Indiana lawmakers reject bus stop-arm camera bill
House Bill 1404 would have let more schools use stop-arm cameras to take photos of vehicles that illegally passed the buses’ extended stop arm, and allowed them to be used to issue citations.
Due to privacy violation concerns, Indiana lawmakers withdrew a bill last week that would have permitted more school bus stop-arm cameras.
House representatives had planned to vote on House Bill 1404 on Feb. 24, but several opponents expressed concerns about the bill before the vote, WANE reports.
The bill would have let school corporations enter into agreements with companies to install stop-arm cameras on school buses. The cameras would have taken pictures of vehicles, including the license plates, that illegally passed the buses’ extended stop arm, and allowed them to be used to issue citations for the violations. The bill specified that the images would need to include electronic verification that the school bus' stop arm was extended when the image was recorded.
A law enforcement officer would then review the image and send the owner of the vehicle shown in the image a citation for the alleged traffic violation and a recorded image showing the vehicle at the time of the alleged violation. The bill also stated that the citation would include information on how the owner of the vehicle in question could provide the name and address of the individual alleged to have been operating the vehicle at the time of the traffic violation if the vehicle’s owner was not the operator.
The bill would have allowed school corporations to receive 37.5% of the fines, according to WANE.
Opponents of the bill argued that automated enforcement could cause people to feel like their privacy was being invaded, the news outlet reports. Rep. Ed DeLaney, a co-author of the bill, argued that other states successfully use a similar method to catch and punish violators, WANE reports.
Rep. DeLaney’s office confirmed to SBF that the bill is now dead and that no part of it has been inserted into any other bills for consideration.
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