Zombie Traffic Cameras

Given the huge uptick in references to zombies in popular culture that we’ve been seeing over the past few years, it wasn’t all that surprising that they should start turning up in other aspects of our lives, such as civic government and law enforcement. Indeed, many local bureaucracies in the United States already appear to be staffed by the walking dead – or at least by brain-dead individuals who are more interested in eating your brain than they are in actually doing any work. Thus, it was more with a sense of resignation than any form of panic that I regarded the news story out of Baltimore about thousands of people receiving red-light camera citations signed by an officer who appears to have been dead for at least two years now. Unfortunately, the City of Baltimore, in a blatant act of discrimination against Life-Impaired Americans, is claiming that the whole situation is merely a clerical error…

You can pick up the original story from the local TV news site if you want to, but the details of the case suggest that at least 1,000 (and possibly twice that many, according to the guys over at Autoblog ) red-light camera citations have been sent out by the City with their certification “signed” electronically by a police officer who has been dead for some time. This would, of course, render the citations invalid in any court, since this type of traffic ticket requires that a live officer oversee the robotic camera’s decision – since a computer can’t really make decisions, it can only act on the commands programmed into it. Facing the possible loss of as much as $800,000 in driver-harassment revenue, the City is scrambling to prove that the citations were reviewed by a living officer who simply failed to change the automatic signature in the computer – but we know the truth, don’t we?

I make no secret of my dislike for these systems – and I hated them even before one accused me of a traffic maneuver that would have gotten me flattened by oncoming traffic if I had actually done what the computer says I did. The law requires a live officer take responsibility for issuing the citations partly to keep cash-hungry municipalities from charging every possible motorist with every possible infraction, whether they are guilty or not, and partly because the Six Amendment requires that any criminal defendant be “ confronted with the witnesses against him” – and a computer can’t testify in court. Thousands (and possibly millions) of people accused by such systems would tell you that no one is really checking the pictures; they’re just rubber-stamping the citations and mailing them in mass – a position supported by the facts of this case…

Now, in fairness, it is possible that the officer in this case was diligently checking over all of these red-light camera pictures right up until the time of his death. If they have active, functional zombies in Baltimore, it’s even possible that the officer in question is still checking over each new day’s supply of pictures to make sure they are clear evidence of traffic infractions before going off in search of brains to eat for dinner. But even if this story is more than just an excuse for riffing off zombie jokes at the expense of Baltimore, it illustrates one of the most irritating aspects of the entire issue: If the people who are supposedly monitoring these citations can not be bothered to update a signature box in order to prevent their city from losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue and keep their police department from looking like a bunch of brain-dead buffoons, how diligent in reviewing the pictures are they being in the first place?

I realize that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were not carved in stone, and that the Founding Fathers did intend for us to be able to update them through the Amendment system as needed. I’m just saying that if we’re going to give up our Constitutional rights to due process, it should be for something more important than allowing a city government to make money by putting the screws to drivers while thumbing their noses at the court system…