If you get caught speeding, don’t blame the camera: Ted Diadiun

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CLEVELAND – I remember a story from years ago that mentioned a wave of car break-ins that were happening in one of the local suburbs. It appears the thieves roamed the city streets, searching the windows of cars parked at the curb for radar detectors. When they spotted one, they broke the window, ripped it off the car and, I guess, sold it or used it themselves.

The idea of ​​local residents rising up, demanding the cops do something, made me smile.

Wait a minute, I thought you meant you wanted the police to mount an offensive against device theft whose sole function is to help you break the law?

Didn’t feel like the cops were all trying to catch the rogues. If they have already solved this case, it was never reported.

It’s not quite the same thing, but I’ve been thinking about this story a lot lately while reading the series of reports about surveillance cameras and people’s reaction to them.

The most recent of the stories, by reporters Molly Walsh and Zachary Smith, appeared in The Plain Dealer and on cleveland.com in mid-April, offering a roundup of the several suburbs around Greater Cleveland that use cameras to catch the speeders, and explaining how and why they are deployed.

The story quoted a man who had been caught on camera for speeding three times in a year: They take advantage of people, he said, proclaiming his outrage and vowing not to pay the tickets.

I won’t embarrass him further by naming him here, as he was kind enough to speak to our reporters, but again, wait a minute. You accelerate. Break the law. The camera catches up to you. How does the government take advantage of you?

If you don’t want to get a speeding ticket, there’s a simple solution: don’t speed up.

I’m no holier than you here, I’ve had my share of speeding tickets over the years. Never by camera but mostly by radar, including once when a Cleveland Heights cop jumped out from behind a tree and pinned me down with one hand, which seemed unfairly sneaky. (I thought about buying a radar detector, but figured it would just get stolen. And then I should have a new window.)

There was, however, a common denominator in all my speeding tickets:

I was actually speeding up.

I deserved the tickets. And if I had been caught by a camera, I would feel the same way, in fact, I would be grateful, because camera tickets don’t add points to your license, they only prove that your car was going too fast, not that you were the driver.

Speaking of which, a December story from cleveland.coms Jeremy Pelzer recounted that 13 years ago a group of drivers tried to evade their speeding tickets and red lights because they were driving cars rented, rented or owned by their employers when they committed the offences. The drivers had filed a class action lawsuit against the city of Cleveland for an absurd refund of $4,121,185.89 plus $1,842,563.51 in additional interest, claiming they shouldn’t have paid the fines.

Luckily, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled on the side of common sense, saving the city $6 million and a measure of common sense.

Again: were the drivers driving too fast? Did they run the red lights? If so, the case is closed, even if they were driving the neighbor’s lawn tractor.

Another imponderable objection to the use of cameras to combat law violations involves an Atlanta-based company called Flock Safety. Flock provides cameras that capture images of license plates, and cloud storage technology that then searches crime and other databases to determine if the license number is related to a crime.

The cameras aren’t used to catch speeders, but by scanning every license plate in range, they’ve proven effective in identifying fugitives, Amber Alert targets, missing persons and other law enforcement targets. law enforcement.

A number of communities in northeast Ohio, including Fairview Park, Bay Village, and North Royalton, to name three, have taken advantage of this technology, reaching 130 communities across the state.

How effective are they? In one case in November, a Flock camera identified a murder suspect’s license number, allowing Middleburg Heights police to pursue and arrest him.

So who could argue against such a crime-fighting tool?

Well, the American Civil Liberties Union is who. The ACLU, which can always be counted on to make things harder for law enforcement, calls it a dangerously powerful nationwide mass surveillance system.

If police or government leaders push for Flock or another centralized mass surveillance LPR [automatic license plate recognition] system in your community, we urge you to oppose it, period, is the warning on the ACLU website.

I urge you to ignore the ACLU, period. The only people who need worry about being identified by the Flock cameras are those on the run or otherwise wanted by law, in other words, the very people who should be identified and brought to justice.

The above is not to say that municipalities that use cameras and radar traps always have the purest motives. I’d like to think most of them do this in order to ensure safer roads and highways, but when you see a camera at the bottom of a hill, or just when the speed limit suddenly drops, you know what they are doing.

The most notorious of these is Linndale, the small town (population: 104) west of Cleveland which, according to our story mentioned above, has taken in $1.3 million in fines for enforcing the photos in just seven months in 2021, mostly in an area where the speed limit suddenly jumps to 25mph for no apparent reason.

The city has long been famous for using its little piece of Interstate 71 as a speed trap to raise ticket revenue, but now it doesn’t even have to spend to station a cop there.

But again, the solution is simple. If you see a red light, stop. If you see a sign that says 25 mph, drive 25.

If you don’t, it’s not the cameras fault.

Ted Diadiun is a member of the editorial board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.

To reach Ted Diadiun: [email protected]

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