Traffic Camera Scam Continues, Landrieu Chooses Police State Crackdown Over Justice

The notorious scam that is traffic camera system in New Orleans, installed for "free" by a private company, which takes a large share of the fines generated and gives the remainder to the city (in what is commonly understood as a "kickback scheme"), continues to enrage local drivers and many are refusing to pay.

Rather than refusing to pay and exposing oneself to being caught in the sticky spider's web of the criminal injustice system, go out and do a public service by bagging up or otherwise disabling the cameras issuing the most tickets!

Instead of the city recognizing the perverse incentives that drove the implementation of the program in the first place, which by the way does not increase traffic safety, and looking to solutions that actually help increase road safety, the City of New Orleans is relying on it's trusted stand-by of increased policing and harassment to maintain and expand this scam.

Much like the flawed idea that the city can arrest it's way to a lower murder rate, the idea that issuing thousands of tickets will lead to better road safety is just not accurate. Better road safety comes from better urban design and other measures that create roads where drivers feel like they must share the space with other non-car entities, creating alert drivers, slower speeds, yet faster overall commutes for everyone.

The solution of cracking down, being tougher, being more brutal, in short, the default solution looked to since the days of plantation owner sadism during slavery, never works as well as being smarter, more fair, more equal, more humane, and more just in creating solutions that benefit everyone instead of only reinforcing the power and wealth of those already among the elite. It has been wrong-headed for the last 300 years, and it is how Louisiana has become the apartheid police state competing for last place with Mississippi in almost every indicator of a functional system we see in evidence today.