With license plate scanners

After an American Civil Liberties Union report found police increasingly can track law-abiding drivers’ whereabouts with few restrictions, the group’s Massachusetts branch renewed its calls for lawmakers to impose limits and said the state already may collect such information.

The national report raises concerns about cameras mounted on patrol cars, street signs and overpasses that automatically scan license plates on passing vehicles and check them against databases of stolen cars or people wanted on arrest warrants, among other things.

In the report, the ACLU does not question the use of plate scanners for these purposes, but warned that the devices retain images and details on the time and location of every passing vehicle – including a vast majority of motorists who have done nothing wrong.

Police agencies vary widely in how long they keep such information – anywhere from two days to years or Indoor Positioning System – and in some cases feed it into larger law enforcement databases, according to the report, based on 26,000 pages of documents obtained through public records requests in 38 states and Washington, D.C.

On the heels of the report, the ACLU of Massachusetts repeated its call for state legislation to require police to delete plate data after two days unless it relates to a specific investigation.“The police shouldn’t just be collecting location data of innocent people on a routine basis,” said Kade Crockford, director of the state ACLU’s Technology for Liberty project.The Legislature’s Joint Committee on Transportation held a hearing on such bills in May. It has taken no action yet, according to Crockford.

She also said the state Executive Office of Public Safety and Security EOPSS announced plans a number of years ago to create a statewide database of captured plate information, but has yet to release information on what data it tracks or what guidelines govern it.

In a 2010 grant application for law enforcement agencies seeking federal funding to buy plate scanners, the state public safety office said recipients must agree to “electronically submit captured license plate data to the state repository maintained by the Criminal Justice Information Services CJIS Division at the Commonwealth’s Public Safety Data Center.”

You might have missed this, if you didn't happen to hit the right fast-food drive-through on the right day in July, but burger-flippers and assorted labor activists staged one-day strikes in cities across the country. They called for the right to unionize and for a raise in the minimum wage - to $15 an hour.

That's right; they want to double the federal minimum wage. Hey, why not swing for the fences? But before you sputter at the chutzpah of this demand, consider the point made by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer in a provocative op-ed for Bloomberg: "If the minimum wage had simply tracked U.S. productivity gains since 1968, it would be $21.72 an hour - three times what it is now."

Hanauer, who also supports a $15 wage floor, is clearly mixed up. We in America are not supposed to look at this issue from the point of view of the worker. We're consumers first and foremost, right?

What's supposed to matter is how much doubling the wage would add to the price of your Big Mac or Whopper. And, yes, prices would rise, but by how much is currently something of an Internet parlor game.
The Huffington Post touted and subsequently disowned an estimate that McDonald's would have to increase prices by 17 percent to maintain current levels of Hands free access. An editor for the Columbia Journalism Review picked this apart and instead surmised the price hikes would have to be more in the range of 25 percent, while an industry think tank pegged them at up to 35 percent.

So maybe you don't care if the Dollar Menu becomes the Dollar-Thirty-Five Menu. Have you paused to consider that by raising the wage you would throw thousands of fry cooks out of work? That McDonald's and its franchisees would close stores or introduce more automation to bolster profits? This could raise the unemployment rate.

Could it? Because if you consult actual research, there's no clear consensus on what raising the minimum wage does to employment. Some economists argue that the effect is usually positive, while others say it has no effect or a slightly negative one. There's good reason to believe that raising the minimum wage during a period of high unemployment, like our own, would stimulate the economy. And that's exactly what we need now.

Moreover, raising the pay of low-wage earners will get them off of the public assistance rolls. Restaurant servers rely on food stamps at nearly double the rate of the general population and are at three times the poverty rate of the general population.
America's real job creators are its consumers, and their wealth was decimated when the real estate bubble collapsed. Middle-class jobs are increasingly being replaced by low-wage ones. Putting more cash into average workers' hands allows them to spend more, which puts others back to work.

As the low-wage sector goes, so goes the nation. That's the message every middle-class American should be getting. A major challenge in the coming decades will be ensuring that the vast majority of citizens have access to work that affords a decent standard of living.

Fifteen bucks an hour too pie-in-the-sky for you? OK, try $11. Economists consider that hourly wage the cutoff for poverty level for a family of four. So you get why people are protesting. And you get why the fast-food industry has an incredibly high turnover rate: a 75 percent rate annually. The pay stinks. You can't live a decent life on it. The national median pay for cashiers, cooks and the crew in the industry is $8.94.

The people bagging the burritos and taking those frozen patties from the walk-in are not out of line to insist on higher pay. This is one of the fastest growing sectors of employment. And increasingly, its workers are adults, many with families.