French City To Use CCTV For Parking Fines

horza writes "The city of Nice, France is rolling out 626 CCTV cameras throughout town, giving it one of the highest levels of surveillance in the world (1.8 cameras per 1000 inhabitants). The usual rhetoric was given — that they will be used solely for reducing violent crime — but the city will now begin sending out parking tickets solely based on the CCTV video evidence."

Videoprotection

[bedonnant]

This is the doing of Christian Estrosi, mayor of Nice and minister of Industry, whose education consisted in winning motorcycle races. He's at the forefront of applying repression at the city level, and actually wanted to fine mayors of other cities where crime is not sufficiantly fought in his eyes. Funny coming from the guy in charge of the city where the Russian Mafia is rampant... anyway the summary has is wrong, in terms of politically correct French. The French government wants everyone to stop using the ugly word 'videosurveillance' and instead opt for the friendly, wonderfully orwellian 'videoprotection'.

Re:Even so...

[Anonymous Coward]

... I'd rather live in a city with CCTV cameras than a city with poorly-trained armed police ready to start shooting at any moment, privately-run prisons that require a constant stream of new inmates to keep the workshops running and the profits up, and drug and alcohol laws that even the Taliban think are a tad excessive.

This sounds like a false dilemma. [wikipedia.org]

London

[Anne Thwacks]

We have this in London, and I personally have had ticekets while asking for directions, waiting to do a U-turn and while waiting to reverse into a parking bay.

You do not want this ... It is worse than living in East Germany under the Stazi. (or similar to the "great Terror" after the French revolution)

Re:Source?

[mxolisi06]

Here [nicematin.com] is an article in the main local news paper. Although I wouldn't be too sure it's better than a blog...

Re:Nice ... Estrosi

[mxolisi06]

not that French politics are any easier to summarize than anywhere else, but to be fair with the GP, we have seen lately that the current governement has more and more of a tendency to use far-right (or what we call far-right here in France anyway) rethorics, such as blaming immigrants for economical and crime problems, for instance.

Re:Revenue Collection

[sumdumass]

The courts do not just let them get away with it. The supreme court ruled in a case concerning DUI checkpoints in Indiana that they are legal as long as the public has both sufficient notice and a reasonable route around them. They can't wait until the last minute and publish the info in some obscure newspaper that probably won't be distributed until after the check points and they can't close the roads around it down to force traffic through it. They has also outlaws drug checkpoints too.

The DHS gets away with it not because it's "in the name of keeping the country safe" but because it's traditionally handled by border agents (yes, even 100 miles inland from the border) which are now under the DHS. Furthermore, the supreme court has ruled on border searches in the past and declared that right of sovereignty (the right of a nation to exist relies on the ability to control what enters it's borders) surpasses the constitution as long as the search isn't overly invasive. It continues to define overly invasive- giving and taking from the constitution.

Apparently our founding fathers was ok with them too as they passed the very first warrantless search law concerning searches of ships entering US ports in the very first session of the US congress under the same principle.

Re:Revenue Collection

[Ponyegg]

I'm part of a the NTBPT (No to Bike Parking Tax) demo group in London which protests at having to pay parking fees in Central London. The UK law stipulates that councils are not allowed to simply charge for parking as a revenue stream, there has to be some benefit to the local population/businesses such as relieveing congestion, and as bikes don't cause congestion we're currently fighting Westminster Counsil in the European Courts of the legality of the charges. http://www.notobikeparkingtax.com/ [notobikeparkingtax.com]

Westminster Council also employs CCTV cars that roam the streets of London spying on the populace & catching any "traffic violations", but we've caught on to that and now we follow the CCTV cars and we film them & alert motorists about them and occasionally post evidence of them committing their own traffic violations to Youtube :-)
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23883049-bikers-blow-cover-of-cctv-cars-snooping-on-drivers.do [thisislondon.co.uk]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHOazGC7alk [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QNfeL71ojg [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cztfKB8SGCI [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsZb9jIfGv0 [youtube.com]

If you don't like what your elected memebers are doing then 1] try and vote them out, 2] organise, protest & demonstrate 3] take direct action to hinder their effectiveness (all legal and above board direct action mind.

Re:Revenue Collection

[sumdumass]

You are suffering from the failed logic that government actually acts rational.

In fact, the revenue streams won't decrease your tax burden, instead they just give raises to employees, elected officials, find a way to work bonuses or more/better benefits into the public sector, and end up spending more. Government is funny that way, they think once the money is in their hands, they have to spend it. Of course that's true to an extent, most jurisdictions (at least in the US) can only keep a certain percentage of revenue collected until a certain point is reached, the excess has to be spent or returned to the tax payer.

This is what has sparked most of the major budget problems we are seeing right now. You can't un-raise employees, so when the economy tanks and revenue drops, it's deficit hell or unpopular cuts in programs, or somehow raising taxes. None of which politicians want to do because it makes it hard to get reelected. Most governments went from "we need this to run" to how much can I spend. The later marks a shift in the deterioration of government and brings about favoritism, cronyism and the general environment of waste that seems embedded in the ineffective government we see today on most levels.

No, red light camera are not subsidizing your taxes, they are enabling government expansion.

already running in other cities nearby

[Scotch42]

This system is already in use for awhile in Cannes (the film festival city) and for sure in other cities in south of France... And the enforcement is drastic. You stop in front of a shop to pick up some ordered goods, you've got a ticket coming home...

Re:Revenue Collection

[Richard_at_work]

Swindon scrapped *fixed* speed cameras because all revenue from them go to central government while the local government has to pay for their up keep (although there is a discretionary fund available for councils to apply for) - that is why it was a cost savings measure, because Swindon was paying all the costs and getting none of the revenue.

However, Swindon still operates mobile speed cameras, because those fines go to local government and not central government.

Norwich is doing the same now that the new government has reduced the discretionary funding.

Re:Not so Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

You're welcome to put a camera in my house.

I will however also require a camera in your house, and those of all government officials.

You will find out that I pick my nose and sometimes eat things I've dropped on the floor. You will also find out that Obama lies to his kids sometimes, and that a senior civil servant likes porn involving old men.

Society has nothing to fear from openness. But it might take some getting used to.

Now, back to the quite separate issue of CCTV in public places. People are unhappy because nobody likes to be confronted with their wrong doing. But you need to be honest with yourself and decide which it is. Do you believe that parking in a bus lane is OK, will you tell your friends "Yeah, I block bus lanes, I'm the only important person in the world. Fuck everyone else" ? No? So, why park in bus lanes?

Poor enforcement leads to a situation where people break the rules but aren't honest with themselves about why. If the rules are no good, we should fix them, if they're fine, we should obey them. There is no middle ground where the rules are good for other people but not us.

Keep pushing it fellas...

[Taibhsear]

In chicago when they switched to a private company for parking meters, who then jacked the prices up by 5-10 times what they originally were and couldn't be bothered to fix them when they broke, the public was furious. Practically no one would park at the meters anymore and there were rampant accounts of people purposely breaking the meters. What do you think is going to happen here? Now the company will have to pay for upkeep and repairs on the cameras as well as the meters so they'll charge even more. How long before the retaliation?

Another stupid (or disingenuous) idea

[wsapplegate]

OK, I suppose I should comment on this since I live in that city, and am only two blocks from the building where cops watch those video cameras. Actually, there are pros and cons to this idea (but mainly cons):

• Pro: Nice is an old city, squeezed between hills, which doesn't exactly spell “car-friendly”. Large avenues are few, and traffic regularly suffers from congestion (even more so since the main avenue has been nearly closed to traffic when they built the light rail line). Obviously, idiots parked in the middle of the road, on bus stops, on pedestrian passages, etc., do nothing to help and should be fought
• Pro: Due to perceived lax enforcement, local motorists have got a bad rep for driving like monkeys. Since I know for a fact that people can't change their habits unless you hit at their wallet, this initiative looks actually good (red light running cameras are also being installed, before you ask)
• Cons: This is at best a money grabbing scheme. While (as told above) motorists park just about anywhere, the lack of car parks may have something to do with that. The underground geology prevents digging very far, and surface real estate is at a premium, but still, there aren't IMHO enough car parks compared to the cars driving around (especially outside the central business district). The existing car parks are not cheap, either, which means people who have a car but can't rent a garage can hardly use them. That doesn't excuse rogue parking habits, but I would like such an initiative to get a companion car-park-building effort
• Cons: At worst, it shows that those cameras are going to be abused for whatever suits the local politicians' goals. The previous mayor “solved” the issue of homeless people by removing them forcefully to some shelter kilometres away (and letting them return on foot. I'm all for eradicating homelessness, mind you, just not that way). The next iteration of this kind of stunt will be even easier thanks to Estrosi's all-singing, all-dancing, repurposable cameras
• Cons: Mayor Estrosi made a big deal of his cameras having allegedly permitted to arrest a few dozens violent people, but the cameras have been placed everywhere, not just in places known for frequent muggings. This basically means the people behind those screens can track your movements throughout the city. But that's OK, you say, because those people are police? Well yes, they're police, but the municipal police, paid by the city, and less competent than a nationwide law enforcement agency (for instance, they have no investigative powers).And reliability of cops in this case is paramount: Nice (like the whole southeastern area and Corsica) has been infamously known for corruption affairs regularly showing up at the municipality. The perspective of having a corrupt official persuading a cop to spy on an innocent citizen doesn't exactly please me. At a minimum, I would have liked the system to be manned by personnel unconnected with the city council

In short, this is a truly bad idea, but since no one cares (and since ethnic issues and the accompanying fear-mongering run high at the moment), politicians can happily bamboozle people into thinking they should accept any weird proposal in the name of security. Trying to explain the underlying issues to the average city dweller (which are basically seniors and right-wingers) will just get you a “think-of-the-children”-like answer (the best line I've found is pointing out how the cameras won't do shit to prevent an attacker from hitting them, and that their tax money would have been better spent on more policemen on the beat). I suspect it will be some time before people actually realise the dangers of this global surveillance system, and when they do, it may well be much too late. Just like all those people that go around yelling that the law “protects too much the criminals' rights”—until of course, a relative of them gets beaten at the hands of the police *sigh*