“Every move you make, every step you take, I’ll be watching you.”—The Police
The green light in front of you flips to yellow, and it’s decision time: jam on the gas and clear the intersection within four seconds, or jump on the brakes and stop just in time?
You glance in the rearview mirror—if you stop short, will the driver behind you end up in your back seat?
Two seconds left. Now it’s nosedive or fly time. You scan the intersection ahead; it’s clear. You kick the horses and go. Overhead, the yellow light turns red, and somewhere behind you a white strobe flashes. Smile: you’ve just made your debut on one of Baton Rouge’s 21 candid traffic cameras, and it will cost you at least $117.
In fact, a growing number of cities are installing cameras of their own: Denham Springs is working to put up its own cameras; Lafayette, New Orleans, and Jefferson Parish already have them.
Livingston Parish has a speed van that uses digital photos to dole out speeding tickets without so much as pulling over drivers. Ditto for Baker and Zachary.
Bureaucrats claim red-light cams and radar vans promote public safety. But critics charge they are merely a techno-based revenue stream for cash-strapped local governments.
And the dollars are rolling in.
Baton Rouge’s cut in 2008 was $1.7 million from 21,933 tickets issued by contractor American Traffic Solutions—and most of the city’s cameras didn’t even go online until last summer.
In January and February of this year, ATS issued 5,000 tickets to Baton Rouge drivers. If the company keeps that pace, it will mail out nearly 30,000 tickets by year’s end, earning the city another $3.5 million.
And that’s with fewer than half of the proposed number of cameras operating. With revenue like that, it’s not hard to understand why city officials love red-light cameras.
Not everyone is enamored with them, though.
“I think it’s an invasion of people’s privacy when you start putting cameras on every corner,” says State Sen. Troy Hebert of New Iberia. “I think you’re getting into a situation where Big Brother is going to be watching everybody.”
Hebert introduced a bill last year to outlaw both red-light cameras and speed vans. A Senate committee made significant changes to the bill before the full Senate killed it.
In March, the Mississippi legislature overwhelmingly passed a bill banning red-light cameras statewide, and Gov. Haley Barbour wasted no time signing it into law.
Hebert says he’s disappointed he couldn’t get the same thing done here. “It looks like Mississippi has passed up Louisiana in protecting people’s privacy,” he says.
Hebert doesn’t want people running red lights or speeding. He just wants trained law enforcement officers to be the ones issuing tickets, and he wants accused drivers afforded the opportunity to have their cases heard in a court of law, in front of a real judge.
If a driver receives a ticket from a police officer, whether for running a red light or for speeding, the case is automatically scheduled for a court date in either city court or state district court, depending on where the alleged violation occurred. If the driver doesn’t pay the ticket before the court date, the case is tried by an elected judge. All of the protections guaranteed under the U.S. and state constitutions apply.
At the trial, the city or the state has to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt—the legal standard for criminal cases. Among the things the prosecutor has to prove are that the person who received the ticket is the person who was driving the car, that all the equipment involved—the traffic light, the radar, the camera—were functioning properly, and that the officer who issued the ticket was properly trained.
By contrast, a red-light camera or speed van ticket works like this:
First, suspected violations are treated as civil rather than criminal offenses, so many of the constitutional protections don’t apply—such as the right to cross-examine witnesses or the right against self-incrimination. Nor does the government need to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt—only by a preponderance of the evidence, a lesser legal standard used for civil cases.
Suspects don’t get an automatic hearing date, either. The driver has to request one, usually in writing. The cases aren’t heard by a judge, but by a city- or parish-appointed hearing officer. The government doesn’t call witnesses. The official acting as the prosecutor merely presents the photograph or video as evidence. The “court” presumes the equipment was functioning properly, and in the case of speed van tickets, that the van operator was adequately trained and operating the van correctly.
In Baton Rouge, the hearing officer is a local lawyer, and the parish attorney acts as the prosecutor. In Livingston Parish, the hearing officer and the prosecutor are the same person, Perry Rushing, the chief of operations for the Sheriff’s Office. Rushing also represents the agency that reviews the alleged violations and authorizes the parish’s contractor, Redflex Traffic Systems, to issue the tickets.
Asked if he saw a potential conflict of interest, given that the Sheriff’s Office acts as the enforcement, prosecutorial, and judicial arms of the parish’s speed van program, Rushing said no.
All of his decisions on speed van tickets can be appealed to state district court, Rushing says—provided drivers who feel they’ve been treated unfairly have the time, money and the knowledge to navigate this new and little-known appeal process.
If you get a ticket from a red light camera and you want to fight it, you’re headed for city hall.
Hearings are held in the Metro Council chamber on the third floor of the Governmental Building twice a month. Lisa Freeman with the Parish Attorney’s Office represents the city, and attorney Doug Olsen is the hearing officer.
Baton Rougean Jeff Dodds fought his ticket and won. Although ticketed drivers get only a photograph in the mail along with their ticket, the city has video of each violation. Drivers can look at the video on the Web. During each hearing, the video for that violation plays on five flat-panel TV monitors suspended from the ceiling of the council chamber.
The video in Dodds’ case clearly showed the yellow light was not working.
Sylvia Reagan won her hearing, too. The video showed her entering the intersection behind a truck pulling a trailer with a crane on it. She told the hearing officer she couldn’t see the light until she was in the intersection. “When I looked up the light was red as could be,” she said.
Freeman says most of the drivers who request hearings received a ticket for not coming to a complete stop before turning right at a red light.
Motorist John Alexander said he was sure he stopped before he made a right turn off of College Drive onto Perkins Road. The camera showed otherwise.
At a hearing in April, one accused driver said he got caught running a red light just after Hurricane Gustav, when the lights weren’t working. The video showed the lights were working, and that the violation occurred Aug. 31, the day before Gustav hit.
Donald Piper has received five tickets for the three cars he owns (his sons drive two of them). At a recent hearing, he watched a video of one of his sons slowing—but not stopping—as he made a right on red at Essen and I-10. “He didn’t stop dead,” Piper told the hearing officer after watching the video.
That slow turn cost Piper another $167.
Denham Springs attorney David Guidry disagrees with Rushing.
“It does raise a conflict of interest question,” Guidry says. “If the government is going to take money from you, the government should have to prove that it’s entitled to take your money. Under this system—the Redflex system—the individual citizens have the burden of proving the government is not entitled to take their money, and I think that is backwards. That is not the way that our American judicial system is set up.”
In 2007, the state Supreme Court in Minnesota banned red-light cameras there partly because of questions about due process and the legal presumption that the owner of the vehicle is responsible for any tickets. In their decision, the justices concluded, “The problem with the presumption that the owner was the driver is that it eliminates the presumption of innocence and shifts the burden of proof from that required by the rules of criminal procedure.”
Metairie attorney Joseph McMahon is spearheading a class-action lawsuit against the photo enforcement programs in Lafayette and Jefferson parishes, hoping to get the cameras and vans banned in Louisiana. “It’s our contention that they violate state law—the state’s police power,” McMahon says.
State law (RS 32:365) prohibits police officers from recording traffic violations and sending tickets through the mail. Local governments skirt the law by making camera-recorded violations a “civil” offense, and by paying civilian contractors to issue the tickets. If drivers don’t pay the fines, the tickets are turned over to a collection agency, and the unpaid debt is reported to credit bureaus.
“It’s denial of due process,” McMahon says. “Where do you sell out your constitutional rights? When do you give up your right to remain silent?”
In May, a federal judge in New Orleans threw out the lawsuit, saying the automated ticketing system does not violate the U.S. Constitution, as the plaintiffs claimed. The suit is now headed to state court.
McMahon contends photo enforcement programs are really about generating revenue for the municipalities that use them. “They’ve changed all the rules of the game to make it easy for them to get paid,” he says.
State Rep. Eddie Lambert of Gonzales says he doesn’t know what local governments are doing with the money they’re collecting in fines, but since many of the tickets are issued on state highways, a chunk of that money needs to go to the state’s transportation trust fund. He introduced legislation in April that would mandate the state spend its share of the ticket money on transportation infrastructure.
“The money needs to go to highways and not to the black hole of the general fund,” Lambert says.
In Baton Rouge, the red-light camera money does go into the general fund, where it may be—but doesn’t have to be—spent on traffic safety programs.
Supporters of photo enforcement programs, most of whom are local government officials, say the programs are about public safety, not raising money.
Speeding drivers and those running red lights cause accidents, resulting in injury, property damage, and higher insurance rates. Photo enforcement reduces accidents, local officials contend. “This is just another tool—at no cost to the taxpayer—to address those problems,” says Livingston Parish Sheriff Willie Graves.
Lafayette, which has a very aggressive and very controversial photo-enforcement program, announced in April that accidents at intersections equipped with red-light cameras had plunged 68%. At Johnston Street and College Road, for example, the city’s Traffic and Transportation Department reported accidents dropped from 54 in the 15 months prior to the installation of the cameras to 20 during the cameras’ first 15 months of operation.
However, what the traffic department’s press release didn’t mention was that the number of crashes at that intersection was already on the decline. In 2006, there were 61 crashes; in 2007, there were 40 accidents, although the cameras weren’t switched on until the beginning of 2008. No doubt the cameras played a part in the further decline in the number of crashes—down to just 20 in 2008—but clearly there were other factors.
Ingolf Partenheimer, Baton Rouge’s chief traffic engineer, says the city’s red-light cameras are there to change driver behavior. “If you run a red light, there’s a really good chance you’re going to have an accident,” he says. “That’s what we’re trying to prevent.”
Partenheimer and his staff have spent a lot of time and effort educating the public about the cameras. They’ve issued press releases, they’ve cooperated with newspaper and TV reporters to spread the word about the cameras, and they’ve maintained a list on the Internet of the intersections with photo enforcement.
“They key has been changing the public’s perception,” Partenheimer says.
Before the cameras, stopping at red lights was an afterthought for many drivers, somewhere behind changing radio stations, talking on the phone, and texting, Partenheimer says. Preliminary data show that since the city began issuing tickets in February 2008, violations and accidents at intersections with photo enforcement have decreased, he says, indicating to him that drivers are paying more attention to red lights.
The financial aspect of the program is something Partenheimer ignores. He says he doesn’t know how much money the city is making from the cameras. “I don’t want to know,” he says. “To me, it’s a safety program.”
If photo enforcement was set up simply to make money, Partenheimer adds, the city could use the system to issue speeding tickets. The cameras not only record red-light violations, they also record the speed of vehicles passing through the intersections. But that’s something city officials in Baton Rouge decided not to do.
In Lafayette, the city’s vendor, Redflex, has issued more than 100,000 speeding tickets in addition to the more than 20,000 red-light tickets, Partenheimer says, a 5-1 ratio.
Partenheimer was initially reluctant to support the use of cameras to issue tickets, he says. “I was the biggest opponent of these things—of red-light cameras. It was too much Big Brother for me.”
Then he spent a few hours watching intersections and seeing how blatantly some drivers were running traffic lights and how dangerous it was. Soon, he was a camera convert. “We have to change the behavior,” he says. “It’s not the 99% who are doing it right. It’s the one percent who don’t care.”
Critics of red-light photo enforcement point to several studies that show the cameras actually cause an increase in rear-end collisions.
Police in Phoenix, Ariz., arrested 68-year-old Thomas Destories in April for the murder of a Redflex speed van driver.
Police say Destories pulled his Chevy Suburban alongside the speed van and fired five shots from a .45-caliber pistol into the driver’s seat, killing 51-year-old Doug Georgianni, who had worked for the company for only four months.
Video taken from the van’s traffic camera helped lead police to the suspect. When police arrested Destories he was leaving his home on a motorcycle, carrying the suspected murder weapon in one of his saddlebags, as well as a spare pistol magazine in his pocket.
Investigators said Destories has never been issued a Redflex speed van ticket, and they have yet to figure out a motive for the killing.
A 2008 study by the University of South Florida’s College of Public Health, published in the Florida Public Health Review, reported that “Comprehensive studies conclude cameras actually increase crashes and injuries….”
Likewise, a 2007 study by the Virginia Transportation Research Council concluded, “Generally, after cameras were installed, rear-end crashes increased and red-light running crashes decreased…. The study did not show any definitive safety benefit associated with camera installation with regard to all crash types….”
The Redflex speed van in Livingston Parish has been issuing tickets since late January, mostly on I-12. As of March 15, the van had issued more than 4,000 speeding tickets. Depending on the violator’s speed, tickets cost anywhere from $100 to $232. Redflex gets $32 per ticket. The rest is split 60-40 between the Sheriff’s Office and the Parish Council.
In March, the Sheriff’s Office announced it was dismissing and refunding 2,488 tickets issued to drivers on I-12 near mile marker 15, the spot at which the speed for the westbound lanes drops from 70 to 60 mph. Perry Rushing, the sheriff’s chief of operations, said that after receiving several complaints, he and the sheriff decided the speed van was parked too close to the speed zone change when it recorded the violations.
Rushing admitted even he was mistaken about exactly where the speed limit for westbound traffic changed, whether at the yellow warning signs just west of La. Hwy. 447 or beyond that, at the first white 60 mph speed limit sign.
“There was some confusion out there,” he says.
Rushing said he and the sheriff decided to “err on the side of caution” and recall all the tickets issued during the first 10 days of the van’s operation.
Mistakes like that add fuel to the fire of dissent that has erupted in communities that have adopted photo enforcement.
Livingston Parish residents Chris Piper and Dustin Dier started www.banthevan.com. Piper and Dier, both of whom are employed as safety professionals, say the van, with its bright strobe lights, is itself a hazard for drivers. They also say the sheriff and the Parish Council haven’t been clear about what they intend to spend the ticket money on.
In Lafayette, Denice Skinner has been fighting the city’s photo-enforcement program. She says the program denies citizens the right to due process. “They’re sending notices in the mail,” Skinner says. “We took your picture; therefore, you’re guilty.”
She accuses Redflex of using harassment and intimidation to force people to pay the fines.
“This is driven by money, and it’s a total hijack of the way we do things in America,” she says. “It’s insane. It’s absolutely insane.”
Surprisingly, a lot of cops have a problem with photo enforcement. A state trooper threatened to tow the Livingston Parish speed van if the driver didn’t move it off the shoulder of the Interstate. In February, a Denham Springs policeman wrote the van driver a ticket for illegal parking on I-12.
Denham Springs Police Chief Jeff Wesley intervened and had the ticket dismissed. In a letter to City Court Judge Charles Borde, Wesley said the van was leased to the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office “and used for the purpose of law enforcement.”
Chief Wesley’s letter exposed a minor paradox because it didn’t identify which laws the civilian driver, a Redflex employee, and the leased van were on the Interstate to enforce. The implication was that they were there to enforce state traffic laws, something a civilian employee of an out-of-state company, driving a company-owned van, doesn’t have the authority to do. And since state law specifically prohibits police officers from engaging in photo traffic enforcement, the van and driver can’t be designated as “law enforcement.”
Additionally, the special ordinances cited by the red-light cameras and speed vans are civil ordinances, which law enforcement agencies lack the legal authority to enforce.
A ranking state trooper, who asked not to be identified, said he opposes photo enforcement because it doesn’t immediately stop drivers who are engaged in dangerous behavior. Whereas a police officer will stop a driver for committing a violation and issue a ticket or make an arrest if necessary, cameras let dangerous drivers motor on, unimpeded. The trooper also said he thought it was un-American to deny those who receive tickets from photo-enforcement programs the right to have their cases heard in court.
A report due out this fall from the East Baton Rouge Parish Traffic Engineering Division will tally the number of accidents at intersections with photo enforcement, including rear-end collisions resulting from drivers slamming on their brakes. The report will include one full year of accident data.
So what happens if the report doesn’t show a decrease in overall accidents at intersections with cameras?
“They get taken away,” says Chief Traffic Engineer Ingolf Partenheimer. “If it doesn’t reduce accidents, then the only thing it’s doing is becoming a revenue stream, and we’re not doing that.”
Partenheimer has been around, and he knows the decision to pull the red-light camera program doesn’t rest solely with him. The politicos—the mayor and the Metro Council—get the final word. But if the program is not doing what it’s supposed to be doing, reducing traffic accidents, property damage, and injury, Partenheimer won’t continue to administer the program. “It will no longer be run out of the Traffic Engineering Division,” he says.
