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Private For-Profit Law Enforcement Schemes Are All About Profit With Safety As A Second Consideration
By Billy Watson
I offer a retired Teamster’s view from 27 years on New York’s streets. I spent 27 years driving trucks through every borough of New York City, moving law firms and corporations throughout Manhattan. In that time, I learned something my father taught me long before I got my CDL: follow the money. When the press release says one thing and the numbers say another, the truth is in the gap between them.
Right now, that gap is wide enough to drive a school bus through.
In Rockland County, a company called BusPatrol has issued more than 45,000 tickets in less than two years for allegedly passing stopped school buses. That’s 45,000 citations at $250 each in a county of 330,000 people. Meanwhile, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, approximately 2 to 3 people die nationwide each year from vehicles illegally passing stopped school buses. Between 2000 and 2023, there were 61 such fatalities across the entire country—an average of 2.5 deaths per year.
So one suburban New York county has generated 45,000 tickets to address a problem that kills fewer than 3 people annually in all 50 states combined.
Follow the money.
BusPatrol, a Virginia-based company now majority-owned by private equity firm GI Partners, keeps 55% of every fine collected. The county gets 45%. The company has spent more than $2.2 million lobbying New York State since 2019, retaining six different firms to expand its reach. That’s not child safety advocacy. That’s market development.
When the Rockland County Business Journal requested data on what percentage of video submissions actually result in citations versus rejections, the county declined to provide the information. That silence tells you everything. If the approval rate demonstrated rigorous review, they’d publish it. The fact that they won’t suggests something closer to rubber-stamping.
Residents report being ticketed when buses were still rolling to a stop, when stop arms were just beginning to extend, when traffic conditions on multi-lane highways made stopping dangerous or impossible. Many paid the $250 simply because they didn’t realize they could contest it—the citation makes the violation clear in bold letters while burying the appeals process in fine print. That’s not an accident. That’s design.
But Rockland County isn’t an isolated case. It’s a pattern.
In New York City, a company called Hayden AI holds a $141 million contract to install cameras on MTA buses that ticket vehicles blocking bus lanes. In late 2024, NBC New York revealed that the system had issued approximately 3,800 erroneous tickets, including more than 870 to vehicles that were legally parked.
The cameras hadn’t been programmed to recognize legal alternate-side parking zones. The “human review” the MTA promised for every citation caught nothing. Nearly 4,000 bad tickets went out the door.
When NBC asked Hayden AI to explain, the company declined to comment. They said nothing. The MTA—which doesn’t write the code, doesn’t maintain the cameras, doesn’t program the zones—announced the issues had been “resolved.”
Here’s what happened next: Hayden AI received an additional $58 million contract to put cameras on 1,000 more buses.
The company got rewarded after refusing to acknowledge a problem with the system they built. Bus lane fines, meanwhile, increased from $4.3 million to $20.9 million—a 570% increase. That’s not a public safety program. That’s a revenue engine with a public relations wrapper.
And those 870-plus people who got fined for parking legally? Some paid because taking a day off work to fight a $50 ticket doesn’t make economic sense. Some couldn’t pay, got hit with late fees, then registration suspensions. Some probably ended up in the recent Thruway enforcement sweeps, vehicles seized for the crime of falling behind on fines they never should have owed.
Nobody’s tracking them. Nobody’s making them whole. The contract is protected. The revenue flows. The people who got squeezed are statistics in someone else’s success story.
What we’re witnessing is the emergence of what I call the Safety-Industrial Complex: private companies that have discovered government contracts are more lucrative when they’re funded by the people being punished rather than by tax appropriations.
The business model is elegant. Propose a “safety” program that costs the municipality nothing upfront. Install technology that generates violations at scale. Take the majority of the revenue. When errors surface, stay silent and let the government partner handle the PR. Collect the next contract.
The people writing the checks are working families who can’t afford lawyers, can’t afford days off for hearings, can’t afford to have their registrations suspended. A $250 ticket doesn’t touch someone with a financial cushion. But for a home health aide in the Bronx, a delivery driver in Rockland County, a single mother juggling two jobs? That’s groceries. That’s rent. That’s the difference between keeping your car legal and falling into the enforcement spiral.
None of this shows up in inflation reports. The Federal Reserve doesn’t track the cumulative weight of camera tickets, insurance algorithm games, toll increases, and late fees landing on household budgets. But when wages rise? When workers get a little leverage? That’s when we hear about inflation being a threat that requires intervention.
The extraction is invisible. The “correction” is always visible.
The opinions expressed in “Your Voices” columns are those exclusively of the author, and are not necessarily reflective of the views of Rockland County Business Journal. RCBJ offers “Your Voices” to allow readers to express their opinions of recent events affecting the county and/or local communities.
