Chalking Tires To Enforce Parking Rules is Unconstitutional, Court Finds (nbcnews.com) 325
Reader schwit1 writes: Marking your tires with chalk is trespassing, not law enforcement, the federal appeals panel said in a Michigan case. U.S. Circuit Judge Bernice Bouie Donald wrote that when drivers pull into parking spaces, "the city commences its search on vehicles that are parked legally, without probable cause or even so much as 'individualized suspicion of wrongdoing' -- the touchstone of the reasonableness standard." Moreover, overstaying your welcome at a parking space doesn't cause "injury or ongoing harm to the community," she wrote, meaning the city is wrong to argue that parking enforcement is part of its "community caretaking" responsibility, potentially justifying a search without a warrant. In fact, she wrote, "there has been a trespass in this case because the City made intentional physical contact with Taylor's vehicle." Further reading: A court ruling 'chalking' illegal could make way for more privacy-invasive tech.
Already obsolete... (Score:2, Interesting)
The city I'm at has vehicles with automated plate scanners with GPS tracking. If it detects the same plate in an interval longer than the parking time, it notifies the driver who calls the tow truck company. Since there are no upper limits for fines, the tow company can easily make $800 because someone stayed six hours in a five hour parking spot.
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Re:Already obsolete... (Score:4, Interesting)
Many municipal laws cover that situation. It's illegal.
Re:Already obsolete... (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a reason to look up the parking laws in a previous city I lived in. They specified that in limited-time spots, the limit applied per spot, per day. So in your example, if you were parked in a 15 minute spot for more than 15 minutes, in the same day, you would have broken the parking bylaw.
It's rarely enforced that way, but I imagine the law is written that way specifically to address the "but I left and came back" excuse.
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The law in my town requires you to vacate the spot "long enough for another driver to take it" before you can park there again.
In other words, drive around the block.Then again, chalking cars ain't illegal over here, so I guess it evens out.
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Many areas stipulate that you must change locations and cannot re-use the same spot. Why it should matter, I have no idea.
It's to encourage people to spend money in the shops. They reason that if you have not bought something and driven away within 30 minutes (or whatever) then you are just fucking around and are no more use to them. Same as a cafe not wanting you to sit there all day just fiddling with your phone and occupying a table.
Re:Already obsolete... (Score:5, Interesting)
Same thing that happens with a chalk mark?
You're likely breaking the law even if you go and drive your vehicle around the block and re-park in the same/nearby location: According to Seattle Municipal Code [municode.com], “No person shall move and repark a vehicle on either side of a street within the same block in order to avoid a parking time-limit regulation specified for either side of the street in that particular block.” Seattle is just the first city that came up in my google search, but I'd expect other large municipalities have similar ordinances. (Minneapolis is the same [elaws.us] "For the purpose of the regulations relating to limited parking, any vehicle moved a distance of not more than two (2) blocks during the limited parking period shall be deemed to have remained stationary.")
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Right, because it's impossible for that wheel to be in the same orientation again.
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Also, the parking enforcement SHOULD mark the bottom of the tire and extend the line to the ground. This marks not only the tire rotation but the actual placement of the vehicle.
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I"m really surprised that to date, no one has come up with a straightforward, simple to install method of defeating these auto-plate readers.
These aren't human eyes and likely have some sort of weakness that could be used against them.
What about infrared, bright LEDs? I"ve seen some tests long ago whe
ug (Score:2)
This is how you end up with parking meters everywhere.
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Until automated vehicles make this all obsolete.
Speeding tickets? ... no longer going to happen, the "driver" won't let it.
Parking tickets? ... no longer going to happen, the "driver" will go to designated "off duty" lots (if people even own their own cars).
End Result? Municipalities that Rely on this sort of money either need to start enforcing the laws against Bicycles & Pedestrians or raising taxes a lot more to compensate for lost revenue (I'm hoping for the former, but betting on the latter).
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This never gets enforced.
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That's why every nothing town around here has "municipal enforcement officers" who do nothing but traffic enforcement, while relying on the provincially contracted federal police force for all other policing. It generates an additional revenue stream for the town. Of course it also takes it away from the actual
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Want to hear something crazy? The residents here beg their district (who is responsible for parking issues) for time-limited (and paid-for) parking with the districts being hesitant to do so because it of course hits the local shops.
The background is this: In my town, you can pay an annual fee to park in your district (roughly 1000 bucks a year). That doesn't give you a parking spot, it merely allows you to use one when you find one. And people are BEGGING to get that. Because then there's at least a chance
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(if people even own their own cars).
They will for the same reason people hate public transportation and public restrooms: a minority ruins it for the rest of us.
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Re:ug (Score:4, Informative)
No, not really. Reporting on this story a town said that the amount they receive from parking tickets is less than the salary of the person who went and did the ticketing. The point isn't to make money, the point is to make sure the parking space are for those doing shopping and not those just wanting to park all day. Since they'll probably have to replace this with parking meters then they'll probably make more money from that but have fewer shoppers because of the cost.
Re:ug (Score:5, Insightful)
This is how you end up with parking meters everywhere.
You end up with parking meters and speed cameras everywhere because some people's rich and god given sense of entitlement leads them to believe that they are above the law and allowed to disregard it at will when it suits their own needs. It's a classic case of a tragedy of the commons where a common resource is ruined for everybody else by a few selfish greedy asshats.
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"Speed laws are notoriously bad and were written with cars from 50 years ago in mind."
Is a speed law complicated? There I was thinking it was simply a speed you're not allowed to exceed.
It is less bad being hit buy a nice new SUV as compared to a car from 50 years ago if both are travelling at 40mph?
Were people 50 years ago texting and checking the social accounts?
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Road design has also improved substantially with wider roads, more banked corners, better signage and lighting, as well as better lane markings.
Not arguing but in San Antonio, the opposite has happened. The lanes are much more narrow and the shoulder lanes are gone for the most part.
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There I was thinking it was simply a speed you're not allowed to exceed.
Ah, a simple person.
No, a speed limit can be many things. Speed limits are tools used to try and reduce traffic noise, reduce risks, generate revenue, mitigate potential congestion, minimise pollution and/or other uses.
Speed limits can reduce and increase risk. For instance they can cause adverse behaviour that leads to accidents.
It is less bad being hit buy a nice new SUV as compared to a car from 50 years ago if both are travelling at 40mph?
Fuck yes. Modern vehicles are far more forgiving to their victims.
But you're also disregarding the far greater ease of the modern SUV to safely avoid the 40mph accident than the fi
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It is less bad being hit buy a nice new SUV as compared to a car from 50 years ago if both are travelling at 40mph?
Very much so, modern vehicles are designed to deform and absorb the impact, protecting the passengers that are inside a capsule. As a firefighter from the 80's on, we used to spend much more time extricating passengers than we do today, mostly due to how modern vehicles are designed. Injuries are much less common and those injuries are also less severe.
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"It's a classic case of a tragedy of the commons where a common resource is ruined for everybody else by a few selfish greedy asshats."
Asshats from Michigan, no less.
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Stupid ruling is stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
So the meter cop just writes the plate number on the sidewalk under the car or takes a picture (which I consider more invasive to my privacy as it will inevitably be kept and logged)
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They're all moving to photo-tracking anyway, and if you think about it logically, it's actually the only reasonable way to do things. From the city's standpoint, it's a win-win, since they get data on everyone and everything; they can track the meter readers at the same time that the meter readers produce tracking data. They can literally use off-the-shelf cellphones, plus some kind of printer — probably bluetooth. In its own way, that's actually simpler even than using a pad of paper and a pencil, si
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We moved away from individual parking meters next to each parking stall to a single parking kiosk at each intersection. You enter your license plate into the kiosk, select how long you want to park, and pay with coins or credit card. There's also an iOS/Android app that lets you do it remotely, which is really handy if you pick too short of a time and need to feed the meter.
By-law officers wander around with little handheld devices, snapping pictures of license plates that get OCR'd and checked against th
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Making the car BEFORE the parking limit has expired was the problem. Officers marking a car, that had yet to violate the law is unreasonable. You can not intervene because the car MIGHT violate a rule later on.
The precedence here is extremely important. Yes, photographing the license plate would be invasive, but police departments around the country do this routinely. It sounds very likely that this too can be considered unreasonable. The harvesting of information because there is a chance that the law
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Fsck all you whiners. Make on street parking enforcement a bigger PITA and the city will just take it all and convert it to bicycle lanes.
Enjoy your $6 per hour tab at the nearest private parking mafia lot.
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I'm all for restricting government intrusion and expanding the definition of the 4th amendment but MARKING a car with an innocuous chalk line is not the same as TRACKING a car with GPS So the meter cop just writes the plate number on the sidewalk under the car or takes a picture (which I consider more invasive to my privacy as it will inevitably be kept and logged)
I don't even understand why they need to chalk mark it. In Germany the parking wardens just make a note of the pattern on the wheel rims. If it is the same the vehicle has not moved since the odds of the pattern ending up at the exact same angle with the filler valve in the exact same place is next to nil. It serves the same purpose of catching abusers of privilege and you don't have to chalk the the car or touch it in any way. I suppose that photographing a car could be construed as a constitutional violat
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As so often, what happens in one part of Germany doesn't necessary happen in another part. I've seen meter maids chalking tyres in Offenbach.
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Where I live, the parking length restrictions are per block, rather than power spot. So even if you move to another spot on the block and plug the meter again, you're in violation.
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Per block? Here if you park on the street for more than 3 hours (this is assuming free parking btw) and have not moved outside of 300 meters you get ticketed.
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I'm all for restricting government intrusion and expanding the definition of the 4th amendment but MARKING a car with an innocuous chalk line is not the same as TRACKING a car with GPS So the meter cop just writes the plate number on the sidewalk under the car or takes a picture (which I consider more invasive to my privacy as it will inevitably be kept and logged)
Marking a car is defacing it. The car doesn't belong to the city. That's trespass and vandalism. I own a nice car and I work hard to keep it clean. I would be upset to find chalk marks on it when I haven't overstayed my parking time limit. There's no justification for marring the appearance of my vehicle because I might commit a bylaw infraction.
On that basis alone the practice should be banned. There are ways that parking enforcement can be done without touching the property of the innocent*.
* I
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stupid ruling is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
You're just a simpleton who didn't read the ruling to understand the mechanics of it. They considered marking the tire as a search rather than an observation. A photograph is an observation of public plain sight.
An observation that is then logged, stored, aggregated, and analyzed. Now the government-and more dangerously the private corporation the government has contracted out to manage parking enforcement- has more data on you regarding where you go, how long you stay there, and how often you go there. Lady should've just paid her damn parking tickets.
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Photographs are captured observations that can be later re-interrogated for violations as desired and then submitted as evidence - thus not just an "observation".
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Marking is a search because it involves touching and altering someone's property
The tire is in plain sight on public property. Nothing is altered.
Or, how DARE the city allow mud on the streets that will "touch" and "alter" your car when you drive over it! It's an illegal search, it is!
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You're just a simpleton who didn't read the ruling to understand the mechanics of it. They considered marking the tire as a search rather than an observation. A photograph is an observation of public plain sight.
Sorry, it's hard to track all the mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance going on here.
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of all the things... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Money isn't speech. The rest isn't a bad list.
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Money isn't speech. The rest isn't a bad list.
Money is a means to speech. If I want to run advertisements in a newspaper or on the web, it isn't free. To restrict the amount of money I can spend to express my opinion is a restriction on my speech.
Do you want big data? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll take chalk-marked tires any day over automated cameras, contracted parking enforcers taking timestamped pictures of your car and plate, and all the associated data collection, aggregation, and monetization that will inevitably arise from it. It'll lead to increased expenses to pay for equipment/contracts and probably lead to increased fines as they measure the amount of time most cars are parked in a given spot and reduce allowed times below that mean accordingly (like for instance reduced yellow times for stoplights with cameras to increase fines). Lady should've just paid her parking tickets or found a different place to park, because she has made things worse for everyone.
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Tiresome conflation. Acting as if people don't want to be seen in public vs not wanting to be tracked.
You mean 4th Abuses? (Score:2, Insightful)
" the touchstone of the reasonableness standard."
As usual, nearly an Entire nation of citizens, journalists, lawyers, and judges cannot read plain fucking English and people wonder why shit is going down hill.
The 4th Amendment does NOT have a fucking "reasonableness" exception inside of it. The 4th clearly states that any search or seizure conducted without a warrant is what is classified as "unreasonable". For decades the people have accepted this fucking farce and this alone is a massive indictment of t
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This is ridiculous anyway because it's not a search. I've no love for parking Nazis, or for parking enforcement in general, but chalking your tire isn't harming you in any way. In fact, if your tire is chalked, you can make use of that to find out if it's overinflated. The chalk should wear away evenly as you drive down the road. And it actually permits tracking your parking while not collecting any data about your vehicle. Frankly though, I can't imagine cities (and other localities) not leaping at the opp
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I'm not a conspiracy kind of guy...but it seems you could make an argument that government is helping government here.
Some lame-oid tries to fight his legitimate parking ticket and an enterprising police force says, "you know..if we get this guy to make 'chalking' illegal, then we can blame it on him when we introduce more insidious technology to do that same job."
So the case starts going uphill until the poor Police Departments don't have any other resource but to do license plate scanning and surveillance
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Can we similarly write in chalk on government vehicles?
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Can we similarly write in chalk on government vehicles?
No. They have a lot of rights over your vehicle that you don't have over theirs, like to come get it if you don't handle your registration, and so on. This is just one more.
So long as they're only marking your tread area, they're not doing you any harm. I'd be ticked if they marked my sidewall.
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"So long as they're only marking your tread area, they're not doing you any harm. I'd be ticked if they marked my sidewall."
This claim is specious. You should check out the cases on FBI tracking beacons. Just because they decided to use Chalk to track you and put it on your tire does not suddenly make it okay.
Additionally, the "not harming you" bit is another farce. You are coming off as just another apologist for government overreach and Constitution violations.
Breaking the law or breaching the constitu
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Eyeroll. Taking a geotagged photo of your vehicle is a lot more potentially harmful than making a chalk line on your tire.
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Nobody has the right to deface my property, no matter how unintrusive they may think it is.
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Congratulations!! You have won the International Internet Award for the gratuitous use of "f-ck" in an otherwise pointless screed. And you'll be one of the first up against the wall when the revolution comes because the last thing a true revolutionary wants is some dork telling him/her he's/she's not doing it right.
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The 4th Amendment does NOT have a fucking "reasonableness" exception inside of it. The 4th clearly states that any search or seizure conducted without a warrant is what is classified as "unreasonable".
Oh really?
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
It looks like it protects against unreasonable search, and prohibits a warrant without probable cause. It doesn't say "no search shall be conducted without a warrant, issued willy-nilly by any judge you happen to have on speed dial".
Searches are committed without warrant when probable cause is observed and it is well-understood that a search not conducted at the immediate time will likely be fruitless. For example: were a person observed engaging in a drug deal, the person could claim that
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As usual, nearly an Entire nation of citizens, journalists, lawyers, and judges cannot read plain ... English and people wonder why shit is going down hill.
The 4th Amendment does NOT have a ... "reasonableness" exception inside of it.
This is not correct. The text of the 4th Amendment says, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
If the writers of the Bill of Rights had intended for the idea of warrants to define reasonableness, they could have writ
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The 4th Amendment does NOT have a fucking "reasonableness" exception inside of it.
If you ignore the 17th word of the 4th amendment then it has no clause about reasonableness. If you can "read plain fucking English", however, then it does.
Narcissists showing their true colours (Score:3, Insightful)
How is chalking tires hurting anyone? I am in favor of chalking tires and am certainly fine with parking authorities chalking my tires. It doesn't hurt me, it doesn't hurt my car. It makes sure that someone isn't hogging a parking spot the entire day. What is the problem here?
I see a win-win all around for the majority of people. The only people I can see having a problem with this is narcissistic people who do not care if they take up a parking spot for the entire day; who do not want to accept fault or responsibility for their wrong doings; who blame everyone else for their own issues and fight perfectly sane laws just to get their own way.
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Re:Narcissists showing their true colours (Score:4, Insightful)
If you are dressing the wheels in such a way that a chalk mark, an *IMPERMANENT* mark that rub off with miniscule effort and will immediately wash away without doing anything if it even just gets wet, will somehow "waste" the money you spent, then driving your car in the first place would probably also similarly "waste" the money so spent.
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If you get your car detailed and your wheels dressed, then choose to park in a spot where your tires get chalked, then you just wasted your own money.
Right so they have a sign that says we will chalk your tires? No? I guess every visitor to there needs to be psychic!
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So they have to record license plates ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now the police have to record the license plates using scanners. Did the police fight hard to defend the chalking law, or did they put up some token protest to strategically lose this skirmish?
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A few clarifications: marking the car with chalk is the problem. Marking the sidewalk is fine. Second, law enforcement does not “have” to use plate scanners. Law enforcement can write down the license on paper or take pictures of the car.
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May be I am recalling some lower court ruling. Anyway it does not matter, IR cameras are dime a dozen now. Most cell phone cameras have IR mode.
You're mixing up short wave IR with thermal (long wave) IR. Just about every CCD detects the former and needs extensive (and imprefect) filters to block it. The latter is the domain of more specialised sensors, and aren't on cellphones.
Interesting legally, but a point missed (Score:5, Informative)
What bothers me a bit is what all of this is distracting us from -- this person is a habitual parking violator. Apparently this person has received 15 parking violations over recent years; it is likely that they have illegally parked (overstayed the time limit) many more times than this and were not caught. While parking violations are pretty low on the list crimes and social ills (well not crime actually - as it's a civil thing), it is clear this person has low regard for social and civil behavior around parking.
Before praising this person for fighting the system or for discovering a loophole, remember that this isn't a one time case where someone got an inappropriate or unfair ticket, this person has habit of violating parking rules.
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It stands to reason that somebody who gets more tickets is going to have more incentive to fight them.
We don't know this person's situation. I've seen some weird parking restrictions. I wouldn't ever try to claim that violators are having a negative effect on my community. In fact, they're probably a major source of local funding.
Does any of this make her argument wrong?
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It stands to reason that somebody who gets more tickets is going to have more incentive to fight them.
We don't know this person's situation. I've seen some weird parking restrictions. I wouldn't ever try to claim that violators are having a negative effect on my community. In fact, they're probably a major source of local funding.
Does any of this make her argument wrong?
No, the court said that her argument was correct - the method of determining that she was violating parking rules was unconstitutional. However my point is that she was still violating parking rules. While the tickets she received in the past may not be valid, if she continues her historical behavior in he future and parking enforcement folks change how they enforce to something that is constitutional, future tickets she receives will be valid. My complaint is about her behavior.
Is her behavior a negative
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This is one of the less intrusive ways to make sure that parking spots actually remain available. If your tax dollars are paying for the roads, don't you at least want the option to use the parking spots rather than have them permanently taken by someone?
Drats, I had mastered cheating (Score:4, Funny)
There goes my strategy of chalk-marking all the adjacent cars so that that enforcement is too overwhelmed with the prior batch to bother with my car.
That won't last long (Score:3)
"By parking here, you consent to.... (Score:2)
This could even be a general civic bylaw.
If a person doesn't want their car tires marked, even temporarily, they can park elsewhere, right?
Seriously? (Score:3)
good ruling but not for a good reason. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of all the reasons to say chalking shouldn't be allowed, 'illegal search' is not one I would have even considered. I figured chalking could have been defeated legally based on the fact that it doesn't seem to really be proof of anything beyond that there is a chalk mark on your car put there at some time by some one (too many false-positive scenarios), at best it is only an indication of suspicion.
Also, surveilling apps and devices in your home (Score:2)
Quartering troops in your home or wagon is against the Constitution.
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Well, if there's a chalk mark on my tire it might be wanted alteration...
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If you were to walk up to an officer's car and start drawing on it in chalk, how well do you think that would turn out for you?
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Depends. Were you drawing love hearts or giant male genitalia?
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If I was to chalk a cop's tire he'll probably ask me whether I'm drunk or what the fuck's this about, then have a good laugh over it.
Cops are just people. At least over here.
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GPS trackers, license plate scanners
Anonymous Coward, the issue I have with this stand is it seems to say "it's not OK to use technology to make something easier."
So if you had some guy walking around an entire parking garage with a notebook, writing down stall numbers, plates and time-of-day, then doing it again two hours later to see who has overstayed, well somehow that's OK. But doing it via a car equipped with a license plate scanner? VIOLATION OF RIGHTS.
Apparently it's OK for a police car to
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You have to admit, technology does allow scanning/monitoring far beyond a level we'd decide is reasonable.
Case in point: One cop looking for a known suspect in a crowd versus facial recognition software scanning every single person in that crowd and comparing to a database.
There is a level we need to agree on.
Re:This will be struck down. (Score:5, Insightful)
for both of these, a large part of the problem is that in the past, the data gathered by the human was used for the one task and then rarely if ever looked at again because it was a lot of effort to dig it back up. The automated system has to store it in a database to function, and once it's there it's easy to check it forever, for any reason, good or not.
Making a given task already considered valid easier is fine. The side effect of making other stuff that may not be valid easier too is where the issue comes in.
Re:This will be struck down. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that complicated really. The guy with the notepad has no practical ability to database his results and cross compare with everyone else's results to reconstruct the daily habits of each car in the lot. Sure, it's technically possible, but it would be a labor intensive and time consuming task.
The automated readers would have no such difficulty. If we could trust that they would NEVER be mis-used in such a manner by ANYONE, it would be fine, but we can't.
When we can stop various law enforcement from going on massive fishing trips and then parallel constructing evidence, THEN we can have nice things.
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Remember, the State will kill you for selling cigarettes on the street.
I write that because, first, they HAVE. And second, because every action the State takes has consequences. And not all of those consequences are so innocuous as a parking ticket.
As for the 'alternatives', such as logging photos of license plates, the State should be challenged to maintain that data only for as long as it is useful for the enforcement action, which for most parking violations is a few hours at most. And of course, we can
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This is maybe the most interesting comment I have read in the whole thread.
How would this be handled?