Big Brother is Here
Last week the law signed by Gov. Fallin in 2016 payed off for a few special interests in the state. The District Attorneys Council has cut a deal with a private company to begin scanning as many as 10,000 violation notices per day for cars scanned and ticketed for lack of insurance. Or better put, ticketed because their system doesn't think the car has insurance. Unless you have an out of state tag, are driving a fleet vehicle, or an Indian tag, those are exempt. Bringing up a constitutional challenge as all laws are supposed to be enforced equally.
The Uninsured Vehicle Enforcement Diversion Program, UVEDP, uses cameras mounted on cars, trailers, and fixed locations to scan vehicle tags and compare the tag numbers with the Oklahoma Insurance Department list. If the system doesn't find a match, the owner of the car gets a $174.00 ticket mailed to them. A company called Sensys Fatso Group is paying for the system and operating costs in return for $80.00 per ticket the first year, going down to $68.00 per ticket in later years. The D.A. Council gets the lion's share of the remaining $94.00 and $10.00 goes to the Oklahoma Insurance Department, $5.00 for payment processing, and $5.00 for the retired law enforcement pension fund.
If you get a ticket mailed to you the fine is $174.00 and you have to show proof of insurance and agree to keep the car insured for the next two years. No mention of what happens if you already had insurance and the insurance verification system was inaccurate or if you had sold the car recently and the other person hadn't re registered it. We do know that retired law enforcement officers working for the D.A. Council will approve each ticket. Talk about self serving, the more tickets they approve the better their pension plan is funded and protected.
Sensys recommends capping the tickets at 5,000 per day till the program bugs are worked out. Meaning they expect hundreds if not thousands of bad tickets generated each day. They also claim that they are not taking pictures of every car that goes by, just pictures of the ones that do not have insurance in the data base.... if that is the case, how can the software run the tag number against the data base? To know the tag number means you have video or a picture of the tag number and car. The company claims that tag numbers pictures and video aren't retained, meaning they got caught in one lie already, only those tag numbers that didn't have insurance are retained for two years.
What a load of problems.
First, this is not new. Oakland CA has been running these automated ticketing scanners since 2010 and Bossier LA has had them working since 2017. Out of 8000 hits this year, only 7050 tickets were sent, with the sheriff department netting $140,000 out of $350,000 shared with the D.A. Council and Sheriff department. That is around half of the $1,250,000 ticketed amount, an estimated 2,916 tickets actually paid the fines, earning the private company $233,280. But the company invested over $5,000,000 to install the system plus the costs of running the system every year. The pressure to make it pay off is going to mean a lot of bad tickets will be overlooked and people coerced into paying.
Then the Oakland system has been keeping the data, indeed the private companies that sell these systems retain the data and sell it. One company brags about 6.5 billion records so far and adding the at the rate of 120 million records per month. The data is sold to insurers, skip trace companies, private detective companies, anyone with money to spend. Manipulating the data from nearby cameras would tell your insurance company that you were speeding or another private company that might start sending tickets for speeding after partnering with the local cops or D.A.. The data can even predict where you might be on any given moment or where you have gone.
Or consider that fewer than 42% of the tickets are being paid. Does that mean that 58% of the drivers just ignore the ticket or that most of the 58% of tickets are erroneous tickets? How many man hours are citizens going to have to put in dealing with erroneous tickets?
Then the Oakland system has been keeping the data, indeed the private companies that sell these systems retain the data and sell it. One company brags about 6.5 billion records so far and adding the at the rate of 120 million records per month. The data is sold to insurers, skip trace companies, private detective companies, anyone with money to spend. Manipulating the data from nearby cameras would tell your insurance company that you were speeding or another private company that might start sending tickets for speeding after partnering with the local cops or D.A..
The data can even predict where you might be on any given moment or where you have gone. The data can tell where you had driven in the past, what cars might have been at or passed a crime scene or near a crime scene, even who you might be associated with.
The systems appear not to be viable if all they do is write tickets for no insurance. Indeed, as time goes on people that don't want to pay for insurance will find ways to evade the system by using out of state tags, stolen tags from fleets or Indians or just tags stolen from the average driver. As the systems can track location and time, sending out speeding tickets would be easy. Your car passed checkpoint A at some time, passed checkpoint B at another time, extrapolating the average speed is easy and automatic.
Or perhaps insurance companies might want to know who is visiting a health center or any sort of medical facility to create a black list of customers or find out if they lied on an insurance application. ICE could use them at immigration lawyer offices or immigrant rallies.
Gun ranges or gun shops could be targeted to create a list of gun owners. Protests of all sorts, mosques, any sort of religious or political gathering or meeting could be scanned by one person driving through the parking lot. And you know that the data is uploaded via the Fusion Centers and become available to thousands of law enforcement organizations. Look at this video from Oakland showing an eight day data base collection of tag numbers scanned in ten second intervals.
The financial pressure to keep these multi-million dollar systems operational will be immense. It is uninsured motorists now, tomorrow speeders or arresting those with unpaid court fines or unpaid taxes. Those with warrants outstanding, even for misdemeanors, in fact, this technology is already working in Texas with the private company raking in 25% on top of the overdue court fines or fees. The cop pulls over a car that the system tags, asks the driver if they want to pay the overdue fees and fines on the spot via credit or debit card, or be arrested and have the car towed. One county has upgraded their contract so that the private company can send out its own agents to collect money.
The incentive for law enforcement is immense. In order to keep their free equipment they have to churn out tickets to pay for the system and its operation. Tag readers in patrol cars will turn the cops into debt collectors and data miners for private companies that sell the data, shifting the cop's attention from controlling crime and traffic violations to responding to a computer's orders.
The contracts generally will prohibit the cops or administrators from discussing the system unless they pre authorize the statements through the private company so honest debate and transparency are gone. Once they start focusing on collecting debt from court fines and fees there is zero incentive to lower the number of defendants going through the system as it becomes a cash cow for shaking down certain classes of citizens on the side of the road. And while .2% of the vehicle drivers are committing crimes or have unpaid debt with the court system, 99.8% of the drivers are data mined with no benefit or probable cause that they are criminals.
Other problems will be rampant. If you sell a car here in Oklahoma the tag goes with the car. You would be at the mercy of the buyer as to when or if they re register the car before the tag expires or if they purchase insurance for the car. You will remain the owner of the car till it is re registered. You will get the ticket, not the current owner. In my life I have seen a lot of cars traded with the registration never being changed till the plate expired.
The black market for stolen tags will skyrocket. Fleet tags will be especially valuable as well as Indian tags and out of state tags. Illegals rarely own the cars legally, the cars are usually in the name of a legal resident or simply running on old tags till they expire and the cars are re sold at that point. Drive up to any insurance storefront on the South Side of OKC and you will find big signs offering "no title car insurance" or no ownership car insurance for the illegals.
And the big constitutional challenge will be the unequal prosecution of the law. Illegals and Indians and large corporations running fleets of cars or trucks won't be ticketed or tracked, but the average citizen will be ticketed and tracked.
Uninsured drivers need taken off the road. I was rear ended a few weeks ago by someone that might well turn out to be uninsured as the insurance company is dragging their feet at acknowledging if the guy has insurance or not. But building the police state higher and higher around out necks is not the way to do this and if it was, why leave gaping holes in the system by allowing out of state tags and Indian tags to be exempt? When the cops do work an accident where an illegal hasn't fled the scene, they let them go anyway.
Better to start arresting drivers without insurance if they don't have proof that they are required to carry and the online system says they have no insurance, require the insurance company to report anyone that fails to pay or drops their policy, and tow the cars of illegal aliens and citizens alike when it is certain that there is no insurance. Driving is a right but rights have responsibilities coupled with them and driving a four thousand pound vehicle down the road at high speed means the chance of an accident and the damage that might ensue is large, thus insurance should be required. Not in a perfect world but certainly in the world we live in.
The unpaid fines and fees can be easily collected by requiring checks of these records at the time of enrolling in schools, turning on utilities, renewing licenses, entering govt. buildings, or just having the deputies and cops finding the scofflaws and arresting them.
