Iowa Senate passes ammendment banning red light cameras
The Senate narrowly passed an amendment Monday to ban red-light cameras, which two judges have already ruled were unlawfully used to issue citations in central and eastern Iowa.
The amendment, which passed 28-22, is part of a larger transportation bill that heads to the House.
"I propose using police officers rather than red-light cameras to enforce safety in this state," said the amendment's sponsor, Sen. Pat Ward, R-West Des Moines.
Ward proposed the amendment after two judges ruled that traffic cameras in Clive and Davenport are unlawful. Both cities have suspended the camera systems while appeals are processed.
Ward said the cameras are an invasion of privacy and wrongly target the owner of the offending vehicle, not the driver.
Sometimes they get it right.
posted by The Inside Dope @ 4/10/2007
4 comments
4 Comments:
Sometimes they do get it right, unfortunately, this is not one of those times. We are preventing municipalities from enforcing the law. If you don't want a speeding or red light ticket, then don't break the law.
OK law and order fans...
Let's carry this to it's logical conclusion.
Let's say they start placing electronic devices on every new car, tamper proof of course, that monitors the speed and somehow it can register every time you exceed the speed limit and reports it to the police.
Every time you change lanes without signalling, you get a stiff fine and it goes towards losing your license.
Every time you don't come to a complete stop at a stop sign, boom... big ticket.
You'd be fine with that also, right?
After all, no one should EVER break the law, no matter how what or when, and no matter what the circumstance, correct?
And let's not make the mistake of thinking traffic cams are about public safety. That's just the idea they use to justify it.
Traffic cams were devised for, were created, promoted, sold, and accepted by cities for the purpose of generating money first, last, and always.
Public safety was just a convenient dodge to divert attention from that fact.
The city would have NEVER installed a single camera were it not for the company which manufactures and installs them coming to the city promising huge amounts of income for the city and police departments.
Consider the deal: The company slaps up cams all over town, no charge.
Then they skim a cut off of every ticket that results and give the rest to the city.
This scheme is ONLY about someone who devised a way for a private company to get their hands on a part of the several million dollars in traffic fine revenue across the country.
It's the perfect scam.
1. The city has to put out nearly no money up front.
2. They don't have much added work.
3. They can then say it's being done for "public safety".
and 4. They simply sit back and watch the money roll in, at least if the scam is allowed to continue.
Boy, I'm with you. I can't wait until techology is used to monitor our every move and fines are extracted every time anyone violates even the most minor infratction.
What a great way to live!
There is a way to legally beat these cameras:
A majority of red light & speed cameras utilize strong flash to photograph the license plate on your car. Once sprayed on your license plate, PhotoBlocker’s special formula produces a high-powered gloss that reflects the flash back towards the camera. This overexposes the image of your license plate, rendering the picture unreadable.
http://www.answerdots.com/go.php?link_id=25
Not according to the Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel. They did a segment on the different methods people can use to defeat these cameras. All of them failed. They even tried speeding past these cameras with a sports car at over 140mph, and the camera still caught the license plate number. The only thing that worked was a James Bond style rotating license plate that displayed a different number. Of course, according to one of the Mythbusters, you would maybe get a bigger fine than the cost of a speeding ticket for using such a device.
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