The EFF takes weird policy positions. They're against speed cameras, but in favor of the status quo (police with guns manually pulling people over for speeding in cities).
That isn't a weird policy position. The speed cameras do ALPR and can store all the results, so they build a location history of all the vehicles that weren't even breaking the law. That's bad.
It's also bad that cops pull people over arbitrarily, but that's not the part in the EFF's bailiwick, and there are other solutions than putting ALPR cameras everywhere.
It’s even worse. The police don’t pull people over for speeding anymore (that’s good, at least from the “guys with guns” perspective). But the bad part is drivers are now emboldened to drive recklessly. These people now kill and injure more than the police — looking at the latest numbers police violence is down while traffic violence is up. IMO speed and red light cameras would do a lot to reduce the use of police while still seeing traffic safety enforced.
Well said. But you could also state your final sentence as “… would do the job that police are supposed to do but aren’t…” I see what you’re getting at, though. Another related area where we could reduce their use is ticketing for vehicle window tint violations. In California, vehicles can’t have tint on the front windows because it’s quite dangerous when other people can’t see drivers. Tons violate it, and it’s historically been “enforced” as a broken tailight-esque reason to pull over POC and search them for drugs, etc. In areas where parking violations are enforced, the parking enforcement officers could easily check this and issue tickets.
Sorry what's weird about this? I assume they're against the creation of automated government databases of cars, licenses and persons (say with ML) and not tech per se
It's also bad that cops pull people over arbitrarily, but that's not the part in the EFF's bailiwick, and there are other solutions than putting ALPR cameras everywhere.