A woman drives with both hands on the wheel. Her phone sits face-down on her lap. No officer pulls her over. No lights flash. Weeks later, a $1,251 ticket arrives in the mail. The evidence: a single frame from a Camera surveillance app. The charge: phone use while driving.
Automated camera companies market their devices as automated license plate readers — tools for catching stolen cars, flagging warrants, and aiding serious investigations.
Sold as a Crime Tool. Used as a Fine Machine.
I don’t know what town it is exactly (Kirkland or Kenmore, WA), and they had a speed limit posted as 30mph., but gave my friend a ticket for going over 28 in a 25 zone. They grayed out the speed limit in the photo they sent that was approved by a cop. My friend would’ve had to go and get a picture of the sign to prove what assholes they were. I remember the sign and know for a fact that it said 30. Not enough to fight it, but enough to stay the fuck away from that town.
Some towns literally just exist to extract money from nonlocals who don’t know to not go through there. There’s one near where I grew up that transitions from a 60 mph to a 30 mph zone at the bottom of a hill, so if you aren’t riding your brakes the whole way down you’re speeding. And of course the cops love to sit there and pop people with tickets for it.
Same sort of speed traps used to be along the only route to a casino I went to a few times. My first time driving to the casino, they were laying in wait. I got caught on the way back.
Pigs sure do love to jam people up. Bonus points if they ruin the life of a minority! There certainly are no such thing as quotas, right?
Emporia, Virginia is another notorious one, right on heavily traveled I-95 as well as US-58. Virginia has front license plates, so the cars that don’t have front plates definitely aren’t from Virginia and if there’s a group of cars all going the same speed it’s the easy way to pick out the non-local. Saw it happen when I was a passenger.
Ain’t that shit considered “entrapment”?
Entrapment is when a cop gets you to do something that breaks a law, and then catches you.
Entrapment has a very specific definition, and this ain’t it.
It might still be an illegal speed limit change, but that’s going to depend on an awful lot of details. It’s certainly bad design, but the locals probably like it for the money it brings in.
That happened to my dad too, he was going “one over the limit.” It’s infuriating because it’s fraud and stealing.
I think that lazy shitty cops do a lot to malign common sense safety engineering that most people would otherwise be totally on board for.
if that’s not worth fighting then nothing is. I’ve met High school kids that have fought tickets before. U.S. Traffic Courts are notoroious for being extraordinarily mundane
They would have fought it if you could fight it like a normal ticket, but you couldn’t. You could pay or write them a stern letter that would mean nothing. Seattle has those kinds of tickets too. This would have had to have been a trip to the AG or something. I don’t know how they would have fought it without a lawyer.
Old guy told me in addition to photos you should request all documentation regarding that specific sign and that stretch of road, such as the work order to have it installed. Public records laws vary lol