RED LIGHT DISTRICT: Glenn Reynolds,

RED LIGHT DISTRICT: Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, links to terrific article by Matt Labash in the Weekly Standard called Inside the District’s Red Lights:

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, it must be noted, is one of the staunchest advocates of automated enforcement, and views the 72 percent figure as a triumph. To which any reasonable person might ask, what other law enforcement tool snags the wrong guy over one-fourth of the time, and is still considered a success?

Just to recap, consider: A private company is given police power to ticket citizens, has a monetary interest in generating as many tickets as possible, and, despite its low success rate, is often allowed to do so with minimal or no police supervision.

It would seem that a trip to Lockheed IMS’s processing center was in order to watch its employees fulfill their constabulary duties. But when I ask D.C. police spokesman Kevin Morison for a tour, he must check with Lockheed, though the police are purportedly running the operation. A few days later, Morison regretfully informs me that Lockheed said no–“They had privacy concerns.” Morison at least plays at being oblivious to the richness of a vendor’s claiming to be concerned about your privacy after taking a picture of your car and in some instances whoever’s in your car, tapping into your DMV records, levying a fine against you, then mailing the whole care package to your house (in Italy, a senator’s marriage faltered when his wife spotted his mistress in a photo radar citation).