When i read these implementations, one thing I think about is the British post office scandal, also known as Horizon IT scandal[1].
These technologies are probabilistic with some nonzero chances of error which can't always be easily detected. These are implemented by people with some knowledge of the tech used (and hopefully the understanding of error), but are to be used by people who expect the output to be 100% true. I do not know how they would deal with tech errors which do not look like errors, but feel like there should be more cognizance about this and expectations should be set accordingly. Same goes for any facial recognition tech deployed by authorities.
Which is why a human being has to review the camera footage and decide to issue the citation. If the system makes an error, and the human checking it makes an error, then the human receiving the citation can contest it. Seems a reasonable number of safeguards to me.
Certainly a lot better than the big tech "we banned you but won't tell you why or allow you to talk to a human about it".
My only problem with more camera-based law enforcement for traffic violations is the fact that they can't tell who was driving. SO the fine goes to the registered owner of the vehicle, so folks won't want to lend vehicles. Of course, one argument is that you shouldn't loan your vehicle to some one who is going to be breaking the law... but is that really the world we want to live in, where we can't loan anything to anyone for fear of them misusing it and the owner being held responsible? I don't have a good answer there.
> one argument is that you shouldn't loan your vehicle to some one who is going to be breaking the law... but is that really the world we want to live in
If you are talking about a car, then yes, that's the world I want to live in. Would they even be insured anyway?
You can get insurance that will cover you when driving some one elses car, and you can get insurance that covers some one else driving your car. Wether either of you have such insurance, is a good question to ask before lending your car to some one.
By default most insurance policies (in the US, at least) cover incidental occasional use of drivers you permit to use your car that don’t actually live with you. They have to be licensed to drive, but that’s essentially the only restriction.
In Ireland/UK, I don't think they cover that at all - They are even a bit sketchy about named drivers. Insurance covering any vehicle tends to be rare b/c they are way more expensive, and usually vocational.
Interesting. Just a quirk of different regions then. In the US it’s essentially assumed that incidental use from friends and such is such a small usage that the insurance risk is minimal.
To be clear, insurance for US vehicles typically only covers a specific named vehicle, although most policies have a few carve outs for specific purposes (eg, 30 days of grace period when you buy a car before adding it to a policy, as well as applying to any car you rent). If the owner of the vehicle doesn’t have insurance and you borrow it, then there presumably wouldn’t be any insurance coverage at all.
On the issue with named drivers: I had two cars, and tried to add a named driver (my partner) to one, but they wouldn't let me. I assume the issue is they thought it likely the ND was the real primary driver, and that I was simply trying to lower their premiums since theirs was higher.
I suspect there's a similar issue with F&F. The cost of insurance is based on you personally, and if they allow NDs, or friends to drive, it's an unknown risk as they can't really tell how much you will actually use the car.
Also, I don't know how much insurance differs between US and EU. IMHO, Irish car insurance is expensive. perhaps due to lenient courts?
I mean, if you switch the word car to any other dangerous object then yes that is the world I want to live in. "Sorry Bob borrowed my handgun and shot up some stuff" isn't a thing that sounds like it would make the world a better place, and yet we treat cars like they are not death machines if misused.
It’s not 1603 where you have to walk 60 miles uphill both ways through the snow and packs of wolves to beg the local lord for mercy. In most places, it’s a form on a web page (I first did that in the 90s!) or dropping a letter in the mail. It’s also very easy to avoid simply by not choosing to stop in the bus lane, which anyone capable of passing a drivers test can trivially do.
If your friend borrows your car and gets a fine in that time, you can pass the fine on to them. If they don't pay it, you can reconsider your friendship with them and possibly take legal action if it's a large fine.
I've contested the red light camera fines in my municipality a few times now. In every case I request the footage and each time it's been overturned because the footage clearly shows me stopping before turning right on read. Ive never had to provide proof that is the states job.
The state should have reviewed the footage and not charged you in the first place.
That should be codified into law because the state is doubly incentivized to do nothing about false positives. If you pay it, they get free money. If you don’t, they get free labor.
In this case, the article clearly states that a human will review the footage... not sure what happened in the above cases, if there was no review, or if the review was simply rushed? I do think it would be fair if the state had to pay the same fine back to the person they incorrectly fined as compensation for their time.
You did have to provide proof! you were assumed guilty until you proved yourself innocent by using the evidence that the state themselves already had, but didn’t present as proof of the infringement.
In this case the assumption is that the camera evidence is accurate and conclusive. If it was a blurry picture, I don’t think they would be asked to provide additional evidence to prove they weren’t guilty, the ticket would simply be thrown out.
In other words, the burden of proof is still on the government to provide sufficient evidence. If they won’t or can’t, there is no case.
The person I replied to was required to challenge the assumption that they were guilty, and the camera evidence exonerated them every time, so by your standards should have been thrown out. The “burden” was on them to “prove” themselves innocent, its literally in the name. Just because the state possessed the evidence to prove his case doesn’t mean the burden was on them
Exactly. Forcing someone to challenge a fine that they've already been issued is not presumed innocence, it's presumed guilt. If someone fails to act affirmatively to challenge the fine for any reason (work commitments, disability, death in the family, the list goes on) then they're on the hook for the charge in spite of the fact that the state knowingly used an inaccurate system to issue the fine.
Meanwhile, I've never had to contest a false positive because my state doesn't allow red light cameras. That's a lot of time that I haven't had to spend defending myself against spurious charges.
It doesn't especially matter where the burden of proof lies if the process for contesting requires any substantial amount of effort on the part of the victim of the false positive.
None of our processes have a 0% false positive rate. Not tickets written by humans, not criminal charges filed by humans, not court cases tried in front of a jury. So maybe a phrase would be "unrealistic expectations".
But what we should expect (and demand) is that the process have no higher an error rate than human reporting, and that the errors should be no harder to correct/appeal.
> the process have no higher an error rate than human reporting, and that the errors should be no harder to correct/appeal.
I would actually ask that the errors be easier to correct, not just no harder.
Even if the error rate is lower, automated systems will detect a larger number of errors and therefore are likely to create a larger number of false positives. If we're going to automate the creation of false positives we need to equivalently automate their correction.
I can get behind this idea if and only if the government makes it absolutely trivial to request a human to review the ticket, with no additional fee and no attempt to dissuade people from exercising that right.
There should be a phone number, a QR code, and a printed link on the ticket that all provide a one-step process to contest a ticket. As soon as a ticket is contested it should be put on hold with no payment due until a follow-up ticket is issued by a human.
If we don't do this then we've just automated the creation of false positives without giving the victims of those false positives any equivalent advantage.
Better yet, the website could allow you to login an instantly view the evidence against you, in addition to filing the appeal. Also, if your appeal is found valid based on the video evidence, you should get the amount of the fine back from the government as a fee for them wasting your time.
They will do this. Later when some place like Booz Allen Hamilton picks it up, they will observe that revenue goes up when dark patterns and obfuscation goes up. So the initial implementation will go away.
Los Angeles doesn’t have a meaningful process to contest parking tickets: it’s an automatic denial, regardless of merit. The only way to get actual review is to go to civil court.
That sounds a lot better than I typically hear but one thing I do keep in mind is that some people, especially men, take comments about their driving very personally and react only slightly less strongly than if someone said they were bad in bed. I’ve known a few guys who would rant about tickets as a tax without noticing that nobody who’d seen them driving believed it.
This doesn't work if the failures are correlated and very often happen to a certain group of people.
Imagine if the system was flawed and assigned all tickets with an unrecognized license plate to NULL or 000000. THe owner of that specific plate would have to spend their entire life contesting tickets.
A less extreme case of this would be a badly-trained model that always detects certain kinds of cars as occupying bus lanes, even if they're parked legally. If you're in the tiny minority that has one of those, you can't park anywhere without getting a ticket which you must contest.
If those cars end up statistically more likely to be owned by the poor / black / homeless, now the local government has a scandal on their hands.
Neither Kafka, Joseph Heller, nor Huxley could conceive of technology-enabled ubiquitous, concealed brutality and extortion. The Western world is rapidly flirting with the specters of pre-crime and automated enforcement that puts the burden on the accused to prove their innocence with Hobson choices while extorting fees from average citizens as a profit-center.
And in Western countries with weak privacy laws, this class of technology also raises the specter of private "social credit" behavioral tracking to discriminates against and quantize people by grading their online and offline behaviors in totally opaque manners.
What the exact error rate is isn't relevant to OP's concern, which is that operators of the tooling will treat it as having a 0% error rate in a way that they don't with human judgment. We've already seen this play out with algorithms designed to predict recidivism or what have you—law enforcement and judicial officials place undue weight on the outputs of algorithms and trust them implicitly where they might ask questions of a human expert.
> which is that operators of the tooling will treat it as having a 0% error rate in a way that they don't with human judgment
This is possible but we have decades of camera enforcement experience suggesting that courts are aware that these systems are not as reliable as the manufacturers claim. People have been challenging photo tickets since the previous century and there’s a well-established process for challenging them.
I am not comparing it to a human error. There is a conventional wisdom that humans make mistakes, and we have redundancy built into various systems to counter the same. With machines and tech, the expectation is that they are accurate (which is not true, but mostly true in the important ways). The reason I brought it up is to hope we have that redundancy in this case and future implementations of AI as well. (Horizon had a bug in calculation system - which seems easy and straightforward and hence unexpected and undetected.)
A typical example would be breath analysers. If humans were to judge who is drunk, there is a high error rate. With tech, the error rate is low, but if there is a bug in one of the equipments, many wrong and unnecessary arrests might be made.
> With machines and tech, the expectation is that they are accurate (which is not true, but mostly true in the important ways).
I find this an interesting comment with your choice of examples as there is an extensive legal history about false positives (medical conditions, mouthwash, etc.) and the need to show maintenance and calibration records.
I was on a jury back in the 2000s where the San Diego police had to have someone from the crime lab testify about their process for managing their breathalyzers, and we ended up unanimously finding the guy not guilty on that charge because they’d messed up the process and had been a year late on calibration testing despite everyone agreeing he was drunk (based on his own testimony, receipts, and the bar staff, he’d had 3 double vodkas in the hour before getting behind the wheel, so we found him guilty on the other prong of California’s DUI statute - which is exactly what his attorney told us afterwards had been his prediction).
Your experience is very helpful. I took a theoretical example since where I live breath analysers are how you get fined for drunk driving. I didn't think it was possible to contest that.
I would rather that these things happen preemptively so that there are no such challenges to fight or tickets to contest just because an AI flagged something and humans went ahead with it. I mean that other tech is deterministic, while AI is probabilistic, but people still havent updated their models for such tech. And we need to keep those examples in mind.
Techbros always love citing the supposedly devastating human fallibility yet experience shows poorly configured/developed automated systems are much more of a concern.
Nice straw-man, but getting back to reality, nobody in this thread has put forth the belief that automated systems are infallible, or is arguing that point. Also the fact that humans are fallible, hasn't stopped us from setting up judicial systems based on human judgement - which work pretty well in several scenarios.
I'm of the belief that if a law exists but isn't being enforced, the only correct course of action is to eliminate the law or start enforcing it. Otherwise, you enforce the law inconsistently, and you reinforce the notion that laws don't need to be followed.
Technology can help with consistent enforcement. Stop light cameras, in my experience, are more impartial and objective than police officers.
Where I live in the U.S., crime is prevalent. Many laws are flouted by criminals and rarely enforced by the police or district attorneys. The system has become a farce. It's better to enforce the laws consistently, or if they're not needed, to eliminate them.
Doesn't really scale well. What you're looking for is community-led policing combined with sensible, few surprises, high community-visibility and -participation legislative processes rather than revenue-led or self-led policing.
I'm familiar. Completely transformed New York City in the 1990s for the better.
But I'm not suggesting that every law is good. If a law is not enforceable or not a net positive for the community, change it or get rid of it. But don't enforce it inconsistently, and don't apply it to certain people and not others depending on the whims of the police and the district attorneys and their personal predilections and politics.
The big problem with all this automated enforcement is they only end up punishing honest people. Kind of like continually raising fares while doing zero about fare evasion.
The police should crack down hard on: license plate covers, fake license plates, fake temporary plates, etc. I suggest seizing the vehicles as contraband. Then I might support more automated enforcement. Until then, I don’t.
This is a “do both” situation: those “honest people” are still knowingly trying to cheat their neighbors, so while they pose less of a threat individually than the people with fake plates the aggregate cost is quite high due to greater numbers, and fining them is done by a separate group of people so it doesn’t take any resources away from the police you need to go after the hardened criminals.
Cameras actively help that process, too, because they collect data showing how widespread the problem is and individual fake plates will collect tickets showing how dangerous those particular drivers are.
You could say this about all enforcement. In the exact same way that organized crime is driven to tax evasion, petty crime is driven to fake license plates etc. That’s not necessary a bad thing.
wish they'd ticket traffic violators, not just parked cars. Cars running red lights, cars driving in lanes they aren't supposed to be in. Cars turning in places that are illegal to turn at. Cars speeding. Cars stopped in crosswalks. I see these daily. I'm happy to submit camera footage if it means tickets and enforcement.
Don’t worry, that’s probably one of the real reasons for 100 camera systems. As someone else pointed out, you don’t need 100 cameras to act as a policy enforcement and deterrence, but if you wanted to get constant surveillance of vehicles and people movements, recorded in public, you would want 100+ systems.
You can’t (currently) ticket people for crimes like speeding, but you can use it to ticket for other non-criminal violations like other parking violations, i.e., replacing meter maids.
cars led to the creation of CHP and the expansion of US police authority, then that spread even more afar.
People should not be allowed to drive unsupervised. I am anti surveillance and anti cop. There is no safe world with unsupervised driving. And so we as a society traded some of our rights, acknowledging this new dangerous tool but choosing its convenience even though this led to whole new police departments, policies, etc.
Pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcyclists, and even drivers know that the way people drive is a serious problem.
I don’t want the cameras either, but to get rid of those you have to get rid of cars.
I'd love any evidence of that and I'd wager that that statement is wrong. Blocking the box only accomplishes slowing down the cross traffic with no benefit to the person doing the blocking.
I don't know about Boston, but I think there's no question blocking the box in isolation gets you there faster, although the difference may not be meaningful.
If the exit moves shortly after you blocked, you may have saved the time between when you got to move and when the light you should have stopped for turns green. If it's a long cycle, this could be meaningful, although it may depend on bottlenecks elsewhere in your path.
If the exit remains blocked until after your light cycles, you still saved the time it takes to cross over half the intersection. This probably isn't meaningful.
Of course, if your blocking of boxes actually blocks a traffic move that would unblock your exit, that's not good. And if blocking becomes common, it causes confusion and delay for everyone.
Drawing bounding boxes around license plates, and then running OCR on those license plates, is a relatively solved problem. My guess is that low confidence predictions will probably still be manually reviewed.
Captchas, at least recaptcha which is the main image selection one, exist to enforce Google's browser monopoly and force tracking on you. You're not proving you're a human, you're being punished for not behaving how google wants. It's vile.
I don't think that's an accurate characterization because the difficulty of the recaptcha is based upon the property its protecting. If it was just about behaving how google wants, then someone who behaved how Google wants shouldn't get tested harder on sketchier sites.
I dunno, I frequently do recaptchas on Firefox on Linux and it hasn't been a problem for me? It does feel like they make me do the image selection more often, but I've never had any problems completing the captchas and it doesn't happen often enough to bother me.
Possible, but I think the more likely explanation is that Firefox users are just higher risk. I don't think the slightly increasesed rare of captchas is going to drive people off of Firefox.
No, but in whatever little bot/scraper blocking work I did, user-agent blocking was an incredibly powerful low-hanging fruit.
For sensitive material, we would often insta-ban anyone who hit us with a 'curl' user-agent and that definitely killed a lot of script-kiddies' dreams right then and there.
Obviously, if you are a determined "hacker" you would get past that and hit the honeypots but simple filters could filter out enough scrapers such that the rest of the attacks could be manually evaluated by humans.
Likely. But if the company providing the service is caught in an audit not implementing the data retention policies that are in the contract, they are dead on the spot.
Just 5 cameras driving about the city all day ought to catch enough violators that anyone habitually parked in a bus lane will be caught and will stop doing it.
I could understand 1 camera per route maybe if the busses physically always stay on the same route.
There are now CCTV vehicles driving around some boroughs of London scanning for parked cars. I strongly believe that this breaks the spirit of the law as it was originally conceived and implemented.
In most areas, local residents allowed for and voted for controlled parking zones primarily to prevent commuters or tourists parking all day/week and to reduce things like car storage by dealerships. Basically, to ensure that parking was actually available for residents, to make the best of a scarce resource.
I don't believe that the intent was ever to penalise someone parking for 15-30 minutes to have a coffee or to shop, to drop off parcels, to make tradesmen have to pay to park when working, etc. Perfect enforcement is punitive, and reduces the utility of the road network overall.
My personal opinion is that these surveillance schemes are radicalising a lot of people and turning them against their elected officials. Discretion fosters trust in power.
Let’s say that the city of LA theorizes that enforcement of parking via these cameras will be cash flow positive; assuming the $11M contract size, 100 cameras and 5 years at face value you’d expect each device to bring in $60/day to break even.
Seems like a good deal for the city if they fine someone at least twice a day per device.
There are benefit for the city and its people if this encouages compliance, even if it doesn't pay for itself.
How much would you pay to clear parked cars from bus stops and bus lanes? That's going to improve route times... Although how much of a difference it makes, and how much of a difference is worth $11M, I don't know.
LA is so late to the game. NYC already does this and they do it without AI. Buses have cams. Anyone who drives in bus only lanes gets a ticket. Any cars parked in bus stops get tickets and a whole lot of honking.
>License plate scanning technology has been around for decades.
While this is true, the big optical character recognition breakthrough was Yann LeCun's use of Convolutional Neural Networks in the 1990s, which I think most people put in the definitions for "ML" and "AI." But of course, as John McCarthy said: "as soon as it works, no one calls it ai anymore"
For starters, you need to determine which cars are actually parked, and if that spot is violating the rules. For fixed cameras generally the installation process just marks as spot or lane where every car "counts", but a camera on a moving bus needs to do that on its own.
couldn’t that be done off-line? The active system would just collect the data, plate number, GPS, etc., and the off-line system would process it with a overlay of the city map, etc.
Quoting the official claims from the article, "Only when the system observes a vehicle parked illegally in a bus lane or a bus stop does it record the license plate and capture video of the event." - it seems very reasonable from both practical and privacy standpoint that all that data should not be collected unless there's some reason to believe (e.g. by such an "AI" system) that there likely is an actual violation.
Who knows, although the main idea is that there are now cameras on the busses recording 24/7 looking for violations and emailing them to the local police department.
That's being done in Rotterdam for ages. Cars with cameras on top which determine which cars have a parking violation. I think they check illegally parked cars plus cars which didn't pay. It's anything but new technology.
"AI" is not a synonym for "cutting edge less than a year old technology", the fact that this sort of AI has existed for years doesn't change the fact that it is a form of AI nor the fact that this specific city had decided to start to use it now.
This is exactly what's being proposed - quoting the article, "Once a recording is made, it will be submitted to L.A. Department of Transportation where a human will assess whether a ticket should be issued."
In any case, neither the camera company nor the bus company have any authority to issue tickets, all they can do is submit complaints+evidence to the appropriate institution.
This is the type of prohibition which we want to enforce because they disturb others, and it would be inappropriate to disturb the illegitimately disturbed person even more by having to stop their activities and wait for some official to resolve the problem.
If a car is blocking a bus stop, the harm is done even if the car leaves before some official arrives to write a ticket, and it seems reasonable that the bus operator should be able to request that the law gets enforced without having to stay on the spot and point out the violation to someone - we do want a deterrent effect towards any would-be violators, that they should fear a ticket even if there are no officials onsite, and perhaps not do the prohibited thing.
If you can't get someone to the bus stop to write a ticket, that's a question of resources. I see no reason that getting someone there is some insurmountable task and thus requires a completely different solution.
It's a useless waste of resources - if there's no genuine dispute whether a violation occurred, in this situation, effective deterrence (which, as psychological research shows, is generally based on the likelihood of getting caught, not the size of punishment, so ticketing as many offences as possible is the key part) is the desired result, so why shouldn't society do it in the most efficient means possible, i.e. with as little wasted labor as possible?
If we want people to obey a certain restriction (especially a relatively minor one like parking in bus lanes), any obstacles that make enforcement time-consuming or inconvenient tend to result in it not being enforced and not being followed - and if we're okay with that, then we should instead totally repeal that restriction and any fines, as if it will be enforced only sporadically, then it will be turned into a tool for arbitrary punishment and not for actually getting that law followed - if we want the latter, we do want mass enforcement.
"if we want the latter, we do want mass enforcement"
I suspect this is meant as a cheap way to keep traffic police from having to interact with potentially violent drivers who believe they should be free to violate parking laws.
> SAN FRANCISCO – Parking control officers rallied outside San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency headquarters Thursday, fearing for their safety as the city ramps up its crackdown on parking violations.
> Officers told CBS News Bay Area that they've always felt at risk while doing their jobs. Now that SFMTA has announced that they'll be cracking down on parking enforcement, officers like Mishan Schexnayder feel like there's a bigger target on their back.
> ... "We deal with everything, from objects being thrown at us all the way up to physical assaults and threats being made on our lives and our family," Adams said.
The choice is either to have a full duty police officer doing traffic enforcement, with the training and arrest powers when things go violent, or hide behind a camera and magic AI dust.
Long history suggests that those with political power don't really care about traffic enforcement, likely in part because those with political power also drive and want weak enforcement to apply to them. Enforcement only along bus routes, gives them the ability to tell bus riders that politicians are Doing Something, while minimizing the negative political consequences of mass enforcement against entitled car drivers. (Hence why the enforcement will only be for car "parked illegally in a bus lane or a bus stop".)
Personally I agree with the need for mass enforcement of traffic laws, including speeding. But I also recognize how driving is given such elevated standing in US culture that I'm not holding my breath. I also see no chance of repealing those laws, or amending them to reflect current use.
Consider how many people break the speed limit, and if the speed limit is raised to reflect current speeds, they'll go even faster, because the cultural expectation is that driving 5mph over the limit is somehow acceptable.
What about programmatic speed ticketing? Either we care to enforce these laws impartially or we want to use them to give cops the ability to exercise their discretion, tertium non datur.
What about posting all police body camera videos at the end of the day and offering 50% of the fine collected from the cop to anyone who can spot a violation of policy or of law?
There’s nothing inherently dangerous about driving fast if it’s in accordance with driving to the conditions on the road. Driving too slowly is more likely to cause an accident by impeding the flow of traffic.
My favorite part of 1984 was about the well-maintained public transit infrastructure of Oceania, and how all of the inner party members who broke traffic laws received parking tickets.
I've been thinking about the description of these traffic tickets as "dystopian" more today than I'd like to admit. Something about it has really bothered me and I finally think I know what. I would argue that this is actually _utopian_: fair and equal treatment under the law, whether you are the NYPD Commissioner or the Mayor, Black or white, gay or straight, male or female—if you are parked in an illegal spot, you'll get a ticket in the mail.
The problem with these things is they stack on each other and we never go backwards. Any single aspect is not a problem so much and someone will argue the merits of why it is a good idea.
The system this builds though on a multi-decade scale is total insanity.
I don't see how it is possible that there is anything resembling what we would call a free and open society in 50 years.
That assumes that the "law" in general is fair and not favouring the current hegemonic societal consensus, which is definitely not the case. What people fail to see, or fail to want to see, is that the hoi polloi, the "poors", the "plebs", in many cases had to resort to actually breaking the law here and there in order to make their world a little bit more equal. These types of laws and the way that they are now applied will actively prohibit that in the future, in effect making this a less fair/less equal world (yes, I'm saying that in many instances actually breaking the existing law makes the world fairer for a big chunk of the population).
I'm saying that more probably there was a bigger percentage of Tesla owners paying their parking tickets compared to clunker owners doing the same, so that this law (written and most especially applied in the spirit of the world inhabited by those Tesla owners) will in effect disproportionately affect the "poors"/"plebs" a lot more.
Well, we know Oceania had buses. And no traffic laws ("In Oceania there is no law.")
You should note that the Ingsoc party opposition to private car ownership also applies to top-hats (part of the "uniform of the capitalists"):
> Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. His exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous world of the Forties and the Thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great gleaming motor cars ...
So going on that interpretation, you can tell we live in a dystopia because almost no one wears top-hats now.
You know, rather that making something you could just look at the literal decades of legal history here. People have been contesting camera tickets since the 20th century and the article specifically notes that they retain the video footage long enough to cover the adjudication period where someone has the right to challenge the ticket and would have access to the recording for that purpose.
Where I live, every ticket arrives with a link to view the video. This has lead to really telling moments where people have ranted about the “trap” and some even share the videos, which reliably show them rolling through stop signs or red lights.
Sure, so if they try to change the law then you can sound the alarm but right now all you’re doing is warning people that things are exactly the same as they’ve been for decades.
> Also the fact that you’re only allowed to contest an allegation within an arbitrary amount of time hardly seems in concordance with natural justice.
Why? It’s common in many areas to say that you have a certain amount of time to appeal an error to avoid needing to keep records for minor issues for long periods of time. This was even more common in the past where you would have been relying on human memory more and some people would try to game the system by waiting & hoping that an officer wouldn’t be available or would have forgotten enough details. It’s hardly just to allow lawbreakers to get off by exploiting the error correction mechanism, either.
"A person who is ticketed would have access to the recording, Territo said, and the ability to challenge the violation — a process that can take months."
These technologies are probabilistic with some nonzero chances of error which can't always be easily detected. These are implemented by people with some knowledge of the tech used (and hopefully the understanding of error), but are to be used by people who expect the output to be 100% true. I do not know how they would deal with tech errors which do not look like errors, but feel like there should be more cognizance about this and expectations should be set accordingly. Same goes for any facial recognition tech deployed by authorities.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal