Last week a judge in Hamilton County, Ohio, ruled that speed cameras in a local community just north of Cincinnati are illegal:

Hamilton County Judge Robert Ruehlman’s emphatic and colorful decision was adorned with capital letters, bold print and exclamation points. In it, he said two speed cameras in the village of Elmwood Place, which were installed last year and caused considerable controversy in the community, violated drivers’ “due process guarantees” under the Ohio Constitution.

“Elmwood Place is engaged in nothing more than a high-tech game of 3 CARD MONTY,” Ruehlman wrote. “It is a scam that the motorists can’t win.”

He wrote in his opinion that even when drivers request a hearing to contest the $105 fines, “the hearing is nothing more than a sham!” The judge said any driver who comes in for a hearing will effectively have to argue against a written report “produced by the company that owns the speed monitoring unit.” There is no ability to cross examine, Ruehlman wrote, while stressing the financial stake the company has in the tickets.

Another issue Ruehlman brought up is the issue of calibration of these cameras:

“The device was not calibrated by a certified police officer, but rather it was calibrated by Optotraffic, the corporation that owns the device,” Judge Ruehlman wrote. “Remember, Optotraffic has a financial stake in the game.”

Regular radar guns are calibrated by police officers, who have no financial gain off of tickets. Here the calibration is done by someone with a direct financial stake, so that is motive to lie and falsify documents.

For those not familiar with the financial game of these cameras, the company that manufacturer them gets a portion of each ticket. In Elwood Place, as well as many others, they end up receiving 40% of every ticket. So in Elmwood Place, each $105 ticket translates to $42 for the company that owns and operates the camera.

About 20 miles northwest of Elmwood Place is New Miami, which also happens to be the next town over for me. They also have these cameras installed and have made a ton of money off of them:

In mid-December of last year, New Miami police had certified more than 9,700 violations since installing two mobile speed cameras in the village Oct. 1 and collected more than $210,000. That’s more than double the $101,300 generated by its police levy and 2012 general fund budget appropriation.

The struggling village has become dependent upon the revenue generated by these cameras. This really reduces faith we have in government. It was so bad that they even had to dismiss a lot of the tickets because they were getting a little too sneaky:

Police Chief Kenneth Cheeck says the cameras have made the streets safer. One camera was hidden in the trees on the west side of town. It has since been taken down. The 1,600 tickets generated from it were all dismissed.

Now that was nice for the people who learned the tickets were dismissed or hadn’t paid them yet. For the ones who went home and mailed off a check, well they just gave away $95 for nothing.

But luckily we now have a group of lawmakers ready to put an end to this scam:

Tri-state legislators said they will support the new law. They said they want to ban the speed camera across the state.

Rep. Dale Mallory, of Cincinnati, said he will introduce House Bill 69 at a press conference Monday. State Reps. Ron Maag, John Becker, Alicia Reece and Wes Retherford will joing Mallory in supporting the plan.

Hopefully their legislation passes, as these cameras raise a lot of legal, as well as constitutional, concerns. The incentive for the owners of the cameras to cheat are high and our legal system should not become a source of profit for the private sector. If for some reason the legislation does fail, hopefully something can take its place stating that the cameras must be owned by the local municipality and remove the huge financial incentives given to the private sector in the current system.