How to Beat a Photo Radar Ticket!
by Jim NintzelArticle Tools
Arizona law requires that you get your traffic citation from a police officer or a process server. Since the tickets that are mailed to violators don't meet that legal standard, you have the option of tossing the citation in the trash.
If you do that, however, police officers or the company that runs the cameras can then send a cop or a process server to deliver the summons--and you're going to have to pay for it. In Scottsdale, it adds $26 to your fine.
Here's the trick: The city has only 120 days to serve you, so if you can dodge the process server for about four months, the ticket is dismissed.
You can also make it harder for authorities to find you by listing a post-office box as your address on your car's registration. That will require police or the company to do a little extra detective work to hunt down your address. You can make it an even more tangled legal trail by registering your car under the name of a corporation.
There are also devices that drivers can use to try to thwart the cameras. "Radar" Roy Reyer, a retired Maricopa County police officer, runs a Web site, radarbusters.com, that offers a range of devices.
Reyer fights technology with technology using a GPS gizmo that alerts drivers when they approach fixed red-light cameras and well-known speed traps. Cost: $239.95.
He also sells a plastic plate to cover your license plate. He maintains the covers--which sell from $24.95 to $69.95--will distort your license number when the camera takes a photo of it.
Reyer insists that the plastic covers work. "We tested our stuff," Reyes says. "The covers are effective."
Mike Phillips, a spokesman for the city of Scottsdale, dismisses the idea that the cameras are fooled by the covers. "This idea that you can somehow put a plastic cover over your plate, and it's going to thwart the camera--all the things that I've seen show that it's ineffective," says Phillips.
Tucson's call for bids specifies that the cameras must work on plates that have plastic covers, which Pryor also calls ineffective.
But people who go to the trouble of installing them worry him. "If people are doing that just so they can speed, they're probably dangerous on the road," Pryor says.
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When are people going to wake up to the fact that government is spending our money on wasteful crap? The surveillance state is just another revenue grab. Cameras have nothing to do with making the streets more safe.
Here's a suggestion: don't speed.
This article needs an editor. "Radar" Roy changed his last name several times, it went from "Reyer" to "Reyes" and finally to "Pryor."
Peril, you rock! Yeah people stop speeding for the love of god! The camera takes a picture at 11 miles over the speed limit...ELEVEN... Take some damn responsibitly and quit breaking the law and getting pissed when you get caught.
What worries me about these cameras is what I see every time I go down River Road and pass the one there. Even when people are going UNDER the speed limit, they see the camera and hit their brakes slowing down more "just to make sure" they don't get a ticket. People don't trust technology and I'm waiting to roll up to a pileup because someone hit their brakes and the person behind them plowed into them.
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