Police in Frankston, Australia used automobile seizure laws this weekend to impound a toy motorcycle belonging to a little girl. While under her father’s supervision, Laney Frankland, 5, had been riding in circles around a reserve near the end of a neighborhood cul-de-sac on a 49cc motorbike. Police arrived on the scene late in the afternoon to tell the little girl that she was not supposed to be riding in that location. The officers then summoned a tow truck to take away her bike. The girl ran to her mother. “I thought she had hurt herself,” Tracey Frankland explained in an interview with 3AW Radio. “She came back and she was hysterical. Her face was bright red and tears were pouring down her face. Now she thinks the police are bad.”

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The state of Arizona began deploying speed cameras on freeways last year for the stated purpose of slowing drivers. Scottsdale was the first jurisdiction in the state to use such cameras and issued $17 million worth of automated freeway tickets before the state took over the program. The city paid a local professor $75,000 to create a study to show that drivers had slowed. An expert in radar technology produced a report last month insisting that is not the case.

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A California judge last week began throwing out red light camera citations issued in Santa Ana. Orange County Superior Court Commissioner Kenneth Schwartz declared the city’s program void because it had ignored several provisions of state law. Local attorneys Mark D. Sutherland and R. Allen Baylis had challenged the city for its failure to provide the required thirty-day warning period before beginning the program and its use of a prohibited per-ticket “cost neutral” compensation scheme.

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The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling last Tuesday imposing restrictions on the ability of Indian tribes to use roadblocks to detain motorists who are not tribal members. The court examined the case of motorist Terry Bressi who was stopped at a checkpoint on the Tohono O’odham Reservation in Pima County, Arizona while traveling on State Route 86 on December 20, 2002. Tribal police, Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service agents manned the roadblock.

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It takes £2,239,300,000 (US $3,749,250,000) in subsidies to operate mass transit programs in the UK’s capital city, according to the Transport for London Annual Report and Statement of Accounts released this week. These subsidies come from a number of taxes imposed on motorists who in many cases do not use public transportation. London’s most burdensome levy on drivers, the congestion charge, is so inefficient that for every £10 taken from drivers, £6 is spent on the bureaucracy required to administer the charge.

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The benefits of a mandated increase in yellow light timing at photo enforced intersections in Georgia have not diminished after six months. In response, the city of Norcross is dumping red light cameras while Duluth is keeping them. The Norcross City Council made its final decision Monday based on the continued low number of violations following the timing change. The city of Duluth, on the other hand, voted last week to keep cameras even though the number of potential tickets has not increased.

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Motorists who passed by speed cameras and red light cameras yesterday in the province of Caserta, Italy were greeted by the sight of the devices shrouded in black plastic trash bags. They were not vandalized. The carabinieri — a national police force — affixed official warning notices explaining that the cameras were in “protective custody under Article 321.” An investigation is underway into possible fraudulent conduct on the part of local officials in thirty-three municipalities as well as fourteen private companies who operated the equipment under contract. In addition to seizing camera equipment, documents were taken from the offices of both photo enforcement companies and local police chiefs and mayors.

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Arizona’s Department of Public Safety frequently issues press releases with the boast that it’s running the “first ever” freeway speed camera program in the United States. This, of course, is not true. The state of Illinois began allowing a private company to deploy speed camera vans on freeways in May 2006. The true claim to the title, however, goes to the state of Hawaii. The Aloha state’s speed camera program lasted five months—before intense public pressure sent the camera vans packing.

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RSA’s Saturday Star reports that a set of speed cameras in Johannesburg accused a Geely automobile of reaching impossible speeds. On April 26, a camera on the N12 South flashed the Chinese import belonging to motorist Francisca Al-Halaseh near Canada Road Bridge. Just 19 seconds later, according to the tickets, she was flashed driving 102km/h (63 MPH) in an 80km/h (50 MPH) zone at Randshow Road Bridge. The only problem is that those locations are 2.9 miles apart, meaning Al-Halaseh would have to have been traveling 549 miles per hour.

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Black motorists may be as much as three times more likely to be stopped and searched than a white motorist while driving through the state of West Virginia, even though they are less likely to be carrying contraband. This is so according to a report by the state Division of Criminal Justice Services. The agency performed a statistical analysis of 301,479 traffic stops that took place between April 2007 and September 2008. Among all 348 state, county and local law enforcement agencies, blacks were 64 percent more likely than whites to be stopped. Hispanics were 48 percent more likely to be stopped.

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Red light camera and speed camera manufacturers fear that last month’s US Supreme Court ruling in the case Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts could create legal turmoil for the industry. The National Campaign to Stop Red Light Running issued a statement yesterday warning that the ruling has armed motorists with a greater ability to challenge the basis of automated traffic citations. Speed cameras, for example, depend heavily on legal faith in a certificate that claims to confirm the total reliability of a machine’s speed reading. In the Melendez-Diaz case, the high court ruled that merely producing such a certificate in court is insufficient. Defendants have the right to cross-examine any individual who claims to have certified evidence.

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The US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri last week threw out a challenge to a red light camera program based on federal anti-racketeering statutes. The city of Arnold was first in the state to set up automated ticketing machines in 2005, a move that the attorney general at the time suggested was illegal. A group of motorists filed suit against the city and American Traffic Solutions (ATS), the private company responsible for issuing the $94.50 tickets. The ticket recipients charged that the way ATS and Arnold colluded to extract cash from vehicle owners was similar to an organized criminal enterprise. This is a violation that would, they argued, fall under the RICO Act which was codified in 1970 as a tool to fight the mafia.

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Heath, Ohio, was so anxious to start collecting on its new speed camera program that it issued $26,500 worth of tickets before the program was officially supposed to begin. The city’s mayor, Richard J. Waugh, issued a statement Monday confirming that refunds would be automatic for each of the 265 vehicle owners mailed a ticket for alleged violations that took place on June 30. Redflex Traffic Systems, the Australian company that actually runs the program, was not supposed to have begun issuing tickets until July 1.

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An independent statistics watchdog agency that reports directly to the UK parliament issued a report yesterday criticizing a key element of the government’s road casualty figures. The UK Statistics Authority praised the general credibility of numbers generated by the Department for Transport (DfT), but the agency threatened to withhold the designation of “national statistics” from DfT reports if the department failed by November to reform the system of serious injury data collection known as STATS19. “The major unmet user need is for statistical information about road casualties that reflect the well-documented fact that the STATS19 system under-records the numbers of those injured in road accidents and the severity of injuries,” the Statistics Authority report explained.

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Fullerton, California believes its right to due process was deprived during a red light camera trial last year, and now the city is spending thousands in an attempt to overturn the judge’s ruling. On Thursday, the Orange County Superior Court’s Appellate Division is scheduled to hear a motion that would, in effect, put a motorist who walked away with a court dismissal nine months ago back on trial for the exact same offense. Fullerton’s complaint is that Presiding Judge Robert J. Moss decided the case in November without input from the city attorney. “The appellate proceedings were thus a sham and not representative of justice or a proper adversarial search for truth and the rule of law, as to the issues purportedly decided on appeal,” the city’s brief, addressed to Judge Moss, stated. “The city of Fullerton respectfully moves this court to immediately… order that the superior court rescind its order dismissing the citation and dismissing the guilty count in this matter.”

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