Allegheny County
Poll Question: Public Safety v. Privacy?
License plate camera readers are now being installed at intersections across Allegheny County. The cameras snap high-resolution pictures of every car passing through an intersection, and then store them in a searchable database.
The $35,000 system enables police to not only identify license plate numbers but also zoom in on the car’s driver and other occupants.
It is unclear how long police will store the information and whether proper checks are in place to ensure that police do not misuse the system.
For example: “What if an officer suspected a girlfriend was cheating and wanted to check on her whereabouts?” asked Swissvale Police chief Greg Geppert, according to an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Police say the cameras will help them nab car thieves and locate missing persons. Civil liberties groups say the cameras represent a potential invasion of privacy for law-abiding citizens. What do you think?
Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.Pennsylvania Voter ID Law
Pennsylvania’s new voter identification law threatens to block more than 750,000 people across the state – including some 99,000 people in Allegheny County – from voting for our nation’s president in November, according to statistics released by PennDOT.
The new law, signed by Gov. Corbett in March 2012, is considered among the strictest of any state in the country. In order to vote, Pennsylvanians must now present at the polls a government-issued photo ID that includes an expiration date.
This could prove difficult for thousands of eligible voters across Pennsylvania, as nine counties do not even have driver’s license centers, according to a report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Pennsylvania’s new voter ID bill is “repulsive,” according to Terry Madonna, Director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster. An ACLU lawsuit to block the state’s new voter ID bill is now pending.