Dial 1-800-RAT-FINK...

Via email, I was alerted to the fact that Sprint/Nextel's Electronic Surveillance Department has been playing Fido every time the po-po said "Fetch!", at least 8 million times over the last sever...

Wait, what?!?

Sprint/Nextel has an Electronic Surveillance Department??!

Maybe these shenanigans would have gone unreported longer if they'd taken a page from the Orwell School Of Marketing and called it the "Department of Customer Love". And by "Customer Love", I mean "Customer Loooove"; the kind you normally have to unwrap a plain brown package and draw the blinds to see on your DVD and is still illegal in some locales.

UPDATE(ISH): Joe Huffman goes into much greater detail, and did it first.

It's all in the name of cash safety...

Baltimore can only put up robot speed cameras in school zones, which cramps the revenue flow from Officer R2D2... unless you create bogus new "school zones".

The Taxman Cometh...

The city tax cops in New Haven, CT, have contracted with a private company to drive a vehicle around the city, using a fantastic computerized and infrared-equipped R2D2 unit to take pictures of everybody's license plates, lest someone be holding back dough from the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Lacking a cool state motto, armed Nutmegger villagers are notably not assembling on the village green.



(H/T to Unc.)

Yes, but...

Did he actually take the camera out, or did he just damage it? What caliber was he using? Scope brand and magnification?

God, this story leaves out all the important details...

(H/T to Unc.)

Heh.

Fight tha power!

Red Light Camera, Part Deux.

In which the photo enforcement saga continues...

Predictably, the Law'N'Order contingent has chimed in with responses like "You broke the law and were dumb enough to get caught by a MACHINE!", so let's examine the state's evidence against the defendant, hm'kay?

Exhibit 1: The Citation.

It lays it out nice and neat: The person cited, her address, the location and time of the crime, her vehicle and its license number. It's all right there in black and white:


Exhibit 2: The Damning Photo.

Well, there it is, timestamped and everything: A photo of license plate number XX2KXX tooling through the red light at the time cited. Slam dunk, right? Wait, that doesn't look like a BMW; maybe she craftily switched her plate to another vehicle to carry out her nefarious red light running scheme!


Exhibit 3: The Defendant's Current Getaway Car.

A-ha! There's her escape vehicle! Only... wait... is that a two or a three?


Better have her waste a day in court without recompense! Only a judge with the wisdom of Solomon could dig to the bottom of this one!

Red Light camera fiasco...

So my downstairs neighbor handed me my mail yesterday and I started flipping through it. Bill, bill, bill, catalog, junk mail, Knoxville Photo Enforcement Service Center...

Huh?

I haven't run a red light in years that I know of, and the last time I did wasn't in this city, but my daily travels do take me through a few traffic camera monitored intersections. Maybe I did and wasn't aware of it? I tore the envelope open, and immediately burst out laughing.

"What's so funny?" asked my neighbor.

"R2D2's a retard. Look at this," I replied, and handed him the notice. He started laughing too.

There on the right hand side of the page was the information that one Tamara K., owner of record of a BMW convertible, license plate number 122ABC, was guilty of running a red light at Kingston Pike and Alcoa Highway on May 22nd at 8:17PM.

There are a couple of problems with this.

1) I haven't been through that intersection in the last year.

2) The license plate on my BMW convertible is 123ABC, not 122ABC.

3) The vehicle in the accompanying photos is a white Toyota Tacoma, license number 122ABC. I realize it was dark, but a white pickup doesn't look much like a silver Nazi rollerskate, no matter how hard you squint.

"I am so blogging this," I muttered. And I have.

This should be fun.


EDIT: Updated with my pathetic claims of innocence.

There's a poll up...

...at Michael Silence's blog regarding the Sheriff of Knoxingham's new deputy/revenue collection agent, R2D2. Feel free to offer your opinions.

Myself, I find it highly ironic to think that the Mountain Boy would come tearing down Thunder Road and get a ticket mailed to him from a robot revenooer at the intersection of Kingston Pike and Morrell.

Blog Stuff: I feel like a stool pigeon.

Okay, let me get this out there: I hate red light cameras. I mean really hate. I just loathe the idea that R2D2 is perched up there on a post, waiting with mechanical patience for me to violate some regulation or another so it can fink on me to HAL, who will then mail me my citation.

Nonetheless...

Just as a prisoner in a concentration camp may loathe the guards, yet still feel a bit of schadenfreude when they put a beat-down on the camp bully, I get a warm 'n' tingly feeling when I see that fireworks display of flashes go off as some asshat of an eighteen wheeler pilot runs the reds at the Lovell Road exit, now that the shiny new cameras are up.

"I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that..."

Via Michael Silence, we learn that the Knoxville Police Department's newest officer, HAL 9000, has reported for duty. He won't be issued a ticket book, however, until his heuristic circuits have been tested and de-bugged.

It's so good to see such efforts being made in the quest for greater ticket revenues traffic safety.

Politics: Robot Revenooers on Thunder Road.

Apparently, it's now official: The Sheriff of Knoxingham has enlisted the help of R2D2 to swell his coffers.

Everyone outside of the PR department of Redflex Traffic Systems and various revenue collection law enforcement agencies (both with no dog in the fight, of course) agrees that the cameras do dick-all to reduce traffic accidents, a fact made more infuriating by the news that the myopic little HAL9000's can't even seem to ticket the right car with certainty, so why are we being forced to subsidize this little revenooin' scheme?

Oh, yeah, the "revenooin'" part... Forgot. Sorry.