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Challenges
to red light cameras span
US
Studies touting safety benefits
sometimes contradictory, incomplete
By Alex Johnson
6/24/2011
In
more than 500 cities and towns in
25 states, silent sentries keep watch over intersections, snapping
photos and
shooting video of drivers who run red lights. The cameras are on the
job in
metropolises like Houston and Chicago and in small towns like Selmer,
Tenn.,
population 4,700, where a single camera setup monitors traffic at the
intersection of U.S. Highway 64 and Mulberry Avenue.
One
of the places is Los Angeles,
where, if the Police Commission gets its way, the red light cameras
will have
to come down in a few weeks. That puts the nation’s second-largest city
at the
leading edge of an anti-camera movement that appears to have been
gaining
traction across the country in recent weeks.
A
City Council committee is
considering whether to continue the city’s camera contract over the
objections
of the commission, which voted unanimously to remove the camera system,
which
shoots video of cars running red lights at 32 of the city’s thousands
of
intersections. The private Arizona company that installed the cameras
and runs
the program mails off $446 tickets to their registered owners.
The
company’s contract will expire at
the end of July if the council can’t reach a final agreement to renew
it.
Opponents
of the cameras often argue
that they are really just revenue engines for struggling cities and
towns,
silently dinging motorists for mostly minor infractions. And while
guidelines
issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration say
revenue is an
invalid justification for the use of the eyes in the sky (see box at
right),
camera-generated citations do spin off a lot of money in many cities —
the nearly
400 cameras in Chicago, for example, generated more than $64 million in
2009,
the last year for which complete figures were available.
Los
Angeles hasn’t been so lucky.
The
city gets only a third of the
revenue generated by camera citations, many of which go unpaid anyway
because
judges refuse to enforce them, the city controller’s office reported
last year.
It found in an audit that if you add it all up, operating the cameras
has cost
$1 million to $1.5 million a year more than they’ve generated in fines,
even as
“the program has not been able to document conclusively an increase in
public
safety.”
Federal
camera guidelines
The
Federal Highway Traffic Safety
Administration says red light cameras and other automated traffic
controls
should:
•
Reduce the frequency of violations.
•
Maximize safety improvements with
the most efficient use of resources.
•
Maximize public awareness and
approval.
•
Maximize perceived likelihood that
violators will be caught.
•
Enhance the capabilities of traffic
law enforcement and supplement, rather than replace, traffic stops by
officers.
•
Emphasize deterrence rather than
punishment.
•
Emphasize safety rather than revenue
generation.
•
Maintain program transparency by
educating the public about program operations and be prepared to
explain and
justify decisions that affect program operations.
Another
common refrain from critics is
that the devices replace a human officer’s judgment and discretion with
the
cold, unforgiving algorithms of a machine.
“You’ve
got to treat people fairly,”
said Jay Beeber, executive director of Safer Streets LA, who has led
the
campaign to kill the city’s red light cameras. “You have to give people
a
fighting chance that you’re not going to penalize them for a minor
lapse of
judgment.”
Paul
Kubosh, a lawyer who has led a
similar anti-camera fight in Houston, called the camera systems “a scam
on the
public,” because they “are writing tickets that police officers don’t
write.”
There’s
a fierce court battle going on
in Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, after a U.S. district
judge this
week ruled that a measure voters approved to shut down the city’s more
than 70
cameras was invalid on procedural grounds.
Read
the rest of the story at
msnbc.com
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