In southern CA, traffic cameras were rolled out in tons of cities at basically every major intersection. They were a huge headache, did effectively nothing but waste taxdollars, and were scrapped for the purpose of issuing tickets. Except they weren't actually scrapped. They now feed data into several location-for-sale data brokers' pool which is queried by police. You're a little bit of a fool if you think this is about about "safety." Imagine the current license plate scanner tech combined with advanced facial recognition - if this isn't happening somewhere already - and tell me with a straight face cops aren't more excited about that dystopian future than stopping a few fender benders and generating meager city revenue (which they won't see anyway).
The dead giveaway to all these blatantly dishonest "safety" measures is they always, nearly without fail invoke safety "for the children." After all, who could be against that?
They don't even pretend it's about safety anymore. Flock cameras are all over the place and were never installed on the pretense of issuing citations or enforcing safety. It's all about tracking who is coming and going.
Itd be great if this sort of system could be trustworthy. How could that be done. Public data? But then that opens the data stream up to criminals who could stalk people and stuff. Third party audits? Who do you trust to do that? NGOs?
Remove the municipal revenue motive: no fines, only points on the license, with an option to plead not guilty in traffic court like a normal police interaction.
Points on the license probably requires more surveillance in order to prove who was driving rather than just that this particular vehicle violated a traffic law.
The whole idea that the way to reduce crime is by surveillance and enforcement is a con. Like in this case, all the places that managed to significantly reduce traffic accidents do so by carefully redesigning their street network to make safety easier and more intuitive.
The dead giveaway to all these blatantly dishonest "safety" measures is they always, nearly without fail invoke safety "for the children." After all, who could be against that?