The city of Española is mulling whether to follow Albuquerque’s lead and install cameras to monitor whether drivers run red lights.
“If you drive around here, in my opinion, we have a lot of people who just disobey driving laws,” Española Public Safety Chief Julien Gonzales said.
Gonzales met with a representative for Redflex Traffic Sysytems Inc, an Arizona-based photo enforcement agency Aug. 2 for an informational briefing. The issue came up during a City Council meeting July 29, when Councilor Cecilia Lujan, who is on the Public Safety Commitee, asked the police department to look into the use of the cameras.
It is a basic public safety concern, Gonzales said, and the city is trying to see if it can manage it a little bit better.
“The technology is there,” Gonzales said, “It’s pretty plain. The light has to be red before you enter a certain part of the intersection,” he said.
So drivers stuck in traffic who end up in the middle of an intersection when the light turns red will not be penalized, he said. According to Darren Kolack, the Redflex regional sales manager who met with Gonzales, the photo, along with streaming video of the vehicle before and after an alleged offense, goes to the company’s base in Arizona, where three people look at it and have to come to the same conclusion as to whether or not a violation has occurred. If they agree a violation has occurred, the incriminating photos and streaming video are sent to the Española Police Department for approval. A citation is then mailed to the driver.
The proposal is only in the planning stages and details such as what recourse a vehicle owner who is ticketed for running a red light would have when he or she is not the driver, have yet to be worked out.
According to Gonzales the administrative citation will not go against points on a driver’s license. The driver also has the option to contest the citation before a hearing officer.
Potential locations for the cameras are at the intersection of Fairview Lane and Riverside Drive and in front of the Wal-Mart parking lot on Riverside Drive, Gonzales said.
Redflex also markets cameras that catch speeders, which Gonzales said he will bring up to the council.
If the cameras were to be installed the city would have the ultimate say in how they are used, Kolack said. In Albuquerque, where the cameras are already in use the cameras take a photo of the make and model of the vehicle, but not the driver, he said. Whether or not the same process is used in Española depends on how the city’s ordinance is set up.
“It’s really the ordinance governing the use of the system,” he said. “We’ll basically cater the plan to whatever the city requires.”
Along with setting up an administrative process, the city decides what is photographed and how many seconds of streaming video are recorded before and after an incident occurs so that extenuating circumstances are taken into account, Kolack said.
“The city would set requirements for the parameters of the system,” he said.
Coming up with an administrative process to attach to the cameras can get sticky, said Peter Simonson, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico.
“The devil is really in the details with these cameras,” he said.
One of the main problems is that what are traditionally criminal proceedings become administrative when the cameras come into play. Of the issues that Simonson has seen with this is that drivers who receive tickets from red-light cameras do not face the same consequences as those cited by police. Simonson said another issue to look into is whether or not the lights are going into areas that have an impact on pubic safety.
“We’re supposed to have a system of disinterested justice,” he said, “When you open up the opportunity to bring in money it opens the system up to corruption. The public needs to ask, what’s motivating the city? Is it for public safety? Or for pumping money into its coffers?”
Councilor Dennis Salazar said his main priority is the overall safety of the community.
“This could possibly save lives,” he said. “It is something I am very excited to look at.”
Looking is all that the council will be doing at the Aug. 19 Publish Safety Committe meeting, Salazar said.
“At this point we want to see if the pros outweigh the cons or if the cons outweigh the pros.” he said. “And just take it from there.”
Salazar said it is still too early to discuss any specifics on the issue, such as where funding would come from or how the system would be implemented.
‘We’re just wanting to get all the information we can and see if it is in the best interest of the city,” he said.
If the committee decides it wants to pursue the issue it would go to the next Public Safety Committee meeting then after that to a city council meeting for a vote. But for now, Salazar said the committee is concentrating on looking at all the facts and statistics, as well as how the system is working in other cities such as Albuquerque.