3 California Cities Blocking Parking Ticket App For Being, Like, Way Too Useful

from the apps-apps-apps dept

There's an app for just about everything it seems, including apps for parking tickets, apparently. One of these apps, called Fixed, is specifically designed to do several things with parking and/or traffic tickets. When you get a ticket, you take a picture of it with your camera on your phone. From there, the app allows you to automate the process of paying the ticket or disputing it. Specifically, by scanning the picture of the ticket you've taken, the app will automatically scan the ticket for common mistakes that are made that might invalidate the ticket entirely, at which point you can use the app to lodge your dispute. Sounds incredibly useful, right?

Well, three California cities think it's so useful that they've done everything in their power to block people from using it to dispute or pay their tickets, because that's apparently easier than getting officers to simply write tickets correctly.

The startup has had issues with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) for some time. The agency was never all that receptive to the service, and the way it automated the ticket contesting process for locals. Using its app, Fixed customers could snap a photo of their parking ticket using their phone’s camera, and then Fixed would check against a variety of common errors before writing a customized letter to the city on the user’s behalf. The app also cleverly tapped into Google Street View to check to see if the city had the proper signage in place in the area a ticket was received. However, even when customers didn’t beat their ticket, the app could help automate the payment without having to use a city’s often outdated website.

Of course, the cities haven’t been welcoming to an app that was aimed at helping locals not pay their tickets by automating the process of jumping through legal loopholes. When Fixed began faxing its submissions to SFMTA last year, the agency emailed the startup to stop using their fax machine. When Fixed pointed out that it was legal to do so, the agency simply shut off their fax.

Keep it classy, San Francisco. It turns out that Los Angeles and Oakland all behaved similarly with respect to Fixed, harrassing and blocking the app and the people using it to the point where the makers of the app simply shut down the parking ticket part of the software in those three cities. This despite the app successfully contesting something like a third of the tickets that users had chosen to dispute using it. Drink that in for a moment. A sizeable percentage of parking tickets were found to have errors on them using this app and, rather than address this by having tickets be properly filled out, the cities in question decided instead to keep people from using the app to contest these error-ridden tickets. It's hard to imagine how a city might be able to display more contempt for its own citizens than this.

And what's really crazy about this? The app had as much to do with getting people to pay their valid tickets on time as it did contesting the incorrectly filled out tickets.

“It’s unfortunate that the SFMTA decided to block our service. Over 60,000 parking tickets had been submitted to Fixed. Not only were we helping people beat their unfair parking tickets, but the alerts on our app were helping people pay their parking fines on time and avoid late fees,” [Founder David Hegarty] continues. “Parking Ticket Fines account for 15% of the SFMTA operating budget, and it looks like they objected to us providing some accountability to their process,” Hegarty adds.

Hmm, it's almost like the city knows it's collecting money it might not deserve and doesn't want to let a simple piece of technology stop that gravy train...

Filed Under: apps, los angeles, oakland, parking tickets, san francisco, sfmta
Companies: fixed

Oakland PD Body Cams Help Cut Police-Involved Shootings From 8 A Year To Zero In The Last 18 Months.

from the the-Mild-West-of-law-enforcement dept

More good news on the police body cam front: according to Oakland's mayor, the police department's camera program has significantly reduced use of force incidents.

[Mayor] Jean Quan said Oakland police officers had 2,186 use-of-force incidents in 2009, the last year that no officers wore body cameras, and that number declined to 836 such incidents last year and to only 572 incidents so far this year, with just two weeks remaining.

It's not just excessive force that's seen a drastic reduction. The department's 619 body cams have also played a part in reducing the use of deadly force.

She also noted that the department has gone more than 18 months without an officer-involved shooting, in a city that used to average about eight such incidents a year.

Additionally, Quan said the captured footage has been useful in defending officers against bogus excessive force allegations, proving the cameras "work both ways."

A body camera system is nothing without solid policies backing them up. Anyone can instruct an officer to wear a camera, but only a department solidly behind the program will hold them accountable if they fail to do so. According to public records obtained by Ars Technica, the Oakland PD is making a genuine effort to ensure devices are on and recording.

Over the last two years, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) has disciplined police officers on 24 occasions for disabling or failing to activate body-worn cameras, newly released public records show…

The new data shows that the most common punishment for officers who did not comply with their own department’s policy was a "written reprimand" or a suspension of one to three days. One officer was even suspended for 20 days in December 2013 due to an allegation of failing to activate his body-worn camera.

On November 22, 2013, there were five separate incidents where officers allegedly "improperly removed" or "failed to initiate their PDRD." One of those officers, none of whom were named, appears to have resigned as a result of the incident.

As Cyrus Farivar points out, something strange happened on November 22 of last year (records requests have been filed for more details), but otherwise, department officials are staying on top of cops who don't comply with the camera policy. This also suggests the city's 700 officers are comfortable with the recording devices, as the number of violations is very low. If this were just a case of underreported abuse, it's likely the department would not have seen such a dramatic drop in use of force incidents.

Taking this program seriously is essential to its success. To do otherwise is to trend towards something like the Los Angeles Police Department's situation: widespread and open abuse. Voice recording equipment installed in vehicles was routinely tampered with and one precinct found that half of its squad cars had their antennas removed or disabled. Those overseeing the recording program weren't informed of this abuse until months after it had been discovered.

Outside factors can have some effect on officer behavior, but better policing starts from within. The Oakland PD seems to have a handle on its body cam program and both its officers and the public they serve are better for it.

Filed Under: body cameras, oakland, police

Oakland's City Wide Surveillance Network Being Built By Contractor With A History Of Fraud And Little Regard For Civil Liberties

from the city-must-want-this-system-built-in-the-worst-way dept

I don't know what version of its CV Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) handed in to the city of Oakland, but it must have been one that glossed over a whole lot of its recent history. "A fool and his money are soon parted," it's often said, but if SAIC's "work" with New York City is any indication, a fool and his money are painfully separated exponentially over the next decade.

In the late 1990s, New York began a program to transition tens of thousands of municipal employees from paper punch cards to digital palm scanners, ostensibly to counter fraud. Dubbed CityTime, the project's initial budget was $68 million. But after SAIC acquired the company that had won the competitive bidding process for the work, CityTime's cost mushroomed to more than $740 million in ten years.

What NYC received in exchange for three-quarters of a billion dollars was a network of well-financed kickback recipients… and not much else. As Mike wrote back in 2011, one of things you don't do to Mayor Mike Bloomberg is screw him over in a business deal.

Apparently, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg has had a similar experience with SAIC and the new computer system for NYC it's been building. But, Bloomberg is a businessman by trade, rather than a politician, so when a company charges you $600 million (way over budget from the original $63 million), he knows that you ask for your money back. So that's what he's doing. He's demanding a $600 million refund from SAIC.

Bloomberg demanded $600 million and, backed by the DOJ, managed to recover $500 million of that. This means SAIC walked away with $240 million on a job quoted at $68 million. On the strength of that experience alone, Oakland should have had serious reservations about bringing SAIC on a new project, but it appears to be blissfully unaware of SAIC's past.

It's unclear if Oakland's mayor, city council, or city administrator vetted the company before approving the DAC contract. Nothing in the Oakland Public Safety Committee meeting records, nor the meetings of the full council, indicate that the city looked into SAIC's record before handing over millions in federal grant dollars. In an interview last month, neither of the two city officials in charge of the DAC — Domingo and Ahsan Baig, the city's information technology manager — were aware of SAIC's past record of fraud, cost overruns, and failed projects.

Councilman Dan Kalb said he also wasn't aware of SAIC's record with other cities or its various military and Department of Homeland Security contracts. "The administration made the decision as to which contractor to go with," Kalb said, referring to City Administrator Deanna Santana's office. "Apparently, last year the council gave the administration the authority to work with the port to decide on the contractor." Other members of the council did not respond to a request for comment.

This is already bad -- no one involved appears to have the faintest idea about SAIC's past -- but it gets much worse. SAIC has been contracted to build a surveillance network in Oakland called the Domain Awareness Center (DAC). This expansion of the Port of Oakland's DAC to a citywide entity is being battled by civil liberty advocates and other citizens of Oakland. Putting SAIC on the project adds its rap sheet of white collar crime and human rights abuses to the mix.

In recent years, SAIC has been accused of defrauding municipal governments, bribing foreign officials, and delivering shoddy products. And when the company does deliver the goods at cost and on time, it's often for militarized projects linked to human rights abuses. Among SAIC's recent contracts: training the Egyptian military, operating drones used to kill foreign citizens, building and operating portions of the NSA's internet spying system used on Americans, and more.

Because of its inability or unwillingness to vet its bidders, Oakland is basically setting itself up to be defrauded and placing its citizens in the hands of a contractor willing to perform nearly any job for the right price. (A price which seems to vastly exceed the quote a majority of the time.)

Here's what SAIC has failed to get off the ground in recent years, despite taking home millions of tax dollars.

- From 2000-2004, SAIC collected $600 million to build a new computer system for the FBI and delivered an end product so disastrous, the FBI immediately scrapped it and began looking for another contractor and a new system. (Not that it mattered. Work began in 2006 and the system finally went 100% live in August of 2012.)

- A several-hundred-million dollar project for Greece (actual amount seemingly unknown due to multiples layers of shady accounting), which (again) suffered from major cost overruns, fraudulent activity and (of course) didn't work as advertised with "only a fraction of the cameras installed actually providing footage."

- Received $46 million to train Egypt's army under the US Army's supervision -- several members of which have gone on to kill "hundreds of protesters" in recent months.

- This:

"SAIC was also responsible for a failed multibillion-dollar intelligence system project for the National Security Agency called Trailblazer that was junked in 2006 and characterized as one of the worst intelligence failures in US history."

Despite this failure, the NSA brought SAIC as a contractor on XKEYSCORE.

In addition to this list of failures, SAIC has also tormented the private sector by birthing patent troll VirnetX, which managed to secure $368.2 million in damages from Apple despite being on track to gross $72,000 for the entirety of 2012.

This is the entity the city of Oakland has chosen to do business with on a surveillance project -- a contractor whose primary contracts are with the military and who sports a horrendous track record on the both the contracting side and the civil liberties side. Maybe the city's hoping it will just get the civil liberties-violating side (one high-ranking city official has suggested the program should be used to "control public demonstrations") and walk away without being gouged too horribly on the contracting front. And if it doesn't it's all just play money tax dollars anyway.

Filed Under: oakland, surveillance
Companies: saic

Police Chief's Custom Spam Filter Blocks Occupy Protestors, Brutality Complaints And (Oops) Federal Monitors

from the citizens-of-oakland:-prepare-to-meet-the-princes-of-Nigeria dept

We all enjoyed a loud, incredulous laugh when Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security Secretary, went on record as being proudly computer illiterate. "Never use email," she said as part of statement delivered by teletype. Perhaps Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan should have chosen the Luddite Way, thus avoiding his current problems. Instead, he chose to perform the digital equivalent of plugging his ears and shouting nonsensical syllables at the top of his lungs in order to actively ignore news he didn't want to hear (found via the essential Police Misconduct Reporting Project).

People who've e-mailed Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan over the past year about Occupy Oakland probably didn't get much of a response.

That's because he used a spam filter to dismiss messages sent to him with "Occupy Oakland" in the subject line, according to a federal court filing Monday. Same goes for the phrases "stop the excessive police force," "respect the press pass" or "police brutality." Instead of landing in his in-box, those messages went straight into his junk mail folder, which he apparently never looked at.

It's tough work being Chief. A steady stream of complaints about the police force under your "control" is sure to be disheartening. But, if you can't take the heat, reroute it out the nearest opening, am I right? And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for that meddling federal court monitor.

Because of those filters, Jordan missed e-mails from other city officials and a federal court monitor, who oversees the department's compliance with court-ordered reforms stemming from a police abuse scandal.

Robert Warshaw, the monitor, had sent Jordan an e-mail with the subject line "Disciplinary Actions-Occupy Oakland." Jordan told the court on Oct. 18 that he never saw those e-mails, infuriating Thelton Henderson, the federal judge in San Francisco who appointed Warshaw.

Oops. Ignoring the persistent chatter of unhappy citizens is one thing. Ignoring a federal judge is quite another. While you can safely ignore some of the people all of the time, you can't really ignore all of the people all of the time. You can attempt it, but then you end up in "unprecedented" territory, which is never a good place to be if you value your career.

Henderson will hear arguments in December about whether to place the Police Department into the hands of a federal receiver, which Oakland officials believe is unprecedented.

When you've mismanaged your post so badly that the police department ends up in receivership via a court order, you've probably done more than filter out anything resembling bad news. A year of unread email certainly didn't improve the ongoing compliance issue. The handling of "Occupy Oakland" didn't instill any confidence in the public that their law enforcement officials were there to serve and protect. Henderson's willful rerouting of email pertaining to allegations of excessive force and brutality shows a very ugly contempt for the citizens under his protection. Of course, now that the truth has come out, he has a few excuses.

He had been inundated with anonymous messages, he said in a declaration to the court.

Well, of course. Anonymity is a key ingredient in any protest. Being inundated with messages you don't like doesn't grant you the permission to revise the incoming narrative by dumping anything negative into the trash. The excuse continues:

But he forgot the e-mail filter was still in effect.

It's an easy thing to forget if you find painting a self-portrait on rose-tinted glass preferable to actually dealing with problems in the community and, indeed, within the ranks of your own force. The brain has many wonderful tricks its willing to play on you to provide you with the short term memory and justification needed to "forget" your determined pruning of incoming messages.

"It was never my intention to ignore the monitor," Jordan said in his declaration.

No. I'm sure it wasn't. You had no desire to piss off a federal judge. But it was your intention to ignore the general public, a fact that goes unacknowledged by this pitiful statement attempting to pass itself off as some sort of an apology. Turning your incoming mail into a "yes-man" approximation is just plain sad.

Filed Under: filter, oakland, occupy, police, spam