Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday reiterated his determination to use city surveillance cameras to issue parking tickets, following criticism from a local judge and the National Police Agency.
Ko said he was not “so stupid” as to advocate using all of the city’s 14,000 surveillance cameras to issue tickets, adding that the city was simply seeking to reduce police officers’ workloads by using the cameras to monitor the city’s top 10 illegal parking “hot spots.”
The mayor has said that using surveillance cameras to monitor these hot spots makes more sense than having police officers guard the sites like “scarecrows.”
He said that the controversy over the city’s plan was unwarranted, given the limited area to be affected, adding that video cameras are already used alongside highways to issue speeding tickets.
Taoyuan District Court judge Chien Chien-jung (錢建榮), in a Monday opinion piece in the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper), accused Ko of disregarding the law on protecting personal information.
Chien said that Article 22 of the Constitution gives people the right to determine where, how, to whom and to what extent their personal information is provided.
Legal exceptions for national security and public interests encompass only truly important issues, such as the maintenance of public safety, the purpose for which Taipei’s camera network was originally established, he said.
Using surveillance cameras to report parking violations would violate the Road Traffic Management and Penalty Act (道路交通管理處罰條例), which stipulates that the cameras can be used only for reporting violations in cases where it is impossible or impractical to stop the violator, such as speeding or running red lights, he said.
Moreover, it might not be clear if a driver remained in a vehicle and there would be no opportunity for the driver to explain their circumstances, opening the possibility of unfair and disproportionate numbers of parking tickets being issued, he said.
Chien added that he had personally nullified tickets based on surveillance camera evidence in certain circumstances, such as turning on a red light.
Meanwhile, the National Police Agency was quoted in news reports as saying it would be legal for the city government to use surveillance cameras to issue parking tickets if it makes a public announcement of the locations beforehand.
However, because of the challenges of interpreting video footage, relying on the cameras instead of on-site police officers could actually increase the time required for enforcement, the agency said.
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