Red light camera schemes are about money
Turning us each upside down and collecting whatever falls out of pockets is too cumbersome a way for government to raise money. Red light cameras make the dollars flow with almost no effort. The House of Representatives voted to authorize towns to begin using them.
Supporters of the bill revealed themselves when they agreed to drop a prohibition on passengers carrying open containers of alcohol in motor vehicles. Alcohol, a majority of House members concluded, is less of a menace to others than drivers going through red lights.
Red light camera schemes are about money. Cities and towns share the dough with contractors, who sometimes give a piece of the action to local powerbrokers. Red light camera laws create a garden of corruption. Nearly as bad, they further alienate citizens from their grasping government.
“If you do a quick Google search, you’ll find that many municipalities pulled out of red light camera operations because oftentimes, they are not leading to safer outcomes, resulting in more rear-end collisions,” Attorney David McGuire, of the American Civil Liberties Union, told WTNH in January. “We know these are also disproportionately put in Black and Brown communities acting essentially as another tax.”
A program that makes the poor poorer but government richer won the support of 104 of the 151 members of the House of Representatives.
The administration of alleged red light camera violations has featured broad failures. In Baltimore several years ago, thousands of drivers received violation notices certifying to their accuracy by an officer who had been dead for two years.
Mourners in a police-escorted funeral procession in Florida were dismayed to receive tickets for violating a local red light law, caught on camera, of course. The presumption of innocence is discarded because enforcers believe their cameras never lie — even when there may be a police officer waving the bereaved through an intersection.
Four years ago, the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, CCM, explained its support for red light camera laws. In written testimony to the legislature, CCM stated, “It is no secret that the fiscal challenges facing both the state and local governments are unprecedented. It is cost prohibitive to place an officer on every street corner to make our roads safe.” Try to imagine the dystopian society with a police officer on every street corner. Or a government camera.
Communities around the nation have suspended or terminated red light camera traffic enforcement programs in the face of corruption and public protests. In Chicago, the city settled a $38 million class action suit for manipulating late fees on what are always described as modest fines but escalate.
Over the long run of the past 50 years, motor vehicle fatalities have decreased substantially. Motor vehicle designs have included frequent and effective safety improvements. The advent of Uber and Lyft have taken untold numbers of drunk drivers off our roads.
The fight over authorizing red light cameras in Connecticut has been waged for more than a decade — one more indication of the amount of money at stake. In 2012, Andrew Schneider was the executive director of the state chapter of the ACLU. He was an essential and effective voice in defeating this misbegotten plan.
His arguments continue to ring as true as a clarion bell. “The presumption that the owner of the car and the driver are one and the same is often wrong, yet the owner is always ticketed,” Schneider wrote 11 years ago. “Also, when a police officer pulls someone over, the driver has a chance to explain any extenu
ating circumstance and the officer may recognize that, for instance, the driver was moving out of the way of an emergency vehicle.”
Schneider also pointed out that contracts between governments and red light cameras may limit law enforcement’s discretion in enforcing alleged violations. Red light contractors sometimes share large chunks of the money raised from fines. Government and contractors have an incentive to gouge the public.
What also has not changed since officials and others have been trying to foist this money spinner on drivers is the weak state of ethics provisions and enforcement in Connecticut cities and towns. The latest red light camera ploy should not be considered by the legislature until every town that wants to use it to punish its residents agrees to be governed by the state’s ethics code — and to submit to the jurisdiction of the state’s ethics agency.
Applying meaningful ethics rules to local officials ought to enjoy a place far higher on legislators’ to-do lists than embracing one more way to penalize drivers and chip away at our civil liberties.
Kevin F. Rennie, of South Windsor, is a lawyer and a former Republican state senator and representative.