LTE: The Camera Doesn't Care Who You Are. Neither Does the Physics

To the Editor:

There is an argument being made in Fairfield's speed camera debate that nobody seems willing to say out loud. So let me say it.

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The loudest voices opposing these cameras are not primarily concerned with government overreach, privacy, or even the cost of the fines. What they are upset about is that they are being held accountable in a way they have never been held accountable before. And for a significant portion of the driving public, that accountability is long overdue.

Traditional traffic enforcement has never been neutral. It has never been equal. It has never been blind.

Black and brown drivers are pulled over at disproportionate rates in Connecticut and across the country. This is not a controversial claim. It is documented by the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project, which has collected traffic stop data from Connecticut law enforcement agencies for years. Working class drivers who cannot afford to take a day off work to fight a ticket in court pay fines that wealthier drivers contest and dismiss. Drivers in older cars, in certain neighborhoods, traveling roads where they do not look like they belong, have historically faced scrutiny that drivers in $80,000 cars navigating the same school zones have never experienced.

And if you knew the right people, or looked the right way, or drove the right car, there was always a reasonable chance you got a warning instead of a ticket. That discretion, that human judgment, that gray area that a retired Fairfield officer recently described with apparent nostalgia, has never been applied equally. It has never been designed to be.

A camera changes all of that. A camera does not see your skin color. It does not see your zip code. It does not see what you are driving or whether you look like you belong on that street. It does not care whether you are charming or whether you have a connection at the department. It sees your speed. That is the only variable. If you exceed the threshold, a sworn officer reviews the footage and if the violation is confirmed, a citation goes out. The same threshold. The same process. Every single time. For every single driver.

That is not a cash grab. That is equal protection under the law.

The people who have spent decades navigating roads where the rules were selectively enforced depending on who you were and what you drove are not shocked by these cameras. They are not outraged. They are not organizing press conferences or flooding Facebook groups with complaints about government overreach. They have always had to follow the law precisely because nobody was ever going to give them a pass. They already knew what it felt like to be held accountable without discretion.

The people staging press events and posting screeds about surveillance states and revenue grabs are largely the people who have benefited most from that discretion. They are the people for whom the gray area has historically worked. They are the people who could fight the ticket, make the call, or simply never get pulled over in the first place because nothing about them triggered suspicion.

What they are experiencing now is not injustice. It is the sudden removal of an advantage they never had to think about because they never had to. Equal enforcement feels oppressive when you are used to preferential treatment.

Chief Michael Paris, a certified crash reconstructionist who has investigated fatal crashes and comforted grieving families, understands what is at stake on these roads. Bill Gerber, who championed this program before he passed away, understood it. The peer reviewed research from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, which documents the probability of death at various speeds, understands it. The 114,000 people who sped through Fairfield school zones in 17 days while children were walking to school created this program through their own behavior.

The cameras treat everyone the same. For a lot of people in this country, that is all they have ever asked for. And there is one more equalizer worth mentioning. At 40 mph, a struck pedestrian has a 45% chance of dying. That statistic does not care what car you drive, what neighborhood you come from, or whether you have ever been given a pass in your life. Neither does the child stepping off the curb. The camera sees your speed. The physics sees the rest.

It should not be a radical concept in Fairfield.

Patrick Smith

Fairfield, CT