I'm not against it in principle, however, I'd scrap 80% of them and use the money saved to get GOOD ones, that can produce decent face shots and legally admissible evidence, because without that, there's no point having them except to intimididate the public.
My main bugbear with camera is parking cameras, private companies have cameras and just use them to flood the country with seemingly random fines, knowing at about 50 pence a letter, and £60-80 a ticket, they can send a sackful of IRL spam, and if one person pays up, they're in profit.
My parents recently got done, for dropping me off to do some shopping, then coming back to pick me up and do their own. They're contesting it tho, and I've also done my research, and they've got no legal basis to apply a fine, so fuck em.
Even if their 'no return in 2 hours' thing applied to a drop off of a customer, they're not the government or police, they can't just make the law, and if you're fining your own customers for coming to shop with you, then you're not doing 'customer service' very well.
Anyways, partially irrelevant rant aside, I'm generally for them, but they need to be better, and we need to have some kind of standards on them, so it doesn't end up being run by the same kind of twats who run car parks.
Else we'll be getting letters stating 'we have camera footage of you lowering your arm, and later on a coke can was seen in the area, therefore we are issuing a £80 fine for littering'.
Fuck em.
