How to beat A Camera Red Light Ticket
How to Fight your Red Light Camera Ticket and Why
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I'm Kelly Hastings I wanted to give some
pointers for fighting your red light
camera ticket specifically in Central
Florida you may know that I recently won
an appeal of from the city of Orlando
regarding my red light camera ticket and
the reason I was able to do that was I
had asked the police officer and the
court below some questions that helped
establish the record for my case what
you have to do is you can't just go into
the the hearing and argue under the the
case law from my case decision the
Hastings case that the court should
dismiss your cases that's not going to
happen unless you establish some
evidence the best thing to do really is
to wait until you get a uniform traffic
citation in the mail in other words
don't go to the hearing officer to argue
your ticket wait until you get a uniform
traffic citation in the mail ignore that
initial violation once you get the
uniform traffic citation the mail
request a hearing before a traffic judge
but either way whether you're below
before the local hearing officer that's
hired by the city or municipality or
whether you're in real traffic court
you're still going to have to establish
some evidence to win your case you can't
just go in there and argue it should be
dismissed based on the case law or you
have to establish some evidence the best
way to do that is to ask the police
officer that's going to be there or the
traffic infraction enforcement officer
some questions and the questions that
you need to ask have to establish that a
private vendor is the real entity that's
determining first off whether a
violation occurred in other words the
private vendor usually American Traffic
Solutions ATS they're the ones that make
the initial determination whether a
violation occurred you have to establish
that for the record so you can ask
questions of the of the traffic
infraction enforcement officer like does
a private vendor manage your camera
program does the private vendor collect
and review the videos before sending
them to you before sending them to the
traffic enforcement officer do they
forward all the videos or do they only
forward some of the videos to the law
enforcement officer and of the videos
they forward to you for review are a
majority of those doing
Jewellery of those result in the
violation so what you're really trying
to establish through this line of
questioning is that there's a private
company American Traffic Solutions are
another private company that's making
the initial determination that a
violation occurred before it's even sent
to law enforcement and if you can
establish that in the record through the
law enforcement officers testimony then
you have a chance to win your case so
once you've asked the officer those
questions you would then turn to the
judge and say judge I move to dismiss my
case because it's an improper delegation
of police power under the authority of
the city of Hollywood versus Aaron face
or the Hastings versus city of Orlando
case and we'll post links to those cases
in the comments so you can use them but
again I would you know number one
recommend getting an attorney because it
really is procedurally difficult to
fight these on your own but if you're
going to fight it on your own you have
to get some facts and evidence you've
got to ask the police officer those
questions so out of the gate we wanted
to talk about that but I also wanted to
get into you know why would you want to
fight your ticket why would you fight it
you know we hear a lot of kind of
negative commentary on people that fight
these things you know that people should
be accountable you just shouldn't run
red lights that it's a safety issue and
we're here today to debunk some of those
myths about red light cameras as well
but I first off wanted to show you when
you're looking at your red light camera
infraction where you can see whether you
actually ran a red light or not because
most of the violations are fractions of
a second and I've got a picture here
that we can show you that shows you how
to read the metadata bar on these
red-light camera pictures and what you
can look at is it's called the red one
interval in Orlando in Orange County
it's actually called the kögel our time
the our time interval but if you look at
it in this case it was point three
seconds in another case we have over
here was 0.1 seconds but anytime you see
the our time or the red one time you
know less than a second at point three
point two point one then that really
raises a question of whether you even
actually ran the red light because
there's a margin of error there and a
lot of it comes down to how the yellow
light intervals set which I've got David
Shaw here with me today
he's going to talk a little bit about
that we hear this all the time it's a
safety issue what are your thoughts on
that one David Shaw I've analyzed the
city of Orlando's ticket data analyzed
crash hit of for the county and what I
found has been rather troubling and
suggested it's it's a safety issue in
that it is not improving safety and in
fact it's very likely decreasing safety
on our roadways and when you're talking
about public safety why would you want
to keep a program that is actually
making you less safe on the roads and
the reason for that is we're using the
I'm sorry the state and the city and or
the county which our jurisdiction it may
be are generally using bare-bones
minimum yellow light times if we could
just increase the yellow light time by a
half a second or a second violations
would drop so much that these cameras
would become unprofitable and that just
would not be cost-effective for these
municipalities in the state or the
camera vendors really to keep them in
operation so they want to use yellows
that are short as possible and I've got
a case right here where a camera was
moved from Hiwassee and Claire Kona
Ocoee when the yellow light time was
increased to 5.9 seconds and violations
dropped from 97 a month on average to
just nine so that camera wasn't paying
for itself anymore
and that violation level stayed low for
15 months
so the violations did not rebound so
you're going to hear a lot of camera
proponents and camera vendors say that
people get used to longer yellow which
is just simply not true
there's local examples local examples of
that as well as national examples of
that so once that camera became
unprofitable 80s came in and amended the
contract with the county in late 2014
because they knew this thing
knew that the camera that camera and to
others in the county were losing money
so they had to move them to more
profitable locations so this camera was
moved down to turkey Lincoln Sand Lake
the yellow light time initially was 4.9
seconds sometime in July of last year of
2015 the yellow light time was then
shortened to 4.4 seconds yes we here
don't run red lights or I got just be
accountable for your actions just don't
run red lights but that's not as simple
as that
like we said most of these violations
are fractions of a second point one
seconds point two seconds you wouldn't
get a speeding ticket for going a half a
mile over the speed limit and weekly you
can't even get one for that and a police
officer that's if a police officer was
standing there watching you run a red
light at 0.1 seconds they wouldn't even
be able to tell with their eyes that
that had happened
it's like we've given more power to
these cameras than we even give to local
law enforcement because a local law
enforcement officer isn't going to
ticket someone for running a red light
at point one seconds
but a camera will so we've really
empowered this out-of-state company with
with our police power we've turned our
police power over to them and they're
giving tickets to people that wouldn't
be ticketed otherwise so I mean if you
look at this this is a picture of
violation um you know and here is what
we call like the metadata or
time bar time code stamp bar and it
gives you information like which lane
your vehicle was in how fast you were
traveling and it also tells you by how
much you supposedly ran the red light in
this case it was 0.3 seconds but this
data bar is not provided with the video
that ATS gives you so there's no way to
cross-reference still frame that shows
that you allegedly ran a red light with
the video evidence because the video
evidence doesn't contain this
information at least not on the videos
they send you
so it's an unfair I mean it's really
kind of a violation of your due process
rights that you're not able to see the
video evidence that you're being accused
according to your not able to see that
that video evidence is actually accurate
you're not able to cross-check it with
the photographs the system is inherently
unfair
