This sucks, as my law-school roommate from Tennessee used to say, “Big fat floppy donkey d*&k”! They say it’s about safety but you know it’s all about the cold cash.
Slow Down: That Golfer
May Be a Traffic Cop
Police Try Unorthodox Tactics
To Catch and Ticket Speeders;
Chicago’s Red-Light Cameras
By LOUISE STORY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 1, 2004; Page D1
Some of the millions of drivers hitting the road this holiday weekend will face some new surprises.
With budgets under pressure, police across the country are using some unorthodox tactics to ticket people who speed or run red lights. There are several burgeoning categories of enforcement. The most familiar is the cameras that catch speeders and red light runners: These highly effective tools are being deployed at many more intersections across the country. Police are also increasingly teaming up with officers from other towns to blanket a particular area with ticket-writing officials.
But in a more unusual approach to law enforcement, policemen are starting to don an array of disguises in order to track speeding drivers without attracting attention. Since November, officers in Wilmington, N.C., have dressed up as golfers looking for their ball at the edge of a golf course and disguised themselves as construction workers fixing street lights.
Outfitted with radar guns, they radio ahead to a partner dressed in a normal police uniform, who then tickets the offending drivers. Officers there have adopted the look of a homeless person, wearing a bandana, old Army jacket, and jeans with the knees cut out, a beat-up duffle bag at their side.
State police in Pennsylvania last month also started disguising some officers, dressing them in camouflage and deploying them to wooded areas alongside state roads. In one recent five-hour stretch, they gave out 27 speeding tickets, according to a spokesman from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. Law-enforcement officers in Maine, Florida and other states are also using disguises.
Police and transportation officials say that at a time when budgets have been cut and some resources diverted to federal homeland-security initiatives, these new tactics present a more effective way to curb aggressive driving and make the roads safer. But some argue that the motivation behind the new vigilance on traffic violations is more revenue-driven than safety-oriented. In some small towns, traffic ticket revenues make up a decent chunk of the budget.
Speeders and law-enforcement officials have long played a game of cat-and-mouse, and some of the latest police tactics are a response to drivers catching on to earlier methods.
In Maine, the state police tried sticking empty police cars in the highway median to try to get drivers to slow down. But as the cars accumulated dust and dirt, drivers quickly concluded there was not a ticketing threat.
The Maine state police have since begun using the officer disguises – but even now, they’re continually on the lookout for new outfits to keep drivers guessing. “I think a lot of them are gimmicky to the point where they don’t work for a long term period,” says Randall Nichols, an officer in the department’s operations division.
Also newly popular are “blitzes,” where police from several departments team up on drivers in one town with an unusually high number of cops. That allows towns that are too small to have dedicated traffic officers set up major speed traps.
Surge in Tickets
In January, Avon, Conn., which typically has only five or six officers on duty to handle all police matters, began teaming up with eight other central Connecticut towns to target traffic violators. It borrows a handful of officers to do nothing but give out tickets. The result: Some 50 to 60 traffic tickets are handed out a day, up from the fewer than 10 that are normally issued, says police chief Peter Agnesi. Police in Utah, New Mexico and Oregon have also led ticketing campaigns in the past year.
Perhaps the most popular new ticketing tools are the cameras, which are set up at intersections or alongside the road to catch both speeders and people who don’t stop properly at red lights. The city then mails the tickets to the car owners. In the past year alone, the number of cities with these cameras has increased to about 100 from 70, according to the two companies that sell most of the devices in the U.S., Affiliated Computer Services Inc. based in Dallas and Redflex Traffic Systems, Inc., of Scottsdale, Ariz.
The list of cities includes everywhere from Paramount, Calif., and Medford, Ore., to bigger cities like Albuquerque, N.M., and Providence, R.I. The city of Baltimore plans to install 18 more red-light cameras on top of the 47 it already has, says David Brown, spokesman for Baltimore City Department of Transportation.
Chicago, which installed the first of 10 red-light cameras in November, says the roads are already safer as a result. One of the cameras that caught 55 violators on its first day of operation now records 39 on average, says Brian Steele, assistant commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Transportation. The city is considering introducing speeding cameras as well, he says.
But another effect of the new tactics is that more tickets are being generated. The Wilmington, N.C., police, for example, typically write 34 tickets a day, but that jumps to 60 when they’re using disguises, says Sgt. David Register. Chicago has issued 32,000 tickets just as a result of the new cameras, says Mr. Steele.
Alternative to Tax Hike?
The District of Columbia, for example, raised more than $85 million from traffic violators in its fiscal year 2002, or about 2.5% of its total revenue that year. But in cities with a smaller tax base, that number can shoot up. In the village of Woodstock, Vt., for instance, income from traffic violations amounts to about 15% of revenues.
“You can be ticketing people and that’s extra money for you without having to raise taxes,” says Eric Skrum, spokesman for the National Motorists Association, based in Waunakee, Wis. He says engineering problems, such as overly short yellow-light times, are behind many of red-light violations. Some cities, he says, don’t want to fix the engineering problems because then they’d lose the revenue from the tickets.
Miffed Car Owners
In some cases, the cameras have created controversy. Some drivers in Chicago, for example, complained that they had received tickets in the mail for violations that occurred when someone else was driving their car. California, one of the earliest states to use the cameras, takes photos of the drivers of the cars as well as the license tags. It charges a fine of between $310 and $361 for drivers who run a red light, and even adds a point to their license. Non-commercial drivers who amass four points from traffic violations of any kind within a year get their licenses suspended.
Write to Louise Story at louise.story@wsj.com
I can definitely see why people would get radar detectors and such. Also, check this out:
Spray vs. Spy: Devices
Aim to Thwart Cameras
By MICHELLE HIGGINS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 1, 2004; Page D4
As quickly as police come out with new ways to nab speeders, companies are creating devices to help drivers circumvent those efforts.
Now, as more cities roll out traffic-enforcement cameras to catch lawbreakers in action, companies are peddling everything from reflective covers to spray-on films to make license plates unreadable when the camera flashes.
“It’s like the arms race,” says Bill Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations in Washington, D.C. “First police came up with radar, then there were radar detectors. Police came out with lasers, then companies came up with laser detectors.”
Some of the new products are decidedly low tech. Super Protector, a clear license-plate cover, sold by RadarBusters.com is designed to obscure license-plate numbers when viewed from above or the side by a camera. PhantomPlate Inc., Harrisburg, Pa., says its $30 spray makes a license plate so reflective it causes a glare when the camera’s flash goes off, overexposing the image.
But the reflective sprays and covers may be effective for only so long. A bill prohibiting the use of the spray in New York is pending in the state Senate. And in Chicago, which started rolling out a red-light camera program in November, Brian Steele, a spokesman for the Chicago Department of Transportation, says the city’s cameras are at an angle to diminish any light reflection.
At the same time, radar-gun detectors are getting increasingly more sophisticated to combat advances in radar guns. Earlier this year, Beltronics USA, Westchester, Ohio, rolled out a new line of detectors able to identify radar guns using “POP mode” technology, which can measure vehicle speeds in a quick short burst without triggering most radar detectors. POP mode is “a threat if you happen to live in a neighborhood with it,” says Craig Peterson, president of RadarTest.com, which posts information about new speed-measuring technology and tactics for getting around it. He says he’s found that some detectors can pick up on guns with POP mode. However, he says, few police departments are using it.
John Broxon, product manager for MPH Industries Inc., a Owensboro, Ky., maker of POP-mode radar guns, disagrees with the claim that POP-mode guns can be detected. “Radar-detector companies have been trying to find ways to defeat the capability and have not being able to do so,” Mr. Broxon says.
All of these products are captivating motorists and infuriating lawmakers. Radar detectors in passenger cars are legal in most states, except for Virginia. They’re also illegal in Washington, D.C.
Though the companies say they aren’t trying to aid scofflaws in any way, their Web sites unabashedly tout their products as a way to get out of tickets. PhantomPlate.com flashes banners such as: “Fight back! Avoid costly traffic tickets.”
The companies say they aren’t encouraging people to break the law. Rather, says Joe Scott, marketing director for PhantomPlate, they aim to protect “the average law-abiding person” from law-enforcement methods that he says are aimed at increasing ticket revenue rather than curbing accidents.
Nathan Abraham, a pharmaceutical salesman from Glen Burnie, Md., says he bought the spray after he got a $75 ticket he says he didn’t deserve. “I don’t condone running red lights,” says Mr. Abraham.
“But there are situations beyond your control when you have to go through the red light,” such as when an ambulance needs to get through. He says he knows the spray works because once he saw the camera flash as he went through a red light to let an ambulance pass and he didn’t received a ticket.
Even if lawmakers succeed in banning the spray, motorists aren’t showing signs of relenting. PhantomPlate says sales have skyrocketed: In the past year, the company has sold over 100,000 bottles.
Write to Michelle Higgins at michelle.higgins@wsj.com
