Comment by whimsicalism

Both of these camera systems also usually come with a kangaroo civil court of sorts. Last time I looked at red light camera distribution in Texas it was also fairly obvious that they were only installing them in poorer areas.

These systems were largely disliked bipartisanly because of those factors.

The value of red light cameras is debatable. I've copied the conclusion from a DoT study below (1):

This statistically defendable study found crash effects that were consistent in direction with those found in many previous studies, although the positive effects were somewhat lower that those reported in many sources. The conflicting direction effects for rear end and right-angle crashes justified the conduct of the economic effects analysis to assess the extent to which the increase in rear end crashes negates the benefits for right-angle crashes. This analysis, which was based on an aggregation of rear end and right-angle crash costs for various severity levels, showed that RLC systems do indeed provide a modest aggregate crash-cost benefit.

The opposing effects for the two crash types also implied that RLC systems would be most beneficial at intersections where there are relatively few rear end crashes and many right-angle ones. This was verified in a disaggregate analysis of the economic effect to try to isolate the factors that would favor (or discourage) the installation of RLC systems. That analysis revealed that RLC systems should be considered for intersections with a high ratio of right-angle crashes to rear end crashes, higher proportion of entering AADT on the major road, shorter cycle lengths and intergreen periods, one or more left turn protected phases, and higher entering AADTs. It also revealed the presence of warning signs at both RLC intersections and city limits and the application of high publicity levels will enhance the benefits of RLC systems.

The indications of a spillover effect point to a need for a more definitive study of this issue. That more confidence could not be placed in this aspect of the analysis reflects that this is an observational retrospective study in which RLC installations took place over many years and where other programs and treatments may have affected crash frequencies at the spillover study sites. A prospective study with an explicit purpose of addressing this issue seems to be required.

tl;dr - it's complicated. There are places RLCs make sense and places they don't. Expecting local government to know the difference... good luck with that.

1 - https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05049/

People like you expressing sentiments like that are exactly how we got here. You want them to go hard on some particular issue. Save the children, get rid of the drugs, arrest the terrorists, save the planet, there's always some justification that's hard to argue against in abstract but think a few steps ahead "what would happen if everyone did it". At the limit tolerating this sort of thing for even a fraction of people's pet issues adds up to dystopian 1984 crap.

And the real root problem isn't you or what you believe. The problem is that you don't feel responsible for the side effects that would happen if you got your way any more than a lone piece of litter feels responsible for ruining the park. Nor does society hold you responsible, "it's nobody's fault". So you and everyone else are free to peddle bad solutions to small problems without consequence.

Edit: Perhaps this is just part of a longer arc of societal progress. We used to categorize bad people worthy of being ignored based on group membership they mostly couldn't control, religions, races, stuff like that. As society got better at measurement we realized this was wrong and somewhat stopped doing it. Now we struggle holding groups accountable. All sorts of evil can be done without consequence as long as the responsibility is diluted enough. Maybe something in the future will solve this.

Maybe you're also in favor of some light reading https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-4/