NOREEN: Electronic policing? What could possibly go wrong?
By a 5-4 vote Tuesday, the Colorado Springs City Council took a step toward resurrecting HAL, the Series 9000 computer from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Sometime in October, the city likely will begin issuing tickets for speeding and running red lights based upon electronic systems.
As you’ll recall from the Stanley Kubrick science fiction masterpiece, HAL murdered all of the spacecraft’s crew except one, but the council’s slim majority was undaunted as it boldly went where a handful of Colorado cities already have gone before.
Under the system that still requires a final council vote in a couple of weeks, those who own vehicles ticketed by the process will be entitled to a hearing, but not a jury trial. A human being will look at all the cases to determine which ones are forwarded to traffic court.
That human being will have no way of knowing whether the person photographed or caught on radar is the owner of the vehicle, but the owner of the vehicle is the one who will receive the summons.
Instead of facing one’s human accuser, the alleged violators will be confronted by a machine with all of the empathy of HAL, who said in the movie: “The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.”
Famous last words, but humans also err.
Yet there are good reasons for the five council members to have voted in favor of the new system.
First — although many disagree — the system is being set up primarily for safety reasons, not for generating revenue. If the city wants money it would put the equipment at Academy Boulevard and Austin Bluffs Parkway, the busiest intersection in the city — but it didn’t.
As the recession and the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights take their toll on the budget, police must be used for priority missions.
“Traditional traffic enforcement is pretty labor-intensive,” CSPD Commander Brian Grady said.
TABOR backers who want the budget to shrink may not accept that electronic policing is a logical result, but that’s the way it is.
Councilman Randy Purvis voted against the idea, saying “This takes too much of the human being out of this.”
Citizen Gerald Miller said the system makes for too much injustice and added that a policeman sometimes catches a drunk driver or makes some other kind of bust after having pulled over a car for running a red light.
“What we need is more police officers. We need to raise our taxes,” Miller said.
No matter how council members voted, it’s hard to knock their logic. Citizens have rights, but electronic policing may be a necessary evil.
Get used to HAL.
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