New cameras will soon start taking digital images of red-light runners, Los Angeles police said Tuesday.

In the event of an emergency, the cameras, which are from Nestor Traffic Systems Inc., could also provide live images, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

The city’s contract with Affiliated Computer Services lapsed last year and red-light cameras at 16 intersections were deactivated. The contract was not renewed because officials learned that 20 percent of photographed red-light violations were dismissed “due to lack of clear evidence to prove the violation,” according to police.

The City Council has approved a $3.12 million contract with Nestor to install camera systems at as many as 32 intersections.

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Smile for the street sweeper. Mayor Rick Gray’s administration wants to streamline the city’s method of sweeping streets and ticketing motorists who do not move their cars for the posted sweeping times.

Gray said Monday the city is considering adding digital cameras to its sweepers.

Sweeper drivers would snap pictures of license plates on illegally parked cars, and tickets would be issued later, the mayor said. Those images would include the date and time.

“There is no new policy in effect right now,” Gray said, but he added that a change may come later in the spring. “There will be plenty of notice,’’ he said.

Hmmm…I wonder what else they will be photographing with those street sweeper cameras? Or what else they will use it for, in the future?

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An official audit of the Winnipeg, Canada photo radar and red light camera system shows that the city used misleading statistics in an attempt to cover-up the program’s failure to reduce accidents. Independent evidence cited in the report released to the public Wednesday indicates that the number of insurance claims for accidents, injuries and property damage expenses went up significantly at sites using camera enforcement in the year following the introduction of the devices.

Provincial law requires that Winnipeg Police Service conduct an evaluation of the safety effects of its photo ticket program. That evaluation claimed accidents dropped at the first twelve intersections to use cameras. Rear end collisions increased from 63 in 2003 to 84 in 2004 and 71 in 2005. Right angle collisions, however, dropped from 37 in 2003 to 15 in 2004 and 12 in 2005. On balance, the numbers looked positive.

Police data for the entire city, however, showed no change in the overall number of accidents. This raised a red flag for the auditor regarding the effectiveness of red light cameras in particular.

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Drivers talking on mobile phones or failing to wear seatbelts could find themselves tracked down through a widened use of road surveillance cameras, under proposals due to be floated in parliament tomorrow. The plans would form part of a major expansion of camera surveillance which critics say is already transforming Britain into the most watched country in the world.

Now, this is currently happening in the UK and not in the US. Not yet, at least. I wanted to show how a simple mechanism, to stop people from running red-lights, is now turning into a full blown ‘camera cop’. Giving up just a tiny bit of your freedom now can result in loosing it completely, down the road.

Police in Chicago, and elsewhere in the state of Illinois, are dramatically expanding the deployment of stealth cameras to catch alleged speeders. The cameras may be a massive invasion of privacy, however, according to some legal experts who are calling for precautions to be taken with the surveillance data.

Recent moves to install such technology in Illinois come as other states are taking action to block its use. Some citizens are taking matters into their own hands, using so-called “photo-blocker” spray to shield themselves from the constitutionally questionable speed traps.

“Chicago must afford some way for those ticketed to say, ‘Right car; right license plate; wrong person,’” said Harold Krent, a law professor and dean of the Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

“Chicago needs to embrace a system to determine how long its surveillance images will be kept and to limit access to such images,” he added.

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley called the vans the “police cars of the future.”

Illinois government agencies tried to implement traffic surveillance technology nearly 20 years ago, but civil liberties concerns undermined the plan. Last summer in Virginia, meanwhile, legislators shut down a similar program.

The national office of the American Civil Liberties Union has opposed red-light cameras in Washington, D.C., saying the cameras intrude on the constitutionally protected right to privacy.

The cameras shift the burden of proof from government to citizens and unfairly penalize car owners who may not necessarily be red-light runners, according to the ACLU.

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