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Comment by obelos | Hacker News Reader

It's puzzling to me why police need to be involved at all, save for possibly some sort of statutory restriction that ought to be removed. What is it about police's training that makes them uniquely qualified to process these images to determine that there's cause for a citation to be issued? This and other automated street safety tools are very valuable for public safety. But there's no reason these programs couldn't be operated by the transportation department or some such, reducing a lot of the privacy concerns rightfully stoked by involving the police.

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> It's puzzling to me why police need to be involved at all

The police: "the civil force of a state, responsible for the prevention and detection of crime and the maintenance of public order."

If you gave this task to "transportation department or some such" they become the police. They become the civil force of a state, responsible for the prevention and detection of this specific crime.

Except of course if you boot up a brand new police force just for this task they will bumble around and make all the mistakes while they lean how to you know police.

> a lot of the privacy concerns rightfully stoked by involving the police

What privacy concerns does this raise which are not already raised by the 11,000 other automatic number plate recognition cameras in operation in the UK?

Police are given a monopoly on physical violence deployed by the State. The key element here is cordoning off that monopoly on violence to apply to situations where it is most likely to be necessary. They are not the sole arbiters of conformance with law and regulation. Many, many agencies cite citizens for misuse of the resources they manage and for other violations. Do police handle violations of environmental regulations? Police do not have a monopoly on investigation, either. Many agencies can and do conduct investigations that compile evidence that later gets turned over to a DA or similar law enforcement agent for starting a criminal case, if one becomes warranted.

If you tried to hand this off to the transportation department, it'd probably end up under the British Transport Police. Six and two threes really.

The Police are already tooled up to issue traffic citations. Tooling up the BTP to do the same task would just mean more money, and end you at the same result, no?

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