Gotcha!

If a business ignores a citation, it must be dismissed after four months, like other ignored citations. And if the business identifies the driver, the original corporate citation still must be dismissed from the court. Therefore, court employees have fewer cases to deal with when corporate citations are never filed with the court at all.

After New Times told Elsa Lynch, Paradise Valley's court administrator and part-time judge, how most cities handle corporate violators, Lynch took steps to change the town's photo-enforcement system.

courtesy of Susan Kayler

Attorney and author Susan Kayler believes photo enforcement violates the rights of drivers.

Laura Segall

After Phoenix accountant Al Golusin filed a complaint, a court revoked the license of a local process server.

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More About

• Francesca Cisneros
• Phoenix (Arizona)
• David Pickron
• World Politics
• U.S. State Politics

By separating people who could be prosecuted for camera violations from businesses that can't, the court will save time and money, she says.

"I think this is a fantastic idea," says Lynch.

For businesses, trusts and governments, everything about photo enforcement is voluntary.

No surprise, then, that most don't respond to the mailings.

During Scottsdale's highly publicized Loop 101 speed camera test program, which ran from February to October 2006, more than 12,000 notices of violation to corporations, governments and trusts were never acknowledged.

But the city uses speed vans, intersection speed cameras and red-light cameras, too. In the first nine months of 2006, Scottsdale mailed 31,831 notices to business and government entities. About 57 percent never became citations.

A detailed review of the violation data provided to New Times following a public records request showed that cities, Indian tribes, school districts, and federal and state government departments were among the ranks of those that ignored violation notices from Scottsdale.

The cities of Phoenix, Tempe and Mesa — which use photo enforcement to nail drivers in their cities — each failed to respond to two or more notices mailed by Scottsdale. Chandler responded to one notice and blew off another. While some of these were police cars, most were city fleet vehicles.

In other words, cities will hire process servers to track you down if you don't pay their photo tickets. But if Phoenix, Tempe or Mesa get a ticket from another city, they won't necessarily pay it.

Some businesses do sometimes tell police who was driving the vehicle in question. They may not realize the violation notice has no legal weight, or they may want to hold their employees accountable for driving problems. Yet most of these companies fail to respond to at least as many notices as they mail back, either out of apathy or because the notices get lost in bureaucratic red tape.

The same holds true for certain government agencies. The state Department of Administration responded to only three of 19 violations. The state Department of Economic Security let only five of 16 notices get turned into citations.

Liz Barker, a spokeswoman for DES, says the agency hadn't realized its system of identifying speeding drivers was so inefficient until New Times called. The notices apparently weren't notice enough.

Barker said officials would fix the process by putting one person in charge of making sure everyone who got a photo ticket was held accountable.

Rental car companies made up the largest single class of corporate violators in the records. Enterprise identified more than 2,000 of its drivers to authorities. Hertz, on the other hand, managed to identify only seven drivers out of 4,787 who drew violation notices.

Records from Mesa, Chandler and Paradise Valley on corporate violators show similar trends:

• Most companies identify either all drivers or none. In some cases, a company might identify one driver out of a dozen or more with violations — perhaps because that employee simply wasn't liked by the boss.

• Most companies that don't respond to the notices are local.

• Companies that ignore the notices are more likely to have multiple speeding violations.

Contractors, dog groomers, churches, housekeepers, limo drivers, medical services, ice cream and pizza shops — the companies that trashed their photo-enforcement notices are as varied as the business world itself.

New Times' records search also turned up hundreds of family trusts among the notices; the majority did not identify the photographed driver to authorities.

Perhaps businesses have a legitimate need to speed at times — maybe that's the case with AAA Africanized Bee Removal, a Tucson company caught doing 79 on the Loop 101. Privately owned ambulances, like fire trucks, can speed legally in emergencies.

Many companies likely handle the violations internally, and police say they are satisfied if a scolding from a supervisor, rather than a ticket, gets a driver to slow his speed.

But what's unjust is that corporations and public entities have total freedom to choose how to handle photo enforcement — and you, the ordinary citizen, don't.

During the Loop 101 program, about 20,000 of the non-servable notices were sent to vehicle owners whose physical descriptions, as kept by MVD, did not closely resemble the drivers in the violation photographs. Less than a quarter of those turned into citations.

And speaking of the actual citations, 10,000 were dismissed after vehicle owners proved they weren't the drivers.

So for the 101 freeway test program, which ended in late October, about 48,000 people paid their fines or went to defensive driving school. And about 59,000 drivers got out of their tickets.

To join that majority, you could form a corporation, LLC, limited partnership, or family trust, then re-register your vehicle to it. It doesn't cost any extra at the MVD, and you get a regular, non-commercial-looking plate.