-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Red light cameras - fake tickets Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 17:28:39 -0800 From: editor <editor@private> Reply-To: editor@private To: declan@private For Declan - I do a site about red light camera tickets. Back in 2002 you had a thread about the cameras, so I figured you might be interested in a little update for politechbot. There's been a number of prominent newspaper articles recently, but when the commercial media discuss the cameras, there's a couple issues they always leave out. Issue # 1. At least nine cities in California are sending out fake red light camera tickets, to get you to identify the driver, so that they can send the driver a real ticket. It's a great con game - most people, not having heard anything about it in the press, fall for it. And, while the fake tickets are fully bilingual, I think that those not as familiar with American courts (and such things as the 5th Amendment) are much more likely to be fooled. I have a section on my website about the fake tickets, in case you need additional info. The url is http://www.highwayrobbery.net/redlightcamsticket.htm#Fakes and the fake ticket info, including some sample fake tickets, is under "Police Going Too Far...." This is some of the info from the website - "If your "ticket" does not have the address and phone number of the court on it, or if it says, "Do not contact the court," it's not really a ticket at all. It's a fake, probably generated by the police (fake ticket examples: El Cajon <http://www.highwayrobbery.net/redlightcamsdocsElCajonmain.html>, Vista <http://www.highwayrobbery.net/redlightcamsdocsVistamain.html>), but it could have been printed up by a clever confidence man who hopes you will give him your credit card number. (For more about con men, see the end of this section.) The official format for a real ticket <http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/forms/documents/tr115.pdf> is on the website of the Judicial Council of California. "This section is about police trickery and bluffing ! "In some towns the police are going to extraordinary lengths to get registered owners, or members of their household, to identify the driver. In those towns, if the technicians reviewing the photos see that the pictured driver is obviously not the registered owner (gender mismatch, or great difference in age) or that the photo is too blurry to be sure of who it is, one tactic they frequently use is to send the registered owner an official-looking notice telling him that he must identify the driver, within 10 days. (In the business, they call these notices a "nomination.") "Why do they do it? "So far, the common thread is that all these "Police Going Too Far..." cities use RedFlex as their camera vendor and have contracts (signed before 2004) requiring them to pay RedFlex approx. $90 for each real ticket issued. These cities send the registered owner a notice (fake ticket) - which the City doesn't have to pay RedFlex for - when they see that the face photo is of such poor quality that it would probably not be accepted by a judge as proof of who the driver was. Sending you the fake ticket is the police's attempt to get you to identify the driver, thus providing them that proof. Once you have filled-out the blanks on the fake ticket form, the police can be pretty sure that a ticket will stick and that they will be able to recoup the $90 it will cost them to have a real one issued. So they go ahead and have RedFlex issue (print up and mail) one." Issue # 2. There's a big incentive for the cities, and the camera companies, to set the yellows very short. Here in California our legislature passed a law, 3 years ago, setting a minimum yellow for _straight-through_ traffic. While the mandated straight-through minimums are on the short side, nonetheless it has caused the lucrative enforcement to shift to left turns, for which the minimum yellow is just 3.0 seconds. And right turns. But there's no evidence that people turning left or right cause the horrible accidents that the authorities say they want to prevent (see the analyses I did of several heavily-enforced intersections - under Hawthorne Documents Set #3, Culver City Documents Set # 12, and Costa Mesa Documents Set #10). But, if we nonetheless accept that it's a reasonable goal to decrease left-turn runners, there's an alternative to heavy ticketing. If you will look at the Mesa, Arizona Ticket Counts table (see Mesa, Arizona on the Camera Towns page of my website), you'll see that left turn violations go way down, and stay down, when drivers are given a reasonable amount of yellow. And for straight through movements, the Ticket Counts table on the Costa Mesa (California) Documents page shows that just a few tenths of a second longer yellow makes a significant decrease in the number of tickets. I hope you find this of interest. Regards, Jim editor@private _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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