Los Angeles Just Proposed the Worst Use of License Plate Reader Data in History
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I am not anti-government, but you are completely right, you cannot ever give the state these types of tools or they will use them en-masse against their citizens.
Never underestimate the churlishness of a politician looking for a scapegoat, they know that a large portion of the population will just roll over as it only targets "bad people".
The fine was previously rather punative, because we, as a society, had to compensate for the small number of enforcers we could afford. That is, any given red-light-runner would stand a very small chance of paying the fine, so we, as a society, judged that an extremely punative fine was the best way of enforcing - you won't get caught very often, but if you do get caught, yipes! that's a big ticket. It's quite within the realm of the law to set and enforce punative fines for running a red light, but as we've seen, the whole of morality in not contained within the law. Red light cameras are almost universally loathed and given a chance, electorates will vote them out.
Similarly, license plates were nominally public, but only because they couldn't be monitored nearly 100% of the time automically. In the aggregate, monitoring license plates becomes quite a bit more theatening to liberty than the very occasional check by the small number of enforcers.
As Stalin once said, "Quantity has a quality all its own". You'd be wise to remember that.