A powerful new digital device is ready to fire tickets off to drivers who run a red light at one intersection in Howard County.
This high-tech camera - the first of its kind in the state - is at Little Patuxent Parkway and Broken Land Parkway in Columbia.
Drivers who blow through the red light at that intersection will receive citations in their mailboxes within two weeks, said Howard County Sgt. Tim Black of the Regional Automated Enforcement Center.
Howard County has ordered three more digital cameras, Black said, and Harford County will install six, starting in September, a spokeswoman for that county's sheriff's office said.
The cameras will speed up the red-light camera citation process by transmitting digital images of suspected violators over a high-speed telecommunications line rather than taking snapshots that must be collected, developed and scanned into a computer system.
Other local police departments will wait to see how well the digital cameras work for Howard and Harford before deciding whether to install them, Black said.
"Digital cameras are obviously the technology of the future," Black said. "We want to keep moving toward state-of-the-art technology."
This development in automated law enforcement is drawing warnings from the same privacy, government and police watchdog groups that have questioned Maryland's use of standard-film red-light cameras since they were legalized about four years ago.
Critics and advocates have long anticipated the emergence of the digital policing tools.
"Surprise, surprise," Jim Harper, editor of the Web-based privacy think tank Privacilla, said about the digital cameras. "This follows a track that one could have easily predicted."
Howard County police, considered a national leader in automated enforcement, have been eyeing digital technology since the county's first standard-film cameras were installed in 1998.
Harper and Howard County Police Chief Wayne Livesay testified before Congress in July about the use of red-light cameras.
Howard police oversee the Regional Automated Enforcement Center, which Harford and more than a dozen other jurisdictions use to process red-light camera tickets.
Drivers in Howard and Harford counties are not likely to detect any difference between digital and film camera, and the result of both is the same: a $75 citation with no insurance points deducted.
Red-light runners pulled over by an officer can be fined up to $500 and lose anywhere from two to eight insurance points, Black said.
Howard County's 24 standard-film cameras will continue to churn out red-light citations, Black said.
Several municipalities within Harford County, such as Bel Air, use film red-light cameras, but the six digital ones will be the first operated by the Harford County Sheriff's Office, spokeswoman Ginger Rigney said.
Howard and Harford have contracts with APAC Technologies, a distributor for the Australian-made digital cameras, Black said.
Cheaper in the long run
Digital cameras have a higher initial cost - Paul L. Paczek, APAC operations manager for Howard County, estimated each unit costs at least $25,000 more than the $50,000 standard-film cameras - but save hours in film collection and processing.
With standard cameras, film must be pulled from the intersection, transported to Baltimore to be developed and delivered to Howard County where it is scanned into a computer system and analyzed.
Digital cameras can transmit images of suspected red-light violators directly from the intersection to the center, where they can be analyzed immediately.
"It's much like downloading something from the Internet, but the information is transmitted over a dedicated line so that no unauthorized person can access it," Paczek explained.
Digital cameras carve off between 60 percent and 65 percent of the labor tied to red-light cameras, Paczek said.
Although they have been available for years, Paczek said, digital red-light cameras have recently become fiscally and technologically practical. Early digital cameras would have cost much more than the $75,000-$80,000 price tag on them now and would have used a file size too large for most computer systems to handle, he said.
Harper, the Privacilla editor, sees digital cameras not as progress but as a tangible way government is encroaching on privacy.
"This is one small but important step in the Big Brotherization of red-light cameras," he said. First police digitize red-light cameras, then they may begin networking the cameras to make databases, and finally, they could use optical-character recognition as a way to track someone's whereabouts at all times, he said.
State law says the images can be used only for issuing citations for the red-light runners, Black said. "We don't use it for any other investigative purpose."
Safety vs. privacy
But any government use of street cameras is worthy of public debate, Harper said.
"What they want to do is take away a little bit of privacy to give us a little more safety," he said. "We have to decide if the safety aspect overcomes the importance of the privacy impact."