An automated speed camera on Parkside Drive in the west end of Toronto lies on its side after being cut down by vandals.Supplied
Years ago I received a letter informing me that, some months before, I had run a red light, and would have to pay a fine. It included a series of pictures of the rear of my car, captured by photo radar.
There must be some mistake, I thought. I’ve never run a red light in my life. Sure enough, closer inspection of the images revealed that I had in fact turned right on a red, a perfectly legal act. I took the letter to the address indicated for inquiries. The lady behind the desk glanced at it, and said: “Yeah, you didn’t wait the required three seconds before turning.”
I’d never heard of such a rule, but never mind: How was I to know whether or not I had waited three seconds before making a turn at some nondescript intersection, months in the past? How could I make a full and fair defence against the charge if I didn’t myself know whether I had committed it?
If I had been stopped by a cop, in the old-fashioned way, I could have either said “sorry, officer, I should have been more careful” or “that’s nonsense, I know I waited more than three seconds.” I could have decided, on the basis of the facts of the case, whether to pay the fine or contest it. But as it was, I had no option. I paid the fine.
Ontario’s decision to kill speed cameras puts Ford at odds with some municipalities, police
Photo radar, in short, is not just like posting a police officer at an intersection. It is qualitatively different. It fundamentally alters the relationship between the police and the policed, in ways that are hard to justify. As in my case, there is no chance for explanation, no room for discretion, no immediate connection between the offence and the charge – and no chance to cross-examine the officer in court.
Indeed, unlike an ordinary traffic stop, it is impossible to tell who was driving. The photo radar regulations get around this by assigning liability to the vehicle owner, rather than the driver. How is this fair? Granted, the penalty is limited to a fine, rather than demerit points or a criminal record. But it still amounts to punishing someone for an act someone else might have committed.
More than that, there is something altogether creepy about the idea of the government in a free and democratic society surreptitiously snapping photos of people going about their business. I understand that this is now commonplace, that there are video cameras recording our every move, just about everywhere we go. But that’s the point: every time we yield to this sort of intrusion, we set ourselves up for the next.
We have indeed become all too complacent about the surveillance state, too ready to yield to arguments of expediency: It raises money. It reduces speeding. If you’re not doing anything wrong you don’t have anything to worry about.
Sorry, yes I do. I have a right to move about without the state recording my activities, for the same reason I have a right to draw the curtains on my windows – and I have these rights regardless of whether I use this anonymity to commit some minor infraction.
The price of a free society is that we tolerate some level of lawbreaking. We could post a police officer every three feet, and it would reduce crime to zero, but it would be intolerable – not just because of what it would cost, but because of what it would imply. We are right to expect some limits on policing power, beyond the bare minimum of the presumption of innocence and probable cause.
We are right, that is, to want some sort of balance, a sense of proportion, even a sporting chance: the idea that the cops have to catch us in the act, individually, to fish with a line rather than a net. This is particularly true with regard to speed limits.
Speed limits are necessary, and a line has to be drawn somewhere. But they are also largely enforced by community standards; the police are mostly a backstop. There is an official speed limit, that is. And there’s an unofficial or “herd” speed limit, which is about 20 per cent more than the official number. The authorities, I suspect, know this: They draw the official limit with the unofficial limit in mind.
People mostly keep in line with the herd, whether because they don’t want to make themselves a target for the police or because they share in the collective intuition that this speed is “about right,” in the same mysterious way that people in crowds know that a burst of applause should last about (there’s research on this) six seconds.
In sum, the Ford government is right to abolish photo radar.