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Cameras Focus On Defense Of Society's Fabric

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By TOM JACKSON

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 6, 2008

So, in the first two months of using cameras to surveil certain troublesome intersections, Port Richey has tagged 570 scofflaw drivers for running red lights.

Excellent.

That's 570 motorists whose indifference to civilized comportment and the safety of others have earned an expensive lesson, up from zero in the months leading up to the cameras going hot.

And these teaching moments have occurred, says Port Richey Police Chief David Brown, without the customary spike in rear-end collisions. So we say again: Excellent.

Anymore, wherever traffic signals attempt to regulate the negotiating of intersections, substantial numbers of motorists regard fresh red lights as nothing more than suggestions or requests to be heeded or dismissed depending on the mood of the human behind the wheel.

Haughty Leading The Spineless

The population of red-light runners grows as other motorists, weak-willed and tempted to naughtiness by the smug indifference demonstrated by those with whom they share the roads, decide to join in the mischief rather than be played for chumps who obey traffic rules.

This puts the innocent, law-abiding chumps - This Space and its gentle readership - at increasing risk. Which is why we applaud cities such as Port Richey for installing photo-enforcement systems at troublesome intersections; those local governments are attempting to preserve the fabric of society, the fundamental contract binding each of us to behave responsibly toward our fellows.

If the cameras boost city revenue by a half-million annually, so what? It wouldn't be the first time government benefited from the imposition of a tax on bad behavior.

Big Brother And Other Silliness

This scarcely is Big Brother among us. Instead, it is a rational response to a pandemic happening in and threatening to the public square, where privacy rights cede standing to safety concerns. Over time, photo enforcement stands to inoculate drivers and pedestrians against the worst excesses of red-light violators.

As to the complaint that where red-light cameras are installed, governments invariably manipulate the duration of yellow/caution lights to snare the maximum number of violators: nonsense.

Port Richey, for instance, does not maintain the traffic signals at the monitored intersections. That duty falls to the Florida Department of Transportation, which - says Bob Reck, Pasco County's chief of traffic operations - adheres to regulations determined by the size of the intersection and the speed limit.

Another dubious claim is that the overwhelming majority of red-light runners are accidental perpetrators. Again: nonsense.

Want to see a blank face? Tell someone that the definition of character is doing the right thing even when no one is looking. How totally last century.

Cloaked by anonymity, as when we operate our vehicles, our misbehavior staggers. Consider our Internet comportment, which tends to range from appalling to abominable. We steal music, capture and present others' academic work as our own, and, under the guise of Web pseudonyms, insult with impunity.

Red-light cameras are an attempt to defend the driving public against assaults by the willfully indifferent. Such miscreants aren't anonymous to the unblinking eye; their reward, rightly, is in the mail.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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