A perfect illustration of how progressive advocacy uses one pretext after another to get to ends that could never be honestly stated at the outset.
In the progressive utopia, policing will be done by surveillance cameras and killer robots, wars will be fought by drones, schooling will be remote over Zoom — as will abortions and assisted suicides — truckers will be replaced by self-driving trucks and package drones, children will be conceived in laboratories to be raised by people incapable of procreation, and even college students and writers will be replaced by artificial intelligence.
Okay, maybe we’re not quite there yet on any of those fronts. And I’m no Luddite about the blessings of modern technology. But the dystopian future of eliminating the human element from all manner of essential human experiences and judgments no longer looks quite so distant. As I was reminded when I opened my mail today and found a speeding ticket assigned me by a red-light camera. Thanks, Kathy Hochul.
One of the most surreal moments of the 2022 campaign came when Hochul, struggling to blunt Lee Zeldin’s criticisms of her for being soft on crime without offending her police-allergic progressive base, declared that pervasive surveillance cameras were the answer and that you should come to love Big Brother:
Governor Kathy Hochul wants to equip every subway car in the Big Apple with a pair of surveillance cameras, she announced Tuesday. The $5.5 million effort, partially paid for by the federal government, will add nearly 13,000 cams over two years, and Hochul hopes the watchful eyes will make straphangers feel safer. “You think Big Brother’s watching you on the subways? You’re absolutely right,” the governor said at a press conference at a subway maintenance facility in Corona, Queens, Sept. 20. “That is our intent, to get the message out that we’re going to be having surveillance of activities on the subway trains, and that is going to give people great peace of mind,” Hochul added. ”If you’re concerned about this, the best answer is don’t commit any crimes on the subways — then you won’t have any problems.”
As a political message, telling people that you are Big Brother is not exactly reassuring, but it’s very on-brand for Hochul. As a policy, cameras do have their uses, but you still need cops to actually arrest the people on the film.
Not so with traffic cameras. Being a reasonably cautious driver, I have only once in my life ever been pulled over by a human police officer (for failing to slow down quickly enough after passing a truck on the highway), but it is much harder to evade the unthinking eye of machines. What is obnoxious, however, is that the pretext for this particular ticket is “speeding in a school zone” even though it was based on a camera observation at 10 a.m. on the Sunday morning of a three-day weekend. A machine using an empty school as a justification for a ticket no decent police officer would write is a fine emblem of Hochul’s New York.
And it is the result of a specific decision made by the governor when she signed a bill last June to allow school-zone cameras to operate 24/7, entirely without regard to whether the school is open or occupied by humans. Naturally, this followed agitation in the New York Times, where writer Winnie Hu complained that the cameras were off at night “even though nearly 60 percent of the fatal crashes across the city during the pandemic happened during those hours. The law links camera use to school hours.” Well, yes, if the penalties for speeding are enhanced on account of a school, it should matter if the school is something more than an empty structure. Hu quoted “the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group.” If you go to its website, you will notice that Transportation Alternatives is not dedicated to school safety; its “mission is to reclaim New York City from cars, transforming our streets into safe, sustainable, and equitable places to walk, bike, take transit, gather, and thrive.” It’s simply an anti-cars group.
Getting school-zone laws passed, then having them enforced by machines, then setting the machines loose even when enforcement has nothing to do with schools or schoolchildren is really a perfect illustration of how progressive advocacy works to use and then shed one pretext after another to get to ends that could never be honestly stated at the start of the process — and to remove all sense of human judgment along the way.