The damage comes as Bellevue expands automated speed enforcement in an effort to reduce serious and deadly crashes across the city.
“The reason the City of Bellevue is implementing speed safety cameras is because speed is a leading contributor to fatal and serious injury collisions, and it is what we hear the most about from our residents,” Bellevue Transportation spokesperson Jennifer Cook told KING 5.
The city installed eight cameras at four locations over the weekend of Aug. 14-16, with one camera monitoring each direction of travel.
A community member called 911 around 5 p.m. Sunday to report damage to cameras along 148th Avenue Northeast, between Northeast 13th and 10th places, Cook said. The city inspected all eight cameras Monday and discovered four had been damaged at two locations.
Both cameras along 148th Avenue Northeast were spray-painted and had their covers smashed. Cook said paint also got inside the units. The city is still determining whether some of the equipment can be cleaned or will need to be replaced.
Two cameras on Forest Drive Southeast, between Southeast 54th Place and Coal Creek Parkway, were also spray-painted.
One of those cameras has since been cleaned and returned to operation. The other needs a new cover. In all, three of the four damaged cameras still require repairs.
Verra Mobility, the city’s contractor for the speed-camera program, is responsible for repairing damage to the cameras under its contract with Bellevue, Cook said. That means taxpayers will not directly pay for the repairs. The total value of the damage is not yet known. Cook said Verra Mobility was still assessing the equipment.
Only half?
I gotta say, I love this part:
Verra Mobility, the city’s contractor for the speed-camera program, is responsible for repairing damage to the cameras under its contract with Bellevue, Cook said.
That caught my eye as well. At least the city was smart to have that in the contract!
Love reading good news first thing in the morning. Where are the rest of the cameras? I’ll be over in Bellevue in a couple weeks and can help out …
There’s no such thing as a benign camera. Glad to see it gone
Nah, we need speed and red light cameras as long as we’re allowing every idiot in the county to zip around in a two ton pollution powered people crusher.
If we completely ban private cars as personal transportation, then we can celebrate this kind of thing, but until then, pedestrian safety is far, far more important than the privacy of ecocidal narcissists.
Local governments shouldn’t have allowed Flock to become such a symbol of anti-privacy and authoritarian abuse if they didn’t want civilians to distrust cameras as a whole.
How often are you a pedestrian in Bellevue?
I don’t go often, it’s oppressive and gross even for a suburb, but when I do I notice that the carbrained suburbanites are way more aggressive than anywhere else in King County, even more so than in Renton.
So fuck Flock, but I’d happily volunteer free labor to reduce costs to put red light and speed cameras covering every square inch of street, road, and stroad in Bellevue
Bellevue is full of rich fucks who don’t give a fuck about anyone else. Of course it’s going to reflect in their driving.
I think the cat’s out of the bag. Flock ruined the general sentiment of any camera the government wants to use to spy on and control the population.
Edit: just to make sure, the vitriol in my first paragraph is strictly for Bellevue asshole residents and not you!
My objection is that “promote safety and peevent deaths” =/= “spy on and control the population” in any sense that holds any meaning. If those two are even similar, then the teenage Anarchists are right and homework and chores are authoritarian forced labor.
How is the average person supposed to trust their government when there’s numerous accounts (and growing) of local government abusing the Flock cameras to spy and persecute civilians?
This isn’t teenager anarchists upset about these cameras. It’s the majority of those in the US.
Take this story for example. How are we ever supposed to trust that they’ll use cameras for anything but nefarious reasons?
Bellevue, as you may have noticed, is not in Florida. You get the local government you vote for, Florida got theirs, Bellevue has theirs, Seattle has its own, Bellevue is actually the least surveillance oriented of the three (although Seattle is once again moving in the right direction under Mayor Wilson, and deactivated all the cameras that were out up by Mayor Harrell ostensibly for the World Cup)
I never said this was about teenaged Anarchists, I said that grouping red light and speed cameras under the same umbrella as Flock cameras is the same kind of thinking as a teenage Anarchist. And I stand by that.
If you think cops in this area don’t act the same as cops in Florida in regard to this issue, you are sorely mistaken.
Most people distrust cameras in the hands of our government now. I can’t blame them regardless of how different these cameras are to Flock.
This. I am vehemently against surveillance cameras, but I still think limited-purpose speed and red-light cameras can be helpful. Flock has poisoned the well so hard, though, that that distinction is almost entirely lost now.
@velma @DudleyMason and “general motors conspired to make it nonfeasible for them to function without a car” is a much more lucid understanding of the average persons motivation for driving one than “theyre an ecocidal narcisist undeserving of privacy”…
FTFA: 4 cameras vandalized.
Whoever writes their titles needs a raise.
Not sure how you fixed it when both statements are accurate, but ok.
