Poking the Red Eye

In a great civilian uprising against — the Panopticonic Red Light Camera — those unblinking red eyes are being closed in the polling place by voter fury.

Red-light cameras that have been gaining a foothold in many states face a growing public backlash and outright removal.

The cameras, billed as safety devices since their introduction in the USA nearly 20 years ago, are increasingly viewed by many motorists as unreasoning revenue generators for hard-up local governments.

Maine, Mississippi and Montana banned red light cameras last year, joining at least four other states, Nevada, New Hampshire, West Virginia and Wisconsin, says Anne Teigen, a transportation specialist at the National Conference of State Legislatures. State senators in Missouri and Tennessee are sponsoring legislation that would limit cameras.

We applaud this legal effort to stop the loss of the conditional human mind in determining guilt or innocence in the duty of blind justice. 

We all know police offers can be kind and empathetic — a robotic eye snapping your image only knows the mindless mechanical.

When we begin to remove the beating heart from the judicial process, we begin to lose ourselves into the dark, futuristic ether where machine not only becomes man, but removes any sense of righteousness from the process of legislating morality through the bending of laws and rules.