Using citizens as parking cops a bad plan

It’s a stupid idea.

Epically stupid. Cosmically stupid.

The Winnipeg Parking Authority is looking into the idea of allowing Winnipeg residents to forward their own photographs of parking violators to the WPA, and using those photos to issue tickets by mail without first having enforcement officers do any followup.

In other words, everyone gets to be an unpaid parking law enforcer. (Right now, the WPA accepts submitted pictures of parking violations, but those pictures are used by enforcement officers to investigate and issue tickets.)

There are no words to describe just how awful this idea is.

And whoever thought it was a bright idea should think again.

Why?

Because it pits neighbour against neighbour, and even when it’s not the neighbour you think it is, hard feelings are likely to fester.

Every time you get a ticket, you’ll wonder if it’s someone down the street, the guy you had the argument with that time about raking the leaves into the road. Or if it’s the dog owner you chewed out for not scooping the poop from the boulevard in front of your house. Or if it’s the recluse who hates absolutely everybody, for no particular reason.

You’ll get your own phone ready, for a little photo revenge.

Sure, you can’t help but feel a little private joy when the illegally parked car partially blocking your laneway gets an enforcement surprise. But that doesn’t mean you should have the tools to write the ticket.

How could this go bad?

Well, neighbours actually value everyone they live around being, well, neighbourly. It’s a quality-of-life issue. It was 2015, years ago, but the federal Conservatives were hung out to dry for their idea for a Barbaric Cultural Practices snitch line that would let you turn in your neighbours to the RCMP. Because it was a horrible, divisive, badly-thought-out idea.

And forget about any comfortable anonymity for ratting out your neighbour’s parking habits — when a ticket is based on a photograph, the person who took the photograph has to appear if a ticket if challenged, to explain the circumstances where and when the photograph was taken and that the picture actually shows what it appears to show.

“What if the person challenges the ticket?” Len Estoe of Traffic Ticket Experts told the Free Press. “Now the person who took the picture would have to come in to court if the person disputes the ticket … I don’t think we should be turning citizens into agents of the police or the Winnipeg Parking Authority.”

And who wouldn’t challenge a ticket or two, just to find out who was snitching to the parking authority?

Let’s not even get started on the question of AI-altered photographs being submitted by people with really bad intentions. You can pretty much make a photograph show whatever you like using AI, and a government agency can hardly use a photo as evidence of an offence without making even the barest minimum of an effort to establish that the photo is legitimate.

Then, there’s the cost: the WPA might save money not vetting photos, and might even take in substantially more revenue, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be a win. For every hour saved in not using an enforcement officer to write tickets, there’s the potential of loading up screening officers and adjudicators with hours of new and expensive challenges.

Is this supposed to improve the quality of life in Winnipeg neighbourhoods? It won’t.

It’s like taking a bat to a hornet’s nest for fun and profit.

It’s a bad idea to turn neighbours into enforcers.

To reiterate, in case we haven’t been clear enough already: it’s a cosmically bad idea.