February 2007 archive

Why They Want us to See Red (Light Cameras)

Alexis Grant over at the Chronicle's new City Hall Blog (A nice blog by the way) reported last week that The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) released a new report last week on the improvement of intersection safety with the installation of red light cameras. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is an organization …

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Texas Legislature to Make Cameras see RED? (Continued)

As we come to mid-month, more news from Austin on all of the action to stop or slow the spread of the disease known as red light cameras. Two more bills have been filed, House Bill 1570, and Senate Bill 195. House Bill 1570 is identical to the previously discussed Senate Bill 125, requiring that …

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Jamming Houston Police

This week, a man was arrested on the charge of interfering with police communications here in Houston. As someone who spent seven years around the newspaper business, I spent time in the newsrooms of a couple of newspapers in Kansas. The one thing that was always present in those newsrooms was a police scanner, usually …

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Time…

When I envisioned this blog ten months ago, I thought it would be a good sounding board for me to vent issues and ideas. Then I got sidetracked by other things in my life and everything stopped in my corner of the Blogosphere. I decided recently it was time to return, and over the last …

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Legislature to pull the plug on Tasers?

More news coming out of the Austin. Legislator Coleman introduced House Bill 1304, which institutes a moratorium on Taser purchases and use during calendar year 2008. With the currentĀ number of Taser related incidents that have happened around the state, it might sound like a good idea. In fact, it, like the Houston Police Department’s chase …

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Could The Wrecker Races Soon Be Over?

We’ve all seen them, along a freeway or on a street. Four or five tow trucks lined up to try and get a piece of the business at a scene of an accident. We’ve seen the drivers of those trucks snake their way down the emergency lane past the backed up traffic just to get …

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Would Houston Slow Down for Cameras?

Phoenix suburb Scottsdale, Arizona recently conducted a 9 month test of a "Photo Radar" system on loop 101 (Phoenix's version of 610).  The city has now passed a resolution to turn the cameras back on full time, considering the system a success. In the ZDNet and Arizona Republic stories, it says that the cameras activate when …

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When is a funeral not a funeral?

Funny question to ask. It’s when people like a religious group from Topeka, Kansas (I know who they are, and I’m not going to add to their fodder with their name being searchable on Google to this site) can protest military funerals as a way of speaking out against abortion. I’m sorry, but the (Name …

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Texas Legislature to Make Cameras see RED? (Continued)

My RSS feed blinked across yet another bill being floated around Austin: House Bill 1052: Relating to requiring warning signs before intersections at which a municipality uses a photographic traffic monitoring system to enforce compliance with a traffic-control signal. Add this bill to the six others that I mentioned in an earlier post. This one …

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HPD Not As Shocking With Taser Training

I was reading the story about Pearland Police Officers receiving their Taser training when a important note about Houston’s Taser Training came to light: Being shocked is not required in every department. Houston Police Department officers do not get shocked during Taser training, but deputies with the Harris County Sheriff’s Department have the option during …

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