONE driving over the speed limit ALWAYS gets a fine.
Why? Because they are properly implemented (only high-risk areas), very well communicated (tons of signage), consistently applied (no crying your way out of a ticket, no racial profiling), purpose targeted (you get a speeding ticket, not a bunch of other fines at the whim of a cop), and correctly incentivized (ticket revenue does not immediately go to the local police or city).
You create a transport system where you're mixing incompatible modes of transport and carnage is what you get. What I see is instead of placing the blame on that everyone wants to place the blame on someone anyone else based on whatever moral anxiety they have.
Consider some people are drunks, you create a system where they have to drive you get drunk drivers. Don't want a bar walking distance from your quiet suburban neighborhood, again drunk drivers. Zoning that separates businesses and stores from low density housing. Driving, accidents. Mix pedestrian, bicycle, bus and car traffic, you get carnage.
No one really wants to blame the system and spend money to fix it. So blaming other individuals is what we do.
Income proportional fines solve the problem. The fine should be a deterrent, but not create crippling debt. That is impossible without taking into account the income of the infractor.
Good luck contending with stare decisis and all of the implied interstate commerce issues to try and prevent this.
I was going 5 over the reduced speed limit, in the slow lane with rush hour traffic. That thing must've issued thousands of tickets.
Trading a little liberty for a little safety and all that.
My thesis has been an uptick on BS calls. Said differently the bad neighborhoods have gotten worse and funding for police is mismanaged.
A big part of traffic stops was to find weed and trade up for an arrest. With legalization, they’ve shifted to camera work, which has gotten even bigger with Flock.
The local cops here have always just run plates for stolen vehicles. Getting a ticket is almost unheard of. I don't know what their deal is, but you can speed right past them in the other lane, or if they're just parked on the corner.
I'm guessing you still can't pass them on a two-lane road without poking their ego.
I'd love if the police enforced this insanely dangerous behavior instead of trying to catch people going 10 over on the highway.
In my city, certain traffic lights literally turn off at night. There's not enough traffic flowing to justify them.
In my neighborhood there used to be a traffic light that would be red for a long time despite not usefully regulating any traffic whatsoever. It stopped traffic despite the fact no other traffic could possibly conflict with it. People realized this and routinely ran that light with zero consequences. At some point the city realized it too and redesigned the traffic controls so that the light would be green in this situation.
The correct action is to constantly bug your local representative to fix the problem, not break a law written in blood.
Jaywalking laws were also written in blood. People break them every single day regardless because they have eyes and can look both ways to determine if it is safe to cross the street before actually doing it.
Obviously, if you can't see the road where the cars will come from, then you cannot know if there are any cars coming towards you in a potentially intersecting trajectory.
At 60kmh a vehicle travels 16 meters per second. In freedom units: at 37mph a vehicle travels 54 feet per second.
A vehicle will materialize out of nowhere and crash into you.
God I hate these sort of responsibility shirking opinions and their peddlers.
I do this several times a day in a major US city for close to a decade now and I've never had a close call closer than the "two people trying to pass each other in the hallway" routine with a driver trying to take a right on red.
Vehicles and everything else on this rock flying through space obey the same laws of physics.
If the traffic on a road goes X miles per hour, then simply don't cross it where you don't have a sufficiently long line of sight. If crossing where the lines of sight are sufficient is not tractable due to traffic volumes or road construction then cross at a marked crossing, intersection that interrupts traffic flow or use proper body language and someone will stop for you.
Sure, you might get exceptionally unlucky and choose to cross at the exact minute some car that's a few standard deviations above the norm but you might also get hit by lightening.
I, I, I
> Vehicles and everything else on this rock flying through space obey the same laws of physics.
Yes. Yes they do.
That's why some countries (e.g. Sweden) actually have this in drivers ed: how fast a vehicle travels, how long it takes for the driver to react, what the stopping distance is for a vehicle etc.
They even teach things like "parked cars are a double problem because you can have people especially kids suddenly appear from behind them".
Or things like "at night you only see this far, and judging distance to things becomes harder".
But all that, including laws of physics, is invalidated by a litany of "I, I, mine, my, me".
Adieu.
If you can't understand the fact it's safe to run a red light when you can see the roads are clear for several kilometers ahead of you, then I simply don't know what else to say.
Even police does this while roaming about on patrol.
Honestly, these arguments sound like cartoon logic. Guy looks both ways and sees the roads are clear but on the exact second he starts to cross the street 10 cars materialize out of nowhere at 200 km/h and nearly run him over just to teach him a lesson. This isn't how the world works.
The "problem" being solved with cameras is "cops aren't generating enough traffic ticket revenue"
Looking even at normal arterial streets, many streets in Seattle are marked 25, but you'd be hard-pressed to find even a cop going under 30 most of the time.
I truly don't understand US road design. The construction of the road and the posted speed limit almost never are even gently correlated other than on a few select residential side streets in a few select cities who have rebuilt streets based on safety studies.
> I remember in Chicago the interstates having posted speed limits of 45mph... the average flow of traffic outside of rush hour was easily north of 70mph.
> 45 mph (72 km/h) in downtown Chicago, where all the major interstates merge
That seems pretty reasonable. I've seen a few places in the US where several major interstates merge and the post speed limit is quite low -- 45-55 mph.
Depending on the situation, it might be dangerous for a cop to also run a red to give chase, so consider it might be their job to let it go.
These camera systems have always been about surveillance. Flock adds the Silicon Valley software process, while the older tech is “law enforcement tech”.
But I'm guessing you are only correct sometimes. I bet some of them can be live-viewed, or track license plates.
There are real surveillance arrays, please worry about those instead.
It's even possible to set the cameras up in such a way that they only store data when a traffic violation occurs. That would address the surveillance issue.
I have a strong sense that the primary objection people have to red light cameras is that they don't like getting caught running red lights, and that the surveillance argument is a rationalization, not the real objection.
All surveillance increases safety. The cost is freedom.
Do you trust humans with the ability to judge the situation and the freedom to decide to run a red light if they think it's safe? Or do you surveil every intersection and punish all infractions regardless of conditions or the existence of actual victims?
For people like me, it's a matter of basic human dignity. I want to be a human with the capacity for judgement and the power to act on it. I want to decide for myself. I want to live in a society that recognizes this. I won't sacrifice this dignity in the name of safety.
Absolutely not.
> For people like me, it's a matter of basic human dignity. I want to be a human with the capacity for judgement and the power to act on it.
Your human dignity does not require you to be able to run red lights when you think it's okay.
This is libertarian ideology taken to the extreme.
Is said in place of using actual arguments or evidence?
If this is the case, what are the consequences of not paying the fine? I interpret your statement to mean that they can't prevent registration of your car. Can they tow you in SF for unpaid fines?
It just turns speeding into something you can buy.
Sadly money and power buying freedom of law isn’t restricted to road rules.
Also, I am a bit biased here after working at flock.
Don’t want the state to generate revenue? Literally just stop speeding and stop running red lights.
Revenu generation is a bonus point: in my country taxes that incentive smokers to quit are directed to healthcare and most of the speeding tickets revenue goes to road maintenance and safety.
I’d prefer a public handling but the trend is privatization with everything : from health to education to water treatment. Even military assets! IMHO red light tickets enforcement is as much important.
Your mixing up states. California's law from above comment is NOT about running red lights.
I disagree. This is acknowledging that these are revenue products rather than safety enhancement.
If you want safety enforcement, put a damn cop there. It WILL work. This isn't hard. People are creatures of habit and you don't need to adjust the behavior of very many of them to make the whole group change.
If you don't want to put a cop there, you don't want safety enforcement.
But driving reckless and having a big well protected car helps of course, so everyone speeding would want even bigger and better armored cars.
Those daring to drive light vecicles or even bicycles, screw them?
Here in germany we managed to have automated red light tickets, without saving video at all btw. Just a picture (or multiple) of the incident. The picture is tied to the traffuc lights logic so knows when red light was on.
Now I am not really a fan of them, but they do work without mass surveillance.
Also, I bike often and driver right turn on green without looking has nearly gotten me a few times. Dont get me started on lack of bicycle infra in most us cities :0
Given that they insure cars more than drivers, it seems kinda reasonable that they be allowed to look at tickets for cars.
So when you start worrying about it as a cost center, then there is a perverse incentive to do things like shorten yellow lights. Short yellows have been proven to create more vehicular fatalities than people running red lights intentionally. And so the person who makes that decision to shorten yellows to boost tickets is effectively committing murder to keep the system “working”. Which is disgusting. Ghoulish, even.
It is literally better in such situations to simply dismantle the system than keep it running.
As you say, it encourages short yellows. I am aware of having "run" one red light in my life--got ticketed for it. The yellow timing was set as short as legally permitted--a driver had a narrow window to decide go or stop. Unfortunately, what happens when neither is an option? I was in the left turn lane and past the decision point. I was already slowing when the light went yellow, I saw it and knew there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
There's also the problem that a huge number of red light tickets are issued to people who "run" red lights in a completely normal and safe manner: making a right turn on red. Car #1 stands as far forward as they can without being in the cross traffic path, the other cars line up behind. First car goes, the rest move forward. Nobody pays attention to the stop line--but the camera does.
In the real world, neither speed nor red light cameras pay for themselves except when something about the situation causes a problem--and it would be better addressed by fixing the true problem. Likewise, I have never seen a cop watching a situation for offenders unless there was something out of sync between the law and the road. Half of the traps I've seen over the years have disappeared when the root cause was fixed.
That said, the bill addresses this category of abuse directly: if a speed camera fails to reduce 85th percentile speeds or violation volumes within 18 months it must be removed.
There are also substantial limits on how the revenues can be spent. If you are interested in this topic it's worth a read: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
Wow! So if you have enough money, it's cool to run as many red lights as you want?
They're speed cameras, not red light cameras, and the revenues go towards street improvements to reduce speeding. So you could speed as much as you can afford, but eventually you'll have bought enough traffic calming infrastructure it'll be prohibitively difficult to keep getting tickets.
Thank you for this clarification and the additional detail you provide!
It sounds like the money collected by fines has to go to more traffic calming infrastructure - which is a pretty big deal.
"What's the alternative?". Maybe a more thoughtful law.
Perhaps a scaled fine system? (The second fine costs 2x the first fine, the third fine costs 3x the first fine, etc)
Maybe after 10 fines you get a point on your license?
Maybe the state has to prove it was you driving so they setup more (but discreet) cameras at intersections?
Betcha red light running drops like a rock after that.
So what does this say about the legitimacy of having those fines affect your license and insurance when issues by a real flesh and blood cop?
Sounds to me like that by default they shouldn't be affecting squat because there's an implicit "the cops will mostly only pull people over if it's unconscionably bad" filter going on.
The idea that AI enforcement won't be just as corrupt and capricious as any other form of government run extortion is bonkers. You're talking systems with less oversight than openclaw being run by people whose entire goal is to make as much money as possible, no matter the source. Private, unaccountable companies with effectively no oversight with the legal right to send you invoices for things you might or might not have done, and the cost for disputing it might well exceed the cost of just paying it and getting it over with.
Why are Californians so hellbent on giving their money to the government, given the absolute shitshow that is their budget and track record? The only good things that have happened in California for decades comes out of private enterprise, but all the crazy nonsense is fostered and maintained, apparently quite vigorously, by elected governments.
I'm furious that 10% of my federal income taxes end up going to California's bullshit, I can't imagine what it would be like having to live there.
Seriously, it's bordering on levels of insanity right up there with thinking that Jefferey Epstein would make a great babysitter. Do people just not pay attention? Does the weather just make everyone complacent and docile?
Speed cams and automated gotchas allowing the government to raid your pocketbook are a bad thing. There's no framing or circumstances where that's good.
In the specific case this thread is about - that of red light cameras - presumably the camera produces a photograph showing a red light, a vehicle going through it, and the vehicle's license plate. Plus a video, showing the light was orange for the legally required amount of time, and showing the absence of any exceptional circumstances (e.g. ambulances).
As law enforcement goes, that really seems like the least capricious, highest oversight law enforcement I can imagine.
Some cameras only produce a photograph. Some produce a video with the light status showing on it--but there have been cases that's wrong, the camera recording what it was programmed to do which didn't match the real lights.
You need actual video of the scene that can be examined and which is of sufficiently good quality that the identity of the car can be confirmed. Very often it does not exist.
Likewise, speed cameras should record enough that one can do a time/distance calculation to confirm the speed--because the system can be miscalibrated or can be fooled by large, flat surfaces.
Or look what has happened with breathalyzers. Last I heard if a judge grants the discovery request for the source code the case gets dropped. And the whole thing is based on a flawed principle in the first place: the ratio of breath alcohol to blood alcohol varies substantially between people--setting it for average isn't accurate. As a screening test for doing a blood draw, fine, but it should not be allowed anywhere near the courtroom. (Some states get this right, some do not.)
And, yes, ambulances. I forgot about another time I know I ran a red light. Something with lights/sirens was coming up behind, no lane was empty, I was in the only lane with one car. Lots of space at the intersection, I pulled forward and turned hard right, clearing my lane without actually entering the cross path.
Your taxes getting evenly distributed is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that removing California from the US would either increase your taxes or require reductions in federal spending.
> the courts solved this by deeming at least certain uses of red light cameras illegal.
This is incorrect. The court in Florida said certain arrangement of the statutory basis (a different one than in CA) for red light cameras is illegal.
I'm not even disagreeing with you here, but that's a huge assumption yo make and you are granting pretty broad authority to the state in the name of that goal. Where do you draw the line of power the state shouldn't have despite it using the authority today towards pro-social goals?
Automated traffic enforcement isn't "granting" any new authority whatsoever to the state. The state already has the authority, it just uses it unfairly and imperfectly enough to fail to produce meaningful deterrence.
> Where do you draw the line of power the state shouldn't have despite it using the authority today towards pro-social goals?
I draw the line at the point where their power becomes not-pro-social, of course.
You and I can argue about what's pro-social or not (which this clearly is), but not whether pro-social things are good or not (which they clearly are).
With regards to authority here, this absolutely is a case of granting more power and authority to the state, or more specifically the state claiming it.
The judge here said its illegal to use redlight cameras in certain situations. Based on the prior comment, if California found a loophole so they can get to the same end by labeling it something different that is them functionally claiming new authority. The judge says its illegal, the state says no its not we can do this anyway.
Considering all of those things, fully automated traffic enforcement in general is a clear net positive.
> The judge here said its illegal to use redlight cameras in certain situations. Based on the prior comment, if California found a loophole so they can get to the same end by labeling it something different that is them functionally claiming new authority. The judge says its illegal, the state says no its not we can do this anyway.
Sorry but this is just too surface-level of an understanding of how law actually works that I can't justify engaging with it.
Not only are California and Florida totally different jurisdictions, but even if they weren't, different statutory bases for the same effective policy can have different levels of legal defensibility or constitutionality. It's not just possible, but in fact quite common for policies to be struck down and then reintroduced with (effectively) a different argument for its validity, and for the new policy (same policy, different argument supporting it) to be valid.
Understanding how laws and the judiciary actually work is truly fascinating stuff and I hope your confusion about this apparent contradiction (which it's not) actually piques your curiosity to dig deeper.
This comes off a bit strangely when you go on to engage with the discussion. It seems unnecessarily dismissive.
Legal precedent within the US does not stop at state lines. A ruling in Florida is applicable present in California.
My argument here, though, isn't that California's approach is illegal or would be overturned if challenged based on this Florida precedent. My point was simply that the state, California in this case, is claiming effectively new authority by playing word games to get around precedent that could otherwise deem their use of traffic cams illegal.
I'm still not sure how you can so blanketly deem automated traffic enforcement a net good. There are a ton of details that would matter, from how its implemented and overseen to how tight or broad the authority is and what that means for future use of the same authority.
Even forgetting that, all this means is people that don't care about getting a ticket, either because they won't pay or it's a such a small amount to them that they don't care. just do what they want. Nothing is being "enforced", just taxed.
The structural problem is that revenue goes to program costs and traffic calming, not to anyone harmed by speeding, which makes the fines punitive in character under any substance-over-label analysis.
The lack of DMV points and criminal record weakens the argument somewhat, but under California's substance-over-label approach those omissions aren't dispositive. They merely show the legislature knew how to stay on the civil side of the line, not necessarily that it succeeded.
If a court finds the penalties punitive in character, the owner-liability structure becomes a compounding problem: California's state due process protections are arguably more robust than federal, and imposing a punitive fine on a registered owner without proof they were driving, while burden-shifting exculpation to them looks increasingly difficult to sustain.
Tha owner is ultimately civily liable if the vehicle is parked in a way that it shouldn't be. Extending that same civil liability to the active operation, as opposed to only the consequences of active operation, seems perfectly reasonable.
I think the best argument is that license points are criminal in nature, but I don't really buy that.
As this judgement reveals, such a suggestion is patently unreasonable, for the reasons listed in the judgement
That is a definite punishment for anyone that cares enough about driving that they were doing it in the first place, while also clearly not being revenue generating (in fact it prevents future fine revenue). I'm not sure that would wash in the car-centric States though (but it would make it an even juicier punishment). But since you don't get banned immediately, it's potentially low-impact on a per-ticket basis.
Unlike improper parking, running red lights should impact said privilege as potential consequences are way more serious.
That makes the Florida judge's framing of red light cameras as a revenue generating scheme even more applicable. More than that, it ambiguates the crime.
In my own experience, when they took down the red light cameras in my area now people are not afraid to run red lights ~2 to ~3 seconds after it's red. See this kind of thing on a regular basis. Every now and then there's a serious accident.
Council et al., 2005 -- https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05048/...
Sometimes an intersection simply has bad luck, draws more accidents than anything about it would cause. Put a camera there, you'll see an "improvement".
Let's make a hypothetical city with 10 intersections, all absolutely identical. Watch until you have seen 20 accidents. Do you really think there will be exactly 2 accidents per intersection??
Select the intersection that gets the most accidents, declare it dangerous.
Case A: stick a camera on it. Case B: do nothing. Watch another 20 accidents.
In both cases you expect to see fewer accidents at the intersection as the original number was just chance. But if you're trying to prove cameras work...
This is pretty damning, in my opinion. AKA we did some cheap analysis on a small dataset, without confidence or effect size, and just agree with the people running the programs.
"The intent of the multivariate regression analysis was to confirm the direction of the effect, not to establish effects with statistical significance or to assess the size of the effect. To undertake analyses for these purer purposes would have required a substantially larger database, much more precision in the estimate of economic effect at each site, and more accurate specification and measurement of the independent variables. For the purposes of this current investigation, it suffices that both the univariate and multivariate analyses are reasonably in accord with the perceptions that are commonly held by those involved in red-light-camera programs."
I'm skeptical of this claim because the red light camera operators are usually contracted by municipalities. They don't have any direct control over the light cycles.
(Yes, obviously they can be in cahoots with the municipality, but I would be surprised if that was common and not the exception)
Do you have any evidence of this?
Why are we discussing cameras?
Fines (and points) are better of course.
The court says that criminal rules should apply because points are at stake, while civil penalties are usually restricted to fines, but I don't buy that argument. We have plenty of non-money civil remedies. Code enforcement departments can require changes to property. Family courts can make all kinds of requirements. It's not outside of constitutional bounds for a traffic rule to result in forfeiting a license without criminal proceedings.
All of which are an affront to people's rights.
The fact that we use a "special word" (civil) for the category of laws where we won't throw you straight in prison if you don't comply, we'll add the extra step of waiting for noncompliance and then charging someone with contempt doesn't fundamentally alter the relationship between the enforcers and the people, so why should the people have to put up with their rights being ignored in those cases?
Rights are not unlimited.
You don't have some inherent human right to ignore building codes, or to retain full custody of your child in the event of a divorce.
That means the building inspector can't just waltz into your home uninvited, ICE can't kick in your door because your maid is brown and the government can't just put up cameras and start dragnet fining people for rules that only really exist on paper and are used to make it procedurally easier to go after behavior that's bad for subjective reasons.
Second, the fact that legislative bodies may pass and enforcers may enforce stuff that violates people's rights (rental inspections and civil asset forfeiture) come to mind because the size of the harm and the manner in which it is targeted keeps it below the "get everyone pissed off" level doesn't make it not a violation of people's rights. Funny you mention building code. The manner in which building (zoning really, since building code is basically the public adoption of 3rd party standards via the zoning code) code is written and enforces is complete dogshit and would not hold up to rigorous scrutiny (and generally does not, in the incredibly rare occasion is sees it), but between the fact that it's cheaper to comply and that the worse abuses are generally targeted at exactly the kind of people who no judge will have sympathy for (much like civil asset forfeiture was initially) mean the general population is not too up in arms about it since it's
Now, before you put words in my mouth as the kind of people who say things like "rights are not unlimited" are in my observation very apt to do, I'm not saying don't have building code. I'm saying don't violate people's rights to have it, or anything else. It's nowhere near enforced to the letter anyway so walking the actual letters back to match what can be enforced without violating people's rights should be no big deal. And the same is goes for like red light cameras.
> the government can't just put up cameras and start dragnet fining people for rules that only really exist on paper
The hell? Do you think "don't run red lights" is a rule that "only exists on paper"? You realize that if a cop sees you run a red light, they're definitely pulling you over, right?
This makes me question many existing civil things. Obviously child support, as in the case law. But also, things like red flag laws. It seems like any civil law that would apply criminal-type contemt penalties is unconstitutional.
Higher quality cameras equipped with facial recognition connected to a database to issue a ticket to the correct person (driver), or
Hire more traffic officers to sit at traffic intersections to catch red light offenders, which will scale in cost by the size of the city, so
Pick your poison
So yeah, in some cases you might get out of it by feigning ignorance, but it seems to be a sensible compromise between facial recognition and giving up.
Where I live, there is one nasty radar placed so that people have to break rather hard, when leaving town as in few meters before end sign, on a steeply downhill slope, when there is just straight empty road ahead. Those who don't know get flashed frequently. There is no pedestrian crossing, no buildings, just empty fields. Locals complained and municipality said - sorry, we know, but its generating too much revenue and municipality needs that cash and became dependent on that. Basically FU. I know about few others in either Switzerland or France which have very nasty locations, in order to trap as many as possible, in places with 0 actual risk to anybody.
They also love putting temporary radars in some train underpasses which also go steeply down, so its trivial go few kms over the limit if you don't constantly brake and ie actually watch traffic around. Since they are well hidden and people see them at last moment and slam brakes hard, it properly increases risks of accidents, especially with mixture of cyclists or scooters/motorbikes. But that doesn't seem the priority anymore.
I am not saying they don't make sense in some places especially around pedestrian crossings, but its trivial to get 'addicted' to steady cash flow and then friction to change situation is maximal. Thats the point where it stops its primary purpose and becomes self-serving bureaucracy self-feeding loop.
It states "while these offense are labelled civil they remain fundamentally quasi-criminal in nature: punitive, adjudicative". Later it states "the State may not employ presumptions or burden-shifting devices that relieve it of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt"
The judge stops just an inch short of saying "this is a kangaroo court where guilt is stated rather than proven"
The judge frames the red light camera scheme as a revenue generating scheme, not a public safety measure.
Additionally, "A distinctive feature of the statutory scheme is its assignment of guilt to the registered owner rather than the driver of the vehicle". and "If there are multiple registered owners, the citation is issued to the 'first' registered 'owner'". and the person whom the citation was issued to must sign an affidavit that includes the name, address, dob, of the person who was actually driving. The judge says this "...abandon(s) centuries time honored protections of hearsay as substantive evidence.".
"It is a foundational rule of constitutional due process that the government must prove every fact necessary to constitute an offense beyond a reasonable doubt before a person may be adjudicated guilty of a crime".
"Although nominally civil, traffic infraction proceedings retain every substantive hallmark of criminal prosecution..." "under Feiock, such proceedings are sufficiently criminal in form and function to invoke the full protections of due process..." - that's probably the core of the reasoning here.
"Section 316.074(1) provides in relevant part that "The driver of any vehicle shall obey..."" - the driver, not the registered owner.
I highly recommend reading the order. It's easy to follow and aligns with my understanding of the law within the USA.