this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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That issue is not really the problem of the camera though. That's like saying you don't like running water because people have drowned in water before. If the cameras are being misused then that is a political issue.
In my city, the police department operates the cameras and they will send at least one warning before you get a fine unless the violation is very egregious (e.g. double the speed limit in a school zone)
Running water is a technology that tends to solve bigger problems than it causes. You can always count on politics to break sometimes, but when it happens with running water, even if people are getting sick because of lead pipes and sewage is backing up into peoples homes because of organizational dysfunction (happened to me, the city just failed to connect the pipes from my apartment to the sewer and pretended they had), it's still better than the public health catastrophe that is an absence of running water.
On the other hand, for the entire class of technology where the benefit is more automation of law enforcement, I'd argue it's completely the other way around; huge inherent political risk, minimal potential improvement.
Can't say I agree. This is anecdotal but the council installed some camera-like devices on one of the main roads in my city and people got scared of them and slowed down as a result. I don't think the cameras are actually turned on and issuing fines as I don't know any people who have gotten a fine from them, but their presence scares people into safer driving.
Automated law enforcement in fields where guilt can be obviously and objectively determined (resist the urge to make a fallacious slippery slope argument) is, on average, a good thing. People's tendency to bad behaviour is strictly because they think they won't get caught. Telling people there's a $500 fine for speeding means nothing because they know the chance of getting caught is in the neighbourhood of 1 in 10,000. Most people speed every day on every road they drive on but they get maybe 1 ticket every other year. But if they know that speeding on one particular road will result in a 90% chance of getting a $50 fine, they're not going to speed on that road. That's why the cameras are usually painted bright orange or white—to get people to see them and think "oh shit, I don't want a ticket; I'd better slow down".
As long as we have democratic control over our own local governments and strong privacy laws regarding how that data can be used, I do not view misuse of automated number plate recognition systems as a serious threat. In fact, I think it's probably a net bonus. There's a show called Police Interceptors which follows British police and it's absolutely shocking how many stolen cars they recover because someone drove it past an automated number plate recognition camera and it got flagged.