State Audit Exposes Profits and Privacy Failures in Municipal Parking Camera Enforcement

A report by State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman says three municipalities, Herzliya, Ramat Gan and Hadera, together with the local council of Binyamina-Giv'at Ada, operated 189 enforcement cameras in 2025. In 2024, those cameras generated 121,000 parking and bus-lane fines and about 44 million shekels in revenue, but the audit says the system was marked by management failures, little transparency, disregard for Interior Ministry rules and serious privacy violations.

One of the most troubling findings involved deleted footage. In Hadera, 12% of deleted incidents, 1,198 cases, were recorded under the vague label “other.” In Ramat Gan, the municipality deleted 256,000 suspected violations in 2024 from the photo database with no documented explanation and no management oversight of the inspectors’ actions.

The report also says privacy protections were routinely weak. In Ramat Gan and Binyamina-Giv'at Ada, images were kept in high quality or without masking, allowing inspectors to identify pedestrians clearly. In Herzliya and Hadera, inspectors could disable face and figure blurring while reviewing footage, and only the vendor blocked that option after the audit intervened. Binyamina-Giv'at Ada also kept footage for 21 days, more than twice the legal maximum of 10 working days, and continued filming around the clock after stopping parking enforcement in March 2024, saying it was for security purposes.

The audit says Herzliya and Ramat Gan released only partial information about enforcement policy, while Hadera and Ramat Gan refused to publish how much money the cameras collected. None of the municipalities published evidence that the cameras reduced congestion or improved public order. The report adds that Ramat Gan’s share of ticketed incidents fell from 37% in 2021 to 13% in 2025, suggesting the camera should be moved or removed. It also criticizes the Transport Ministry for not pushing more authorities to enforce bus lanes, noting that only 6 of 38 municipalities with bus lanes do so publicly. Ramat Gan, which has collected about 11.5 million shekels from bus-lane fines since 2021, kept the money in its general accounts and opened a separate account only in June 2025, with no deposits made by the end of the audit. Englman concluded that camera enforcement can improve compliance, but must be careful, proportionate and limited because it can harm bystanders’ privacy.