We keep putting it back up, but they keep knocking it back down.
A similar start to yesterday’s story, not out of any sense of laziness, but simply a recognition that, well, it would be a hell of a way to start this story as well.
Only this time the players are different.
The we are the City of Toronto, and a concerned neighbourhood group. The they are the people, or maybe just person, who seem intent on committing regular acts of vandalism on city-owned properties and assets. And the it in this case is a traffic camera, specifically a speed-camera, better known as photo radar.
Five times the contractor who supplies and maintains the camera has set it up. And five times somebody has come along and cut it down. You could say this whole thing is a going concern.
The camera has been positioned on Parkside Drive, at the edge of a part of town known as High Park. This stretch of road traverses a residential area, but that’s of no consequence to the thousands of motorists who use it as a short-cut from one point to another, many of them barrelling through the neighbourhood at highway speeds.
In 2021, an elderly couple idling at a stop light were killed when another motorists rammed into them from behind while travelling at a high rate of speed. Two people dead, and another in prison for six and half years. In 2019, there were 232 vehicle crashes along this stretch of road, a number that went down to 152 by 2023. But despite a 32% decrease in vehicular accidents, it still needs to be pointed out that there were 152 car accidents along this road in one calendar year, which to me is around 150 more than ought to be happening.
So, three years ago, the residents of the neighbourhood finally got some traction from City Hall, and a radar speed camera was installed, as both a traffic enforcement measure, but also as a speed-deterrent measure. And boy, did that camera ever tell a story.
This camera, all by itself, has yielded over 65,000 speeding tickets representing a total of over $7 million dollars in the three years that it’s been in operation. That, of course, doesn’t count the times the camera was sawed down and chucked in the High Park Duck Pond.
The camera has been erected no fewer than five times, and all five times some idiot thinking that he’s a modern-day urban Robin Hood has taken it down, something I find absolutely mind-blowing, especially with the modern irony of just about everyone and everyplace having cameras pointing here, there, and everywhere. And yet there’s no clear image or video of the perpetrator, or perpetrators. Recently, a trail camera was found to be affixed to a tree bordering on the clearing where the camera is located, but nobody seems to know the origins of that camera, including the police, who are making noises as if it’s not theirs, but then again, the police are allowed to lie, another slice of irony. At the time of writing, I don’t know the status of that trail cam, but I do know that whoever is doing the vandalism is probably following the media coverage, since modern day Robin Hoods love the attention their work generates. But for me, after five chop-downs, we’re finally thinking about putting a covert camera up? Or even better, we put a covert camera up and the freaking media come and report about it, photograph it, then publish it. I guess we’re hoping this slug doesn’t read the paper.
As to trail cameras, I think they’re kind of motion-activated, so on a busy street like Parkside, the thing would be tripping quite a bit just from the traffic on the road whizzing by, let alone some crazed anarchist with a power saw hacking away at a speed camera. So that alone is telling me that it’s not the work of the police. Nevertheless, if we pack the thing with enough battery and media-storage power, maybe we can get some traction out of it. I would personally volunteer to go over the footage, so long as a cooler of Bud Light was involved.
In all honesty, I could have this whole thing solved in no time with a duck blind and that same cooler of Bud Light. As an added bonus, I’ll even slap the bastard silly, since hands-on crime-fighting seems to be my thing. I could extend that offer even more by finding out where Mr. Hood lives and going there to saw his goddammned golf clubs in half, or his car in half, maybe even his fishing rod if he has one, but of course sparing his wife, kids, and any family pets. And all this would have to be done with the seeming futility of the police in mind. After all, if the sheriff can’t catch Robin Hood, could he catch the guy who sawed Robin’s golf clubs in half? This, of course, is just crazy talk, and if I needed a chainsaw to be welded, I’d just call Elon.
This would make me a pariah of sorts, the arch-enemy of the people. Because people hate photo radar, because it’s another thing telling them what to do and has an enforcement element to it, as per the tickets. People don’t like rules, and in this case they don’t like rules that prohibit them from driving as fast as they want. I have perfectly good words that I could use to refer to these types of people adequately, but I want to go to church on the weekend, and don’t want to burden the priest with any additional sinning outside the regular mix I bring to the confessional.
Plus these fantasies of semi-violence against card carrying assholes are not becoming, so they remain that, simply fantasies, although Operation Bud Light had some legitimate merit.
And so, in the interim, we keep putting it back up, and they keep knocking it back down.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 