The Chicago Sun-Times reports that the Windy City’s police chief has issued new guidelines for the use of deadly force (shooting people, in layman’s terms). “Chicago cops will now be permitted to shoot at drivers or passengers in cases of felons fleeing in motor vehicles.” And there you have it, minus the shit storm that’s brewing on this bad boy. Of course, all TV cops already have that right, so why not the Chi Town Po-Po? “The liability to the City of Chicago could be astronomical.” Ah. Previously, on America’s Most Amazing Parting Shots, “Officers were allowed to use deadly force to prevent death or great bodily harm to themselves or another person, but it didn’t allow them to use force to apprehend a fleeing forcible felon,” said the paper’s police source. “If confronted by an oncoming vehicle, officers were simply told to get out of the way, unless they were put in great danger.” Good thing the policy told them to get out of the way, I suppose. Anyway, the cops have already gone into damage control mode.
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.
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.
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.
A Sanford homicide suspect was arrested around midnight on Saturday when he ran a red light in Orlando.
Sanford police had been searching for Sergio Henderson after Robert J. Johnson, 37, was found dead near West 10th Street and Olive Avenue on Monday. Police believe there was a fight outside when the shooting occurred.
Henderson, 22, had just been released from prison on June 3. Since May of 2006 he had been serving time on offenses including battery on a law enforcement officer, burglary and vehicle theft.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the new federal “pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg is about to cap the execs working for GM, GMAC, Chrysler and Chrysler Financial. Well, restructure or “renegotiate” their salaries, bonuses and benefits. As Dan Rather might say, what’s the frequency, Kenneth? Less obliquely, the four auto industry recipients, all of whom owe their existence to billion dollar blessings from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), must send Ken new exec pay, perks and bennies guidelines by August 13. At which time the man originally tipped to be President Obama’s Car Czar (mooted by a 25-member task force) will decide whether or not he likes their proposals. If he doesn’t . . .
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.”
Speed camera vendor American Traffic Solutions (ATS) next month will use its automated ticketing expertise to run a litter camera program for Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Under first-of-its-kind initiative, city workers will drive around photographing neighborhoods with special cameras hooked into a Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite tracking device. The workers will be looking to capture homes that might have litter, weeds or trash on their lawn so that a hefty fine can be imposed.
The East Sussex, UK, police are attempting to have speed camera photographs removed from websites, claiming they represent copyrighted material. In particular, the police are targeting a set of images taken in June 2008 that motorcyclist Peter Barker used to prove that a radar device that clocked him at 38 MPH must have been wrong. Based on measurements of the photographic evidence, a Brighton Magistrates Court judge agreed and threw out the case against Barker. These are the photographs of Barker’s alleged infraction that East Sussex Police are trying to ban: photo one and photo two.
Red light cameras have come under fire recently for focusing on vehicles that make right turns on red, a maneuver that is rarely responsible for causing an accident. But even cities that do not issue many right turn tickets focus on another type of violation that is not dangerous. According to data obtained from the city of Fullerton, California, tickets mailed to the owners of vehicles entering a through intersection less than a second after the light turned red added up to nearly $1 million last year. These technical violations rarely cause accidents. A 2004 Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) study showed that right angle accidents—the type caused by straight-through violations of red signals at intersections—do not happen until an average of nine seconds after the signal had changed from yellow to red (view study).
The Washington state Department of Licensing has pulled O&J Sales’ license after finding 22 cars were contaminated by methamphetamine, reports The Whidby News Times. The cars, worth $70,000, were crushed due to the high cost of cleaning them to state standards. And those high state standards (0.1 micrograms per 100 square centimeters, 15 times the California standard) are a cause of frustration for the lot’s owner. “If the standards were applied to every car dealership in the state, most of them would go out of business,” says O&J owner Mark Brown, noting that one of the crushed vehicles was bought from a state police auction. Unfortunately for Brown, his lot was raided in March, when police found 94 grams of meth. This led to the arrest of Brown’s son, the lot’s manager. The O&J building tested at 5,200 times the legal limit for meth on a swab test. The shutdown of O&J is the first meth contamination-based closure on record.
In a speech last week before the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), a road safety expert argued that speed limits should be based on engineering, not political considerations. Chad Dornsife, executive director of the Best Highway Safety Practices Institute made his case to an ITE annual meeting in Denver, Colorado. “The solution is to properly engineer our roadways to facilitate the optimum flow of traffic, a prescription that would reduce our total vehicular carbon footprint and improve roadway safety,” Dornsife said. “The future is in educating motorists to drive safely via safety campaigns that promote keep right except to pass, yielding, courtesy, and safety practices that are based in fact. Programs that create jobs, reduce our carbon footprint, pollution, and improve the safety and efficiency of our infrastructure.”
Canadian activists are turning to the courts to stop the controversial photo radar program in Winnipeg. On Thursday, the Road Safety Awareness Group filed a claim in the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench seeking the refund of $177 million CAD in tickets issued, plus additional damages. The suit names city and provincial officials as well as Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), the Dallas-based contractor that runs the program; its predecessor, Lockheed Martin IMS; and Gatsometer BV, the Dutch company that makes the speed camera equipment. Rather than focus on legal issues, the suit attempts to expose the unseemly manner in which the photo radar program was approved by the province of Manitoba in 2002 and implemented in Winnipeg the following year. The suit argues that ACS and Lockheed used bogus safety and financial statistics to convince officials to use the company as its sole vendor. The program happened to be quite useful to the companies’ other business lines.
Last night, I watched a Flood Automotive Group TV ad touting “Cash for Clunkers.” The message was simple: Uncle Sam’s got $1 billion for clunkers. Come get $4500 for your clunker. Not a single word about which vehicles qualify for the money. It didn’t even refer viewers to a website for details—like this ad for C4C “designated” dealer Phil Fitts Ford. A quick ring ’round twenty dealers nationwide shows a definite “reluctance” to discuss the particulars of the CARS program over the phone. “I’m sure your vehicle will qualify,” a Chrysler dealer told me re: my theoretical 2005 Chrysler 300. “Bring it down and we’ll have a look.”
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