Camera Frauded – I WON the WAR !!!

It should be stated before I write this post that I am a supporter of CameraFraud.com a local Phoenix based group that is protesting the use of photo radar (aka cop-arazzi) cameras in our state. I am not however opposed to the “proper” use of these units, say at a school zone where the speed is 15mph and people often fly through at 45 or places where they would make a difference but not left on interstates for weeks at a time to snap pics of people going 11mph over the limit.

In Germany the famous Autobahn runs smoothly, mainly because people WILL figure out how fast to travel and in general it’s not faster than they feel comfortable. Case and point, traveling through Texas several years ago, I found no signs of law enforcement for all 800 miles of Texas, I ran at about 85mph and all was fine, when I thought the road warranted slower speeds, I slowed down. It’s human nature, it’s instinct and it works.

OK I digressed

So this morning I checked the mail and found that I had been sent a cop-arazzi greeting card (aka photo radar/red light camera ticket). I opened the citation and checked out the pictures and quickly realized that it was not for me, the license had been misread by some underpaid and overworked clerk that likely looked at 500 or more pictures that day alone and made a bad judgment with a few of the letters in my tag.

Being the good citizen that I am, I attempted to alert the company that is contracted with the City who issued the citation to make them aware there was an error and the nice lady on the other end (we’ll call her Susan), said she would look into and get back to me.

At about 2:30 she did get back to me and said that all I had to do was fill out the form, section B and all would be fine, NOT SO FAST, what I was about to do was the same as signing a ticket on the street, Not an admission of guilt but promising that I would appear in court to then clear things up.

Being an upstanding citizen and trying to save the court system from having to dismiss a case for someone’s bad judgment, I demanded to speak to a supervisor, that person kept me on hold for 15 minutes so I did what any other upstanding citizen would do, I emailed.

I emailed the people that needed to help me along with a picture of my motorcycle and the red light camera picture. I  started with the Honorable Governor Jan Brewer, next the police chief from the city that issued the citation and whose officer had testified on the citation that it was accurate, followed by the Representative for my election district and lastly the company that actually issued the citation and operates the cameras.

This email was sent at 3pm along with the attached picture, and wouldn’t you know it, that by 4:30pm I had a phone call from the officer that signed the citation, apologizing for misreading my tag and letting me know that it was a mistake and it was all taken care of now.