Capturing Red-Light Runners Creates Red-Faced Officials

This city’s effort to catch red-light runners with computerized cameras at busy intersections was meant to reduce traffic accidents.

What it has done, however, is provoke a civic backlash like few other issues in this politically placid city: a tangle of litigation, political foment, radio talk show meltdown, and now an embarrassing admission by the city that the controversial system has bugs.

As a result, 5,000 tickets issued to drivers who supposedly ran red lights were canceled last week, while the police chief promised to find an outside consultant to do an audit of the mess and reestablish the system’s credibility.

Further, a moratorium was placed on photo-tickets at any of the 19 intersections equipped with cameras until the consultant’s work is finished.

Both sides in the dispute are claiming the high moral ground.

Police Chief David Bejarano told reporters that he still believes the cameras are a good way to save lives by reducing the number of collisions caused by scofflaw drivers running red lights.

But attorneys representing several hundred people challenging tickets issued by the computerized system branded it both a threat to personal privacy and an unholy alliance between government and a money-making company.

“This is a very serious threat to the civil liberties of Americans,” said lawyer Arthur Tait. “These systems are run and operated entirely by private companies with a profit goal.”

In San Diego, that company is Washington-based Lockheed-Martin IMS, a subsidiary of the military-industrial giant.

For each ticket issued, the firm gets $70; last year, it received $1.76 million. The company’s take will escalate sharply as more intersections are covered throughout the state’s second-largest city.

Critics charge that Lockheed-Martin has rigged the system so that even law-abiding motorists are getting ticketed.

That theory got a boost last week when, as part of the lawsuit discovery process, the company conceded that sensors installed several months ago at three intersections were put in the wrong place. The sensors are used to determine whether a driver had time to stop before the light turned red.

Amnesty Declared For Three Intersections

Faced with the possibility that the messed-up sensors led to tickets being issued improperly, the city attorney proclaimed an amnesty for the three intersections. Drivers who had paid the $271 fine will have to wait until the audit is completed to see if they get a refund.

Bejarano also pledged to find an engineering firm to test all 19 intersections to make sure the sensors are now correct--which would confirm a judgment made by traffic inspectors.

“The whole situation was caused by innocent human error,” said Lockheed-Martin spokeswoman Kathleen Dezio. Still, “everyone who got a ticket did, we believe, run the red light.”

The camera system began in Europe four decades ago and has spread in the past 10 years to dozens of communities in the United States, including Los Angeles. The system is no stranger to controversy, but nowhere has the uproar been as uproarious as in San Diego.

Some drivers are removing their front license plates so the camera cannot “read” the plate and find the driver’s address. Police are responding by giving more fix-it tickets to drivers spotted without front plates.

One reason the controversy has hit high gear in San Diego may be that California has the nation’s steepest traffic fines and, unlike many states, assesses a negative point to the light-runner’s driving record, which can later contribute to higher car insurance rates.

Even San Diego police have been ticketed for running red lights in their squad cars when not rushing to emergencies. Officers are made to pay out of their own pockets.

San Diego Councilman Jim Madaffer, standing beside one of the camera-equipped intersections in his district, called for a halt to cameras until the public can be convinced that “we’re giving tickets to real scoundrels who run red lights and not to people who went into the intersection when the light was green and got trapped by the camera.”

In Washington, hearing complaints from numerous cities, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) decried “this expansion of government and this Orwellian threat to our privacy.” A week ago, he issued a report suggesting that cities are shortening yellow lights in order to catch more red-light runners.

Armey and others assert that local governments favor the cameras not because they decrease accidents, but because they mean more tickets, and more tickets mean more money.

The consensus of the traffic-engineering fraternity, however, is that the cameras decrease accidents and are quite fair. Camera proponents point to a study showing a sharp drop in accidents in Oxnard.

“The Armey report is wrong on completely everything,” said Richard Retting, senior transportation engineer with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. “To say that traffic-safety professionals are incompetent and conspiring to shorten yellow lights is lunacy.”

Expert Cites System as ‘a Trap Situation’

On the other hand, UC San Diego graduate student and lecturer Paul Akins is convinced the San Diego system is flawed. He’s serving as an expert witness for drivers who hired attorney Tait and his partner, Coleen Cusack.

“After looking at systems around the world, it seems the situation here is more of a trap situation with the turning of the yellow lights cranked down,” Akins said.

Pshaw, said Sgt. Ernie Adams of the Police Department’s traffic enforcement unit. He notes that the yellow-light times are set not by police or Lockheed-Martin but by city engineers using a Caltrans formula.

“People just don’t like getting tickets,” Adams noted.