Delaware Liberal

The Trouble with Speed Cameras

Kids in Montgomery County, MD have apparently discovered how to fool the speed camera in front of their school. The kids print out the targeted license plates on glossy paper, using fonts that are close to the ones the State of Maryland uses, paste the paper over the real plate and zoom through the camera’s field of vision. The camera takes a picture of the plate and records the speed.

This seems to be one of the many new systems that take a picture of the plate only (others will take a picture of the car or the face of the driver as well). But even if this system is taking a picture of the car too, it is probably a safe bet that the company retrieving the pictures and sending out the tickets is a private entity with no incentives for accuracy (as in comparing the description of the car in the registration with the one in the picture) of the tickets they are sending out.

I really understand why people want cameras monitoring certain public spaces (I don’t like the cameras much at all, but understand why people think that they are useful), but when you are using them for law enforcement purposes it is really important to do this thing in a way that you aren’t punked at the first opportunity by a bunch of kids with nothing better to do.

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