- April 18, 2024
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Palm Coast is looking at options for ending its red-light camera program, but removing the cameras entirely might leave the county Sheriff’s Office lacking an important crime-fighting tool, Undersheriff Rick Staly said.
“For law enforcement crime solving, I think they’re a great tool,” he said.
“Generally, criminals travel to and from the scene of a crime using the public roads. So on the Mobil homicide case, we have extensive video of the suspect vehicle after the homicide, where he drove back on State Road 100 to his apartment complex.”
Mobil gas station clerk and local mom Zuheily Rosado was shot and killed Feb. 21, 2013. Deputies arrested 26-year-old Joseph F. Bova II in connection with her death.
Deputies use the cameras to gather information in other investigations, too, requesting footage several times a week, Staly said.
“In another case, we investigated a traffic homicide at Palm Coast Parkway and I-95, and all the witnesses told us that the victim had run the red light,” he said. “If we used the witness statements alone, the person who died would have been found at fault. When we viewed the video footage, that was not the case at all, but if we haven’t reviewed the footage, that person would have been found 100% at fault.”
Charles Territo, a spokesman for American Traffic Solutions, the Arizona-based company that manufactures the cameras, said the cameras are often used for other investigations.
“More than 300 times, Palm Coast police have requested video from intersections with red-light cameras, to help investigate any number of traffic-related or other crimes,” he said.
The video can be retrieved for up to 30 days, he said.
“At an intersection, if there is a collision maybe in the middle of the night, more often than not, those collisions becomes he said, she said,” said Territo. “The cameras provide irrefutable evidence as to who it was that ran the red light or caused the collision.”
May 19, he said, ATS provided footage for a traffic crash in Miami.
“There was a fatality, and they didn’t know what happened,” he said. “We had cameras at that intersection, and they asked for video. And sure enough, a person had been waiting at a light for about a minute, and sure enough they ran the light. They were T-boned. The person who ran the light was not killed, the other person was.”
No simple solution
Palm Coast City Manager Jim Landon is communicating with ATS about the possibility of altering or ending the city’s contract with ATS, saying the camera program, though it has reduced violations, no longer operates as the city intended when it was implemented.
But the city’s contract with ATS doesn’t spell out a procedure for ending the contract, and city staff don’t yet know how much it might cost to get out of it.
“Palm Coast has a contract with ATS through 2019,” Territo said. “Just as the city expects us to live up to contractual obligations, we expect the same from the city.”
The city’s original contract with ATS contained a clause that would have allowed the city to end the contract without cause, but it was removed as a condition of the city adding more cameras in 2012, city spokeswoman Cindi Lane said.
A petition effort to get rid of cameras in Palm Coast by referendum recently stalled after organizer CarMichael McMillan decided not to follow through with it and submit the signatures, saying he’d instead begin organizing a statewide effort.
But Territo said referendum efforts have not been common. Less than 30 camera referendums have been organized nationwide, he said, and there are more than 700 camera programs. And even if a referendum is passed to eliminate a camera program, he said, that doesn’t end a contract.
Territo called Palm Coast’s camera program “a success story, and one that Palm Coast should be proud of.”
“In Palm Coast, nine of 10 drivers who’ve received a violation have not received a second,” he said. “The average number of violations in Palm Coast has fallen from 96 a month when the program started to just 25 in April this year. That’s a 74% decrease.”
Staly said that though there have been fewer violations, intersections with the cameras remain the county’s top crash locations.
“The last time we looks at the data, of our 10 top crash locations in the county, nine had red light cameras, and of those, the number one reason for the crash was a rear-end collision, “ he said.
Staly pulled the data about a year ago to make sure the Sheriff’s Office’s traffic enforcement operations were focusing on the right areas, he said, “and when they gave me the data, it was ironic.”
Staly didn’t have statistics on numbers and types of crashes before the cameras were installed, he said, but “the perception is that those locations were high crash to begin with, but it’s a different kind of crash. So it’s not the T-bone collisions, it’s the rear-end collisions.”
Staly said he’d prefer to be able to use law enforcement officers to monitor the intersections for red-light violations. “I think that a law enforcement officer on red light violations is a better product,” he said, “But that’s expensive."
In the meantime, he said, “We would love for the city to find a way to keep the cameras, not necessarily for red lights, but for crime solving.”
