The industries that profit from photo enforcement are scrambling to convince Florida lawmakers to adopt legislation that will forgive municipalities for installing red light cameras contrary to existing state law. A circuit court judge last week ruled that red light cameras were illegal in the state, following the legal argument presented in a 2005 attorney general opinion. On the day the decision was handed down, an insurance and camera company-backed front group headed by Melissa Wandall, the widow of an accident victim, released new polling data intended to jump-start the legislative effort.
“These camera safety programs maintain that high degree of support across partisan, generational and gender lines as well,” Public Opinion Strategies (POS) partner Neil Newhouse claimed in the industry-supported press release. “Even a very healthy majority — 60 percent — of those who have personally received red light and speeding tickets still support using the cameras.”
The POS polling firm, which conducted the survey, has a contract with American Traffic Solutions to produce regular surveys in support of the ticketing company’s business model. The polling firm consistently produces favorable numbers that do not match the results seen at the ballot box. Photo ticketing has been put directly to voters in municipal elections on nine occasions (view list). Photo ticketing has lost all nine contests with up to 86 percent of voters rejecting the industry’s arguments.
The industry has also made it a priority to undermine a 2008 review of the safety effects of red light cameras conducted by University of South Florida (USF) researchers (view report). On the same day, a letter attacking the 2008 report by Edward A. Mierzejewski appeared in a suburban Chicago newspaper — the same letter, word-for-word, has appeared in the National Campaign to Stop Red Light Running’s photo ticketing company-funded newsletter. Although the 2008 report’s authors responded directly to the criticisms in a journal article (view letter and response). Mierzejewski ignored the points made in rebuttal and used the same text published as a letter in a half-dozen Florida papers two full years ago.
The industry turned to Mierzejewski for good reason. As the administrator in charge of the USF Center for Urban Transportation Research, he is heavily involved in research supporting the use of toll roads. Tolling and photo enforcement are intimately linked, with American Traffic Solutions (ATS) serving as the leading provider of camera enforcement for toll roads. Mierzejewski maintains strong ties with the industry as he is the former program director for HDR Engineering, a company that worked closely with the ATS political operation in shutting down the 2008 congestion reduction initiative in Washington state that would have removed the profit motive from tolling and photo enforcement.
The Florida legislature will open the 2010 legislative session tomorrow.
[Courtesy: Thenewspaper.com]
Privatizing the enforcement of traffic laws is the first step down a slippery slope that will lead to outsourcing other police functions to “Blackwater-type” enterprises, which operate with little or no oversight by the voters.
If you’ve ever seen a banana republic in acton you may be saying to yourself, “where can I get a fine government like that?” Well, that’s the gag. Chances are you bought it already.
It is the best government that lobbyist money can buy.
I sympathize with anyone who has lost someone to a traffic accident – one of my friends was killed when his motorcycle was struck by a woman in an SUV talking on her cell phone…which is apparently quite a common occurrence. However, I don’t really care what stats or polls the industry has to support its push for more cameras – I take issue with Automated Photo Enforcement (APE) in principle. The industry cannot deny that there is a lot of money to be made by ticketing people, and because automated cameras are used, they don’t have to pay people to observe traffic violations. They cannot deny this, and they cannot make the argument that they exist to increase safety, because if that was really the case, they’d perform the service for free. I agree with the slippery slope notion, because industries are rarely content with their profit margins and are always looking to expand. The main problem with APE is that the industry’s desire for higher profit will never coincide with the practical need for more enforcement. At some point roads cannot be any safer than they already are. Also, I take offense to an industry that uses public roads that were paid for by constituent taxes as a venue for extracting still more money from those constituents. The ticket-writing should be left to human policemen. Municipal fines should not enrich private entities, only the state and local governments that funded and built the roads on which the laws are being broken.
Just the fact that these companies claim a commission on each infraction is too much a conflict of interest. If they were selling and setting up cameras and training a local worker on how to properly check the photos to write tickets it would be a much different story.
Can you imagine if police officers were paid a bounty on each arrest?
Public Opinion Strategies (POS) partner Neil Newhouse.
POS indeed. That what all these corrupt parasitic companies are.
Last week I was in Palm Beach County and saw this sign at an intersection on U.S. Hwy. 1 in Juno Beach.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8490341@N04/4390369879/
Yeah, POS’s poll is a POS. There is no chance that 60% of us are in favor of this nonsense.
This will self correct, I suspect. Given the amount of publicity being generated over all this, pretty soon many camera installations will suddenly become “inoperative”. And after a few discrete pieces of black tape are appllied to a few license plate numbers, and a bunch of e-tickets are mistakenly issued to a bunch of wrong owners, the court cases are gonna pile up.
I don’t follow this much, but I don’t understand how you can ticket the owner of a piece of property, and not a driver. Curious.
In Florida, when a racehorse breaks his leg, they shoot the jockey.
“Can you imagine if police officers were paid a bounty on each arrest?”
We’re close enough in places like Alabama (among others) where the Sheriff is paid a fixed amount per day per prisoner for food.
No law says the Sheriff HAS to spend all the money on food. So they don’t and claim the rest as personal income. Nothing illegal about it.
One of the many police scandals in Missouri was STL city police selected towing firm wasn’t releasing cars to their owners or claiming them lost. Of course the cops (and the Chief’s daughter) had access to those ‘lost’, and/or were sold them.
Took 10 years, but the FBI finally started an investigation…
Red light cameras? Just another money grab by those in power. They always have and always will.