City Owes it to Citizens to Get Red Light Cameras Right

Last August, the City of Bradenton turned off its seven red-light cameras due to frustration with a vendor whose contract was set to expire. Now, the city council is poised to take up the task of re-instituting red light cameras with a new vendor. Members would do well to consider the county’s experience with the devices and avoid making some of the same mistakes.

Red light cameras are a very controversial aspect of public safety. Most people I talk to come down hard on either side of the issue with very few seeming indifferent. Depending on who you ask, they are either life-saving devices that reduce accidents and deaths or a big-brother boondoggle that acts as a hidden tax on drivers, most of whom represent little or no threat to the safety of others.

There is no clear evidence that the cameras save lives or reduce net accidents, and there are several very valid questions as to their constitutionality, though most higher courts have been reluctant to take up the issue. Using a camera to document a moving traffic violation raises several obvious concerns. First, it reverses due process by punishing a vehicle owner rather than a driver and then shifting the burden of proof from law enforcement to the person the car is registered to.

The manner in which fines are issued is also dubious and coercive. Accused offenders are first offered the chance to pay a lesser fine and receive no points, but only if they waive their right to contest the citation. Should you fight the ticket and lose, you are punished with the full fine and the points. Obviously, offenders of the same act who are caught by a patrol officer rather than a camera are not given the same opportunity.

Once the state law establishing the use of the cameras was passed, municipalities rushed toward implementing what looked like a steady source of much-needed revenue. But inconsistent enforcement and concerns over legality led to the requirement that a police officer review the video footage associated with each proposed citation and then issue the actual ticket. With this additional cost and 50 percent the fine being kept by the state in addition to the vendor’s sizable take, the cameras became much closer to revenue neutral for the communities they served. Of the roughly $5.5 million generated by those seven cameras since they were installed in 2010, the city has netted a mere $270,000.

The fact that a profit-driven corporation also has a prominent role in deciding who gets cited has also been problematic, with enforcement seeming to be dictated not by safety but rather the opportunity to issue as many citations as possible. When the county implemented its red-light program, then-Sheriff Brad Steube submitted a list of 10 intersections deemed by his deputies as the most dangerous. Of those 10, only one ultimately had a camera installed. The rest of the signals selected seemed to have one thing in common: high-frequency of turning right on red. That meant that there existed a statistically-significant chance that there would be much more opportunity to cite drivers who did not come to a full and complete stop, often referred to as a "rolling right on red,“ even though these instances are almost never a factor in traffic fatalities.

The county’s contract said that it had to pay the vendor for each such infraction that it documented. Sheriff Steube, however, wisely instructed his deputies reviewing the videos to approach such violations just as they would if they had been in a patrol car and witnessed the same act. If the driver had acted reasonably and no real danger was created, no ticket would be issued. The problem was that the vendor was still entitled to seek compensation under its contract. That part was eventually amended, but it speaks to the flaws in the method and motivations.

Initially, the legislation at the state level didn’t even authorize the use of the cameras for citing drivers for illegal right hand turns. Rather than instruct municipalities and vendors not to cite for them, however, the Florida Legislature simply passed new legislation amending the law to account for such infractions. Again, this speaks to the revenue engine argument and against the notion that the cameras are for the sake of safety.

At the meeting, Councilman Bemis Smith noted that around 70 percent of citations issued involve instances in which the vehicle was recorded entering the intersection just fractions of a second after the light turns red, a distinction that "can’t even be seen by the human eye." Indeed, more than 98 percent of deaths related to driver’s running red lights involve not cases in which the driver pushes a yellow just a fraction of a second too long, but rather ones in which the driver has completely blown through a signal that had already been solid red on their approach. This makes sense, as there generally isn’t enough time for a car to move from a standstill to an intersecting point with another vehicle that is moving through at speed, only fractions of a second after they themselves have gotten the green. This is obviously even more true regarding pedestrians and crosswalk signals.

Opponents have also long argued that the fact that municipalities often move to cameras without implementing any less intrusive and more effective methods to reduce such collisions–standardizing the time of all yellow signals, requiring standardized "all-way-red" periods during each signal cycle, etc.–also suggests it’s more about revenue than safety. Councilman Smith said he’d like to see more efforts directed toward such fixes before re-implementing the camera program, and I think he makes a very valid point. Bradenton Chief of Police Melanie Bevan has likewise identified 10 potential intersections where her department feels cameras would be most beneficial, and one would hope the city would do a better job in listening than the county did with Steube’s list.