ENABLING BAD BEHAVIOR. A Chicago Tribune editorial calls out the city fathers of Schaumburg, otherwise known as Scumburg, or as yuppie hell.

Schaumburg recently deactivated a red-light camera near the Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg because ... it was doing too good of a job.

From November to January, the camera caught about 10,000 violators and the village slapped them with $100 tickets, mostly for turning right on red without making a full stop. But that brought a blizzard of complaints from drivers, and some threatened to stop shopping at the mall if the camera remained in place.

Village Manager Ken Fritz said that enforcing the right-turn-on-red law wasn't improving public safety and the village wanted to be "as friendly to customers as we are to villagers."

So the camera goes, and the scofflaws get a free pass.

It's always amusing to read Illinoisans taking other Illinoisans to task for being bad drivers. Here goes.

This is the wrong idea. The camera proved its worth. Clearly, a lot people are making illegal turns there, and that's a dangerous thing to do. The village is caving because it fears the economic consequences of enforcing the law. And what are the consequences if a driver whipping around a turn smacks a pedestrian or another car?

As if there's anybody walking around there anyway. Like other yuppie hells, the area is thin on sidewalks. Illinois pedestrians quickly learn to practice defensive walking, as a walk light is no protection against a cell-phone-jawing, to-the-left looking driver who treats the red light as reason to make a cursory check for oncoming cars and roll into the crosswalk, possibly to stop there.

The self-absorbed pedestrians one encounters in California who attempt to walk and text-message at the same time are still rare in Illinois. There's probably a tasteless pool somewhere on the frequency of fatalities involving pedestrian texters and right-on-red crosswalk infringers.

It's doubtful that many shoppers would stop going to the mall because of the camera. Motorists have a way of figuring out where the speed traps and traffic cameras are—and they act accordingly. They slow down. They stop at the light.

Maybe. Or perhaps they become a danger around Oak Brook or Old Orchard instead.

To make the story more amusing, consider Chicago, where there are lots of red light cameras (not that the streets are any safer for pedestrians) but relatively few police cruiser cameras, and the police don't mind.

Contrast that with Mayor Richard Daley's enthusiasm for other types of video. Chicago now has some 2,250 surveillance cameras to detect criminal conduct in public places. By 2016, Daley promised last month, Chicago will have one on every corner.

The city has also installed red-light cameras at some 132 intersections, with another 330 planned. So what exactly is different about those cameras? Well, they are trained on the citizenry, not on the police. What's sauce for the goose seems to be regarded as a dubious liquid substance when proposed for the gander. The city is less eager to capture video evidence if it may expose wrongdoing by its own law enforcement agents.

But the rest of us might want to keep unsleeping electronic eyes on the people with guns and badges. A city with a good police department can gain a lot from squad-car video cameras. A city with a bad one can gain even more.

Chicago? Bad cops? The purpose of the police is the preservation of disorder?