
NY Man Arrested for Cutting Wires to Red Light Cameras (2016) - crunchiebones
https://newsmaven.io/pinacnews/courtroom-files/ny-man-arrested-for-cutting-wires-to-red-light-cameras-exposing-revenue-scheme-TmvQ7-MX9U-VXG26D11tdg/
======
ambicapter
> Ruth pointed out some cameras that were put up have been taken down after
> they fell short of daily contract-quota with Xerox to produce 25 citations,
> per camera, between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., which costs Suffolk County $2,132
> per day, according to the Xerox contract with the county.

> Xerox collects $13 from Suffolk County for each ticket, which increases to
> $33 per ticket when a camera generates more than 90 tickets in a month.

Wow, talk about a misalignment of incentives.

~~~
dmix
> Wow, talk about a misalignment of incentives.

Even though I lean libertarian I despise most of these public/private
partnerships for this reason. Profit seeking combined with governments use of
force (for monopoly or as part of the business model) is almost always worse
than pure public services or markets.

Private prisons are a classic example of that, but there are countless less
obvious ones in every local government. And it sucks because people blame
capitalism for these failures, despite the arrangement looking nothing like a
traditional market.

~~~
chottocharaii
All traditional markets require the use of force; just its limited in effect
by consent in contract.

~~~
dmix
The market may require it at some point but it's not fundamental to the
organizations business-models which is very, very different. Society as a
whole is structured around these forces as well, so there is no way any
economic system can operate without it. And we're better off for it.

99% of libertarians are for minimal government use of force, not zero
government.

------
IronWolve
Wow, recap of the article, lots of WTFs.

1\. Cameras lowered from 5 to 3 seconds.

2\. Cameras placed in low income neighborhoods.

3\. They put a camera at the mans house!

4\. John Lang, a traffic-light scam whistleblower in Fresno, California who
posted on Facebook that police were trying to kill him just days before he was
found stabbed to death in his burned down house.

~~~
danso
The coroner's report notes that firefighters discovered his home was
barricaded at the time of the fire. The cause of death was not stab wounds but
smoke inhalation and fire:
[http://dig.abclocal.go.com/kfsn/PDF/JohnLang-16-01-222.pdf](http://dig.abclocal.go.com/kfsn/PDF/JohnLang-16-01-222.pdf)

~~~
AdeptusAquinas
Thats an odd document. Cause of death: smoke inhalation; contributing factor,
multiple stab wounds. Conclusion: suicide.

~~~
gcapell
Towards the back of the article it talks about video from inside the house
where the man shows the knife to the camera then turns off the camera.

------
cabaalis
> Another vexing problem for Ruth is the coverage the issue has gotten from
> local news, specifically News12, which is owned by CableVision who provides
> the internet service to the cameras at the lights. ...... When victims of
> the lights went to News12 about the deaths of their family members due to
> the shortened lights, News12 interviewed them, but never ran the story. And
> while other local media outlets report from Ruth’s point of view and most of
> the public’s, News12 has painted Ruth a criminal.

And yet we're supposed to treat the for-profit media in this country as
sainted individuals, with no biases or influences whatsoever?

~~~
nemild
I hope not. I’d be curious who’s telling you to treat them as sainted
inviduals.

Here’s my media literacy guide that catalogs all the biases (contributions
welcome):

[https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-
media/blob/master/README....](https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-
media/blob/master/README.md)

~~~
tomohawk
Comparing media coverage of death with actual causes is misleading. There are
many other reasons why something may be covered, other than just frequency of
occurrence. Often coverage is for things that we might do something about. For
example, there is quite a bit of coverage of terrorism because much of it is
preventable. When systems break down and the barriers to it no longer work, we
get Syria.

~~~
brokenmachine
_> Often coverage is for things that we might do something about._

I disagree. IMO it is almost always about maximizing "engagement" to the news
source itself through those ways described in that github - getting the viewer
to feel emotions/outrage/etc.

What am I, as a private citizen, meant to do to prevent a plane crash, random
act of violence, terrorism, or whatever else that is being massively
overreported?

 _> there is quite a bit of coverage of terrorism because much of it is
preventable._

In what way do you propose I, as a normal middle-class office worker, prevent
terrorism (which is already a vanishingly unlikely cause of death anyway)?

Or even more broadly, how do you propose our government prevents terrorism?
Surprisingly, the unprecedented levels of spying and monitoring of our own
people doesn't seem to have stopped it yet. Maybe even more spying will enable
us to win that pesky war on terror.

We are not dealing with rational actors here. These are people who truly
believe they are going to be martyrs and have eternal happiness just for dying
in the right way at the right time. You can't negotiate or reason with that.
Also you can't prevent every danger. There will always be, eg footpaths that
people can drive cars onto, or whatever other ways to kill random people if
you are crazy enough.

As a normal citizen, I would much prefer my government spent its resources
preventing the overwhelmingly more likely (and preventable) forms of death or
injury - but that doesn't sell papers, fund the war machine, or enable massive
and ineffective civil rights degradation.

------
DoreenMichele
_When he was in jail for his most recent arrest, a sheriff’s deputy even
offered to bail him out._

:)

If only real life more often played out like that scene in _Scent of a Woman_
where righteousness wins out and doesn't end in the bad guys ruining the guy
taking a stand:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAtzy-l3H1g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAtzy-l3H1g)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcj1wMZRitI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcj1wMZRitI)

------
chiefalchemist
Certainly the programming of the lights is public information. If it's not, a
stop watch could document the setting. From there, I would imagine there are
published best practices. That is, if the speed limit is X, the duration of
the amber light has a very defined duration.

The town itself acknowledged the sub optimal programming of the light.

How is it that someone needs to resort to civil disobedience in order to have
his/her fellow citizens properly protected; protected from their own (local)
gov?

~~~
rhinoceraptor
Be careful, that kind of speech could get you charged with practicing
engineering^Wcommon sense without a license:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
mix/wp/2017/12/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
mix/wp/2017/12/08/criticizing-red-light-cameras-is-not-a-punishable-offense-
oregon-concedes)

~~~
cwkoss
Is Xerox a front for the Illuminati or something? /s

How is so much power being exerted against people questioning red light
cameras? Feels like there is some national entity providing support.

------
joncrane
How reliable is this source of news? The farther I go, the less tied to the
truth the content seems to be.

~~~
c3534l
Zero. Read the rest of the site. These are paranoid ramblings of mostly one
individual. The fact that this is on the front page of hacker news really
makes me worry about the critical thinking skills of the forum.

~~~
cabaalis
Actually, critical thinkers will separate ideas from their source.

------
brlewis
_The shortened duration times at the traffic lights generate $32 million for
Suffolk County, which is why the county allows the practice to continue
despite their own study showing they lead to an increase in accidents with
injuries._

This is exactly what lawsuits are for.

~~~
olyjohn
Lawsuits cost a lot of money.

------
busterarm
Apparently the (very cynical) lesson in all of this is that you don't get
between the State and its money.

They'll either incarcerate or kill you.

------
jakelarkin
anybody ever been to Milbrae? It's a tiny town with no courts and no police of
its own. The cameras at intersections around the BART station make $millions
for the city, mostly for vaguely marked and unnecessary no right turn on red.

~~~
chrisdhoover
Yep, total trap. The in and out is there. Be careful getting a burger and
leaving, you need to watch it turning right to go back to 101

------
crwalker
If the claim that standard 5 second yellow lights were shortened to 3 seconds
for traffic cameras is true, Suffolk county officials should be ashamed. This
is simply extortion.

~~~
theonemind
If true, they should be ashamed and THEN go to prison. That kills people.

~~~
gambiting
Fyi - light goes to yellow for 3 seconds before going to red in all of EU and
people don't die because of it. I'd say 5 seconds in US is unusually long.

~~~
pkaye
It depends on size of intersection and speed limits. Are you saying all
intersections in the EU are 3s?

~~~
egorfine
I cannot remember seeing 5s yellow light ever (and I drove across almost all
the EU). 5s yellow would certainly caught my attention in a "WTF is this"
style as 5s is not just long, it's actually enormous and kinda defeats the
purpose.

------
eevilspock
We need more boycotts, protests, civil disobedience, voting with our feet,
delete Facebook/Google/Uber/etc, Robin Hoods.

We need a society driven by values and humanity, not the Dollar Almighty.

If not us, then who?

~~~
dvtrn
_If not us, then who?_

Probably our great, great grandkids, when things end up far, far worse for
them because it wasn't us doing anything about it now.

You know, to play devil's legal counsel. Er, I mean advocate /s

------
tkok89
As a person outside of US, I find this interesting. In Finland, the duration
of a yellow light is defined in Finnish directive for traffic lights. For
speed limits of 40-50 (km per h) duration is three seconds and for 60 kmph it
is four seconds and over that it must be 5 seconds.

So the three second time is a norm here in a city area. I wonder how much that
affects the statistics of traffic safety. Can someone explain me, why a
shorter duration of yellow light causes more accidents?

In Finland I think it is not illegal to drive pass red light if it is not safe
to stop before them, so when you see the yellow light you must consider if it
is possible stop the vehicle safely.

~~~
esotericn
> Can someone explain me, why a shorter duration of yellow light causes more
> accidents?

The purpose of an amber/yellow light is to give drivers a transitionary stage.

Consider the limiting case, that a light goes from green to red with no
intermediate period.

Drivers will not be able to avoid running red lights. They'll approach the
junction at 30mph, the light will change just before they reach it, and
they'll go through.

Now you've normalised running red lights. Drivers can't stop if they're 5m
from the red (at 30mph), but what about 30m? 50m? 100m? There's no clear
cutoff.

So either you make the all-red cycle really quite long, or accidents increase.

------
cronix
These are easy to get around though. It might depend on the State, but in
Oregon, in order to actually get ticketed by those stupid things, the image of
the driver in the car must match the picture of the driver the car is
registered to. So if you're married, just register your wife's car in your
name and hers in yours. The pics will never match, and no ticket. If you have
to go to court, you can show the judge the pic and it's clearly not you
driving, so no ticket.

~~~
300bps
Some states are “owner responsibility” states which means it doesn’t matter
who is driving.

And going through red lights is dangerous. Wouldn’t it be better to stop doing
it rather than come up with a way to outsmart the system?

~~~
cronix
Sure, one should never intentionally run a red light, and I wasn't suggesting
that they do.

The article specifically talks about them shortening the duration of a yellow
light from 5 seconds to 3 in order to increase revenue by catching more people
running the (shorter) light. They purposefully are creating a situation where
people feel the need to speed up to make it through the shorter duration light
and more people are getting killed because of it.

I don't know about where you live, but in a lot of places if you cross the
crosswalk and are now in the intersection and the light just changes from
green to yellow, 3 seconds isn't enough to clear the intersection before it
turns red unless you were already traveling the speed limit and the lane is
clear ahead of you. Imagine yourself in rush hour traffic and you're the first
car stopped at a green light because you can't safely clear the intersection.
The car ahead moves and you start to enter the intersection because there is
now space to clear the intersection without having to stop in it. Just as you
start to accelerate it turns yellow, and then red 3 seconds later before you
clear it because they shortened the time. If the light stayed at a 5 second
yellow light, you would have made it through. Is that genuinely your fault if
you did everything according to the book but only got caught because they
artificially lowered the yellow light time?

~~~
300bps
Shortening light cycle times to increase revenue is evil. But one thing that
is not widely known is that it is illegal to enter an intersection while the
light is yellow. The only time it is legal to enter an intersection is while
the light is green.

So if the light turns yellow, you enter the intersection and leave it while
the light is still yellow... that is just as illegal as if you entered the
intersection when the light was red.

~~~
hexane360
Not true in the first few states I checked. The closest is Wisconsin, where
the motorist "must stop at a yellow light except when the motorist is so close
to the intersection when the light turns yellow that it’s unsafe to do so"
[1].

In other words, you're wrong. Also, there are multiple degrees of illegal, and
I'm certain the punishment for running a yellow light isn't of the same
magnitude as the punishment for running a red light.

It seems that you like correcting people enough that you're biased towards
believing in unintuitive things.

1: [https://www.drivinglaws.org/resources/wisconsin-red-light-
st...](https://www.drivinglaws.org/resources/wisconsin-red-light-stop-sign-
tickets.html)

------
xutopia
He's probably right about being a scheme... goes about it entirely the wrong
way to stop the scheme.

~~~
gameswithgo
What approach can a normal, non wealthy, non connected citizen take?

~~~
CarVac
Any way to get a law in the books that specifies a minimum yellow light
duration for a given speed limit?

www.shortyellowlights.com/standards/ has a formula.

~~~
pkaye
I know there is a state wide rules in California. And because of complaints
about red light cameras, they even increased some of the limits by 0.5s. I'm
not sure of the exact numbers right now. I know my own city was caught doing
some of these games but after the changes were made, they saw a 77% drop in
red light tickets at some locations.

------
duxup
The legality of issuing tickets without being able to identify the driver is
beyond me. I"m sure there is a "reason" it just seems inherently unjust to me.

Heck I'd rather just have humans deal with it as a sort of jobs program even
;)

~~~
dragonwriter
A ticket is a summons, not a conviction; the owner of the car can, of course,
argue that they were not driving, and present evidence to that effect.

~~~
duxup
A summons for a person based on "I saw your car" seems unjust too.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
It seems reasonable that an individual should bear at least some
responsibility for who they allow to borrow their car.

~~~
duxup
If they know the other person is going to commit a crime yeah.

Otherwise, no it is not reasonable at all.

------
kevin_thibedeau
More creative would be to inject an altered video feed with the license plates
changed.

------
MK_Dev
Did I just a read an upcoming movie script?

------
tyingq
Painting the lens black might be a better balance of quick and effective.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
But you'd have to reach the lens. The wires might be handier...

~~~
tyingq
Ahh, I had assumed the wires were only exposed at the same height, but
protected at ground level. Maybe not?

I wonder if putting a bag over it is a lesser degree crime.

~~~
reaperducer
_Ahh, I had assumed the wires were only exposed at the same height, but
protected at ground level._

In some red light camera installations you can use an Allen wrench to open an
oblong metal panel at the base of the camera pole and expose the power
circuit.

...said a friend.

------
trhway
Vertical integration in law enforcement is coming. Some components are already
here - private cameras, private prisons, that judge getting kickbacks for
sending children to the private prison...

~~~
dragonwriter
> Vertical integration in law enforcement is coming.

It's been around for a long time, it's called “the state”.

~~~
trhway
I stated it badly - I meant that private components of law enforcement start
to form their own structure instead of being just a separate components
embedded in the state structure.

------
Simulacra
What a patriot...

------
lamarpye
Is this a crime?

------
endorphone
A few years ago these claims would have been considered conspiratorial, and
would have yielded public outrage. Now it's just banal and accepted that a
municipality and private company got together to manipulate and effectively
rob their own citizens.

How have politics become so corrupt? At the early days of the broadly
available internet I was sure it would lead to a more informed public, and
from that a more accountable, responsible leadership. If anything we have gone
in the opposite direction.

~~~
noonespecial
Last time I got one of these "tickets", it came from the red light camera
company and informed me that as long as I paid the fine on time, I would not
be reported to the authorities and therefore would not receive a moving
violation (and so points on my license). The money went to the red light
camera company.

So, as a private entity, they collected evidence of a "crime" I committed, and
threatened to expose me to the authorities unless I paid them off. How is this
not extortion?

~~~
sigfubar
Have you contacted your state's attorney general? This sounds like exactly the
sort of case that their office would be interested in pursuing.

~~~
noonespecial
I actually considered that but wasn't able to gauge how realistic an option
that might actually be.

------
jessaustin
_If you think Ruth may be paranoid, consider the case of John Lang, a traffic-
light scam whistleblower in Fresno, California who posted on Facebook that
police were trying to kill him just days before he was found stabbed to death
in his burned down house.

Police ruled his death a suicide._

Wow Xerox don't play.

[EDIT:] after a bit of online research, it seems plausible that Mr. Lang's
death was actually a suicide. That doesn't change the fact that a three second
yellow would be unsafe at most normal automotive speeds...

~~~
gambiting
>> That doesn't change the fact that a three second yellow would be unsafe at
most normal automotive speeds...

Lights go to yellow for 3 seconds in all of EU and the only EU country that
has more fatalities per 100k citizens than US is Lithuania[0]. If anything, it
seems to me like the American 5 seconds is unusually long.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-
related_death_rate)

~~~
Rebelgecko
Fatalities per distance driven is probably a more useful metric, since the US
has more cars and typically longer commutes (when you check this the US is
behind 4 European countries). 3 seconds seems like a really short time for a
yellow. If it takes 1 second to react, make a decision, and physically push
the brake pedal, that only gives you 2 seconds to come to a complete stop. If
I'm doing the math right for a 25 foot wide intersection (enough room for 1
lane in each direction), at 60mph (~95 kph) that gives a stopping distance of
about 150 feet / 46 meters.

Lots of cars are barely capable of that in test conditions with new tires on
dry roads.

------
hitsthings
Why is an article from 2016 a top story now?

