Automated traffic enforcement
 

I came home to day to find a nice letter from the "Traffic Violations Bureau"

"Hmm, I wonder what this is..." I thought.

I open it up to find a piece of paper with 4 photographs printed on it in black and white.
The top image is of a car just before the crosswalk.
The second is of the car in the intersection (in front of the crosswalk).
The third is a closeup of the license plate.
And the fourth pic is a closeup shot of my face.

"WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS!!" I thought.

I looked at all the text on the side, which is simple. It has my name, address, date of birth, time of day the photo was taken, my weight, my height. Everything on the text part of the form is correct, except one thing. The license plate is not from my car.

The intersection where this happened is no where near me, in fact it says I ran this light at 9:26 a.m. going east bound at Beverly and Robertson. That's like 4 cities away from where I was at that time, which was in my office fighting to stay awake.

The color of the car is incorrect, and the photos are not even of me.

Should I just throw this letter in the trash?
Or should I pay it or what?

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BoneProne Family Member

Take it to that city attorney and get it cleared now. Trash or ignore and the man on de bench signs the warrant...

Make sure YOU have a copy of it for the future too. Just read aome articles about the redlight cams and some of the BS caused by them. Bench warrants are shoved in front of judges in stacks and they just sign them. So they don't know what they are even signing them for. Nor care. But the cops will!

They have had this in Germany since the 70's.

Since the license plate is clearly not from your car, I would fight it absolutely.

Regards,

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Midnight
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Excellence is not an act, but a habit - Aristotle

[This message has been edited by Midnight (edited 08-02-2001).]

I don't know. This not being my fault, why should I have to deal with it? I should some how be compensated for all the time this mess is going to take to clear up. I'm looking at an hour on the phone at least. Who knows how many times I'm going to have to call and confirm that it's been cleared. It's already giving me a headache...

I wonder what would happen if I sent it to John Stossel. You know, the guy from Dateline NBC, he does that segment called "Give Me A Break".

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BoneProne Family Member

You'd have the warrant out before Stossel ever saw it for one thing... two, civic duty dictates that you don't hold them responsible for errors and to help correct the error... sort of like jury duty pays 7 bucks a day here. lol

They will give you a note to Kevin if you're late to office tho... http://bbs.gofuckyourself.com/board/wink.gif

We have those here in Phoenix as well -- the cameras are either mounted on the top of the stop lights (if they are looking for red light violations -- we're like the worst in the country for accidents from running red lights) or they are on the electric/phone poles where they put the radar vans for speed zones --

If a ticket is mailed it's to the registrant of the license plate -- and if the person driving wasn't the car owner then both the car owner and the driver have to go to the court date in order to get it switched (we've had it happen to a couple people in our office) which is a pain in the ass.

However -- the big thing when I moved out here last year was the actual enforceability of the tickets themselves -- the issue being that the courts couldn't prove they were being received (why they didn't send them registered mail I don't know) and therefore they couldn't warrant you for not paying. One of the towns around here had to hire like 200 people to go hand serve their tickets since they also have an expiration on them and if they haven't been taken care of the court has to assume they were never received.

Not saying thats true in your case by any means, more like an example of ineptitude in government...

I have mixed feelings about those. On the one hand how can the same type of people who run the post office NOT screw this up. On the other hand so many people run red lights there are not enough cops to catch them - and one of them might hit me. This would be a great system if it actually worked.