Chicago Red Light Cameras Issue Thousands of Bogus Tickets

mpicpp points out a report in the Chicago Tribune saying that thousands of the city's drivers have been wrongfully ticketed for red light violations because of "faulty equipment, human tinkering, or both." The Tribune's investigation uncovered the bogus tickets by analyzing the data from over 4 million tickets issued in the past seven years. Cameras that for years generated just a few tickets daily suddenly caught dozens of drivers a day. One camera near the United Center rocketed from generating one ticket per day to 56 per day for a two-week period last summer before mysteriously dropping back to normal. Tickets for so-called rolling right turns on red shot up during some of the most dramatic spikes, suggesting an unannounced change in enforcement. One North Side camera generated only a dozen tickets for rolling rights out of 100 total tickets in the entire second half of 2011. Then, over a 12-day spike, it spewed 563 tickets — 560 of them for rolling rights. Many of the spikes were marked by periods immediately before or after when no tickets were issued — downtimes suggesting human intervention that should have been documented. City officials said they cannot explain the absence of such records.

Comments

The way I fought my ticket...

[mi]

By appealing and not agreeing to "settle" with the prosecution — in fact, I did not even want to "talk to them" other than during a hearing and in judge's presence. This made it necessary for the actual officer, who (supposedly) reviewed the ticket before it was issued, to appear in court — which he didn't do. Maybe, I was just "lucky" at that and, maybe, Chicago would've allowed the prosecution to avoid presenting the officer for testimony, but...

The automatic cameras allow for issuing a massive number of tickets — because human police don't need to do much work. If more people appealed — thus necessitating the human policemen's presence in court for each such ticket, maybe, they wouldn't be such a valuable proposition for the local authorities.