I Got Arrested to Prevent an Accident
My search for the real reason people hate speed cameras
The woman who handcuffed me asked if I was cold.
It was June. We stood in the sun in the middle of the street. For an early morning, it was sweltering.
She held me by the cuffs — thick, plastic, human-size zip ties. I looked at the news cameras and the traffic on this Brooklyn street that my fellow protesters and I had brought to a standstill.
“Are you cold?” she asked. “You’re shaking.”
I laughed a bit too loudly. I had heard this one before. Perhaps they taught gaslighting in the police academy — “Question Their Well-Being 101.”
This was not the first time I had been arrested for standing in the middle of a street and refusing to move. As a protester, this was a thing that I did. But while my getting arrested was no accident, I was hoping that our demonstration might prevent one.
My protest that June day was about a tiny maligned machine called a speed camera. Since 2014, the New York Police Department has caught nearly 520,000 speeding drivers. Speed cameras have…
