this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
354 points (98.9% liked)

News

23400 readers
4061 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] hark 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just because you can't see the obvious issue of deriving revenue (and thus eventually relying on it) from traffic violations, doesn't mean it's a contrived edge case. Here are a couple of articles to help you along: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/us/police-ticket-quotas-money-funding.html

https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/red-light-camera-controversy/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I read the article second article, the first is paywalled. I still think cameras are a good solution. The argument in the article sounds a lot like "some police are bad, we shoud disband the police" or "some government officials are greedy, we should disband the government".

Frankly, it sounds like the real issue if that they have privitized the production and configuration of the traffic cameras. If there was legislation in place that ensured fair and consistent implementation of the devices much of the issues identified by the author would be moot.

Any system that we put in place to enforce rules can be abused by those in power, but that doesn't mean the system is bad or wrong. The reality again is that cars are dangerous, and I argue we should prioritize protecting the public.

It's easy to hop in a discussion and say "no that's bad", but a lot more productive to say "here's an alternative".

[–] hark 1 points 1 year ago

Privatization is an issue, but also cities or police departments that rely on such revenue will also push for systems that drive revenue since it is a significant portion of their budget. Here's another piece that explains it: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/09/1174962751/paved-paradise-examines-how-parking-has-changed-the-american-landscape

It's a pretty long piece which covers other aspects of parking, but if you start reading from this excerpt: "GRABAR: I think so. Essentially, parking enforcement serves as a subset of what is now known as revenue-driven policing. And the idea here is that cities take advantage of these parking laws to try and get as much money out of people as possible, but not in the way that you would think, right?" and onward, it covers how underlying problems aren't solved because the revenue derived from the existing situation is too convenient for the city. They even build around that by giving certain companies discounts on parking tickets because of how often they get them from just trying to do their job.