'Red light' cameras, and laws that aren't laws

Adam MacLeod, a Faulkner University law professor, has an interesting essay over at Public Discourse. Unlike most people who get caught by a traffic camera, MacLeod chose to pursue his case all the way to its eventual dismissal by a county-level judge. His saga is fascinating to read for the glimpse it offers of the convoluted legal system that one would have to navigate to fight a ticket of this sort. But it also got me thinking about why any sort of automated policing is harmful to the social contract.

I mainly understand the role of government in the limited sense in which Locke describes it, as the result of a contract entered into by free and equal individuals for the preservation of their God-given rights to life, liberty, and property. To be clear, I am not against the idea of laws in general, or of traffic laws in particular. It's pretty easy to see how speed limits and traffic signals help to preserve the fundamental rights of all members of the society, even if they constrain us from doing whatever we want, and even if doing what we want in a particular instance is not per se a violation of the natural moral law. Rather, I am against the elimination of a human element in the enforcement of the law.

I once had a "red light" ticket experience of my own, and I regret to say that I didn't have MacLeod's stubborn force of will. When I was living in Texas, I was notified of my infraction by post, together with a link to a video clearly showing me slowing but not coming to a complete stop as I turned right at an intersection somewhere in Fort Worth. The evidence was incontrovertible: The law says that drivers must come to a complete stop at a red light, and I had not come to a complete stop. Unlike MacLeod, who was not the one driving his car, I in fact had been the guilty party. And while I had philosophical misgivings about "red light" tickets even back then, I simply didn't have the time to contest the matter. Grudgingly, I wrote a check and mailed it off.

These misgivings are due to my understanding of the social contract. Laws are only laws insofar as they are in accord with reason. If I were to start asking people, I would bet that pretty much everybody has rolled through a stop sign at some point, if not in broad daylight, then at night with a clear view in both directions and not a car in sight. If not at night, then maybe while transporting one's laboring wife to the hospital in order to give birth. If not a rolling stop, then perhaps traveling 5 miles per hour over the speed limit in order to "go with the flow" of traffic. Surely I'm not the only one who tends to follow the "spirit" rather than the "letter" of traffic laws.

Yet it's not a matter that I take to the confessional, for laws are for man, not man for laws. There are instances when God-given reason leads us to violate the letter of the law because the law simply doesn't apply. To give another example: A few miles from our new farm in Wisconsin, County Road H merges into County Road X at a curve in the latter road. These two roads are only used by the few people who live on them, and the area is very rural. Sometimes an hour or more will go by without any traffic at all. Nonetheless, there is a stop sign for those on County Road H, so that a driver merging onto X is legally obligated to come to a full stop before proceeding onto X, even if he is turning left, which, practically speaking, means continuing straight on.

The stop sign makes perfect sense in the summer, since the corn gets more than 5 feet high, and drivers can't see oncoming traffic coming from the right on X until they've nearly arrived at the stop sign. But stopping makes no sense at all when the fields are bare, because drivers can see for a few hundred of meters in both directions. To stop or not to stop: That, I suppose, is the question for a driver like myself. Again, laws are made for man, not man for laws. I feel perfectly capable, through the exercise of my reason, of knowing when to obey a stop sign, and when to take a careful look and zip right through.

Am I a law-breaker in doing so? Not that Monroe County is about to post cameras on all its stop signs, but if they were, then I'd technically be just as guilty as I had been back on Fort Worth's more congested streets. The evidence would be incontrovertible.

This, in short, is why there needs to be a human element to law enforcement. The police officer who trails behind the car transporting the laboring woman to the hospital with his lights flashing is probably not going to write a ticket once he's apprised of the situation. The Monroe County sheriff doesn't bother to police the junction of those two county roads because people generally take care of themselves without any sort of oversight. You can generally cruise right by a police cruiser on the interstate going 72 miles per hour because that's generally how fast the flow of traffic is, regardless of the posted speed limit.

In all these instances, the police officer is a human representative of the other individuals who have entered into the contract simply by living in a particular society. The roads benefit everybody and foster everybody's right to life, liberty, and property. We give up our right to drive as fast as we want on the roads because we may be trampling on somebody else's rights by doing so. The police officer, however, as a rational human being, has the discretion to judge whether a particular individual's violation of the letter of agreed-upon laws also violates the spirit of those laws. It may be that there are mitigating circumstances, like those I've described above. It may be that, clearly, nobody's rights are being trampled on in a particular violation of the letter of the law.

If the police officer doesn't have that discretion, then the judge certainly does, and if not in regard to guilt or innocence, then certainly in waiving the heaviness of the punishment. That's what left me frustrated a few years ago when I was considering whether to challenge my own "red light" ticket. First of all, there was no police officer to talk to, let alone a police officer to decide whether, given how empty the roadway was, and how near I came to stopping, it would be worth pulling me over. My frustration was compounded by the fact that the byzantine appeals system seemed designed to prevent challenges. MacLeod's account of his own saga makes me grateful that I didn't bother. I wouldn't have had the time, or the legal know-how, to make it happen.

Which simply shouldn't be the case in a healthy democracy.