Two bills are making their way through the Arizona Legislature to end the state’s use of speed and red light cameras.
SCR 1002, sponsored by State Senator Wendy Rogers (R-Flagstaff), is a Senate Concurrent Resolution, so if passed, it would bypass a likely veto by Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs and be placed on the ballot for voters. It passed out of the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee mainly down party lines after a hearing last week.
SB 1019, also from Rogers, has similar language but would have to go through Hobbs and has yet to be brought up in two House committees that it was assigned to.
In 2023, Hobbs vetoed a bill that banned red light cameras in the state.
Rogers spoke at the hearing to introduce the legislation, calling the camera system a “cash cow” and “scam on Arizonans.”
“Mr. Chairman, this is a seminal piece of legislation,” she said. “It bypasses the governor because the voters of Arizona want their freedom back, they want their rights back. They do not want to be subject to photo radar. I represent a rural district, and my rural constituents are adamant about this, and I know several municipalities in Maricopa County are adamant about this.”
She continued, “And so we come to you today to get this Senate concurrent resolution on the ballot, because there’s overwhelming data coming in, polling data that shows that Arizonans, far and away, want to get rid of this invasion of their privacy and this invasion and taking away of their constitutional rights.”
State Representative Leo Biasucci (R-Lake Havasu), chair of the committee, asked Rogers whether the cameras make roads safer. She said that is a “myth” since people will modify their behavior when they know a camera is at a specific location and slam on their brakes. She added that smartphone map programs show drivers where they’re located in advance.
Rogers said the machines can be “tweaked” to bring in more money, pointing out that 10 percent of the revenue goes to Clean Elections. She said this creates a conflict of interest for politicians who run for office using Clean Elections. She said a human, not a machine, should issue a ticket.
Rogers said the Town of Paradise Valley has 11,000 residents yet issued 100,000 tickets last year alone, bringing in “millions of dollars” of revenue. She said she was told that only one vendor has all the contracts in the state, which is a “monopoly” and “wrong.”
Stephanie Durban, an officer with the Mesa Police Department, opposed the bill, claiming that the cameras help reduce speeding in school zones and act as a deterrent so there is a “low recidivism rate.” She didn’t explain why the cones and school officers in school zones’ streets aren’t enough to deter speeding.
State Representative Teresa Martinez (R-Casa Grande), vice chair of the committee, pushed back on Durban and said statistics from the Arizona Department of Transportation show that fatal collisions are increasing in Mesa. She also expressed concern that there wasn’t an “equal application of the law” since process servers only go to certain parts of the state to track down ticketed drivers.
Martinez asked Jay Kaprosy, a public affairs consultant representing Verra Mobility, who assumed control of Redflex, the previous primary operator of the cameras. Verra Mobility is a transportation technology company.
Former Redflex CEO Karen Finley of Cave Creek was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2016 for paying bribes to a Chicago city official to help procure the contracts. Kaprosy said he didn’t know and denied that Verra Mobility was the only camera provider in the state but could not identify the names of any competitors. He said the company operates in three cities in Arizona.
He defended Paradise Valley’s aggressive cameras. “Paradise Valley is a unique community that is utilizing this tool very effectively to address the realities of their community,” he said.
Biasucci said his biggest concern is that the cameras aren’t stopping drivers “going 100 miles an hour.” He said, “If we’re gonna go down this road with cameras being the solution to safety, then why not have cameras installed in every car that automatically issue a ticket to a driver who goes 11 miles per hour over the speed limit?”
The state representative also asked how it was fair that one city was ticketed at 11 mph over the speed limit and other cities at five mph over.
Shawn Dow, a member of the public who has been trying to get the cameras banned for several years, said they are unconstitutional. He said they violate the Fourth Amendment “by doing illegal background checks on us every single time we pass by that camera.” Due process rights are violated, he said, since those ticketed cannot obtain the “validation or calibration” of the cameras in court, cannot face their accuser, or receive a jury trial.
Dow said the tickets are automatically dismissed after 120 days due to not being served by a police officer, and he has been trying to make everyone aware of that. He said he discovered this by looking up Rule 4. “I went to the county records, and I looked up every single executive of the photo radar company, and I found that every single one of them had like, 14 photo radar tickets, and all of them said dismissed under Rule 4,” he said.
Dow added, “I have proven it to you time and time again, every time a politician and one of my elected officials finally listens and goes to the attorney general and says, ‘Are they breaking the law?’ They say yes and shut the program down, and then some politician comes and grants them the ability to continue.”
He said the drivers’ data is shared with the Department of Homeland Security, and the forms he’s seen always leave the section blank for how long the data is saved.
He said, “That’s why courts have ruled these unconstitutional,” he said. “We’ve had these cameras banned in 19 states and ripped out of over 700 cities. It’s not because I’m yelling and screaming and annoying. It is because they are unconstitutional and because they’re increasing accidents. They’re putting our lives and property at risk so they can make millions of dollars a year. I can provide you with right here down the street, 91st Avenue and Bell, 180 percent increase in accidents. At 75th Avenue and Thunderbird, a 480 percent increase in accidents.
At some point during the hearing, Kaprosy pushed back and said that no courts had ruled that the cameras were unconstitutional, contradicting Dow.
Pinal County Attorney Brad Miller testified last, addressing the constitutionality issue.
“Here, this legislative body determines what’s constitutional, the judicial branch and the executive branch, equal branches of government. So if you determine that it’s not constitutional then it isn’t constitutional. … Here’s the reason why courts are reluctant to actually find these particular cameras unconstitutional, is because in a civil matter they make this distinction between civil and criminal. In a civil matter, the Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, and Sixth Amendment do not apply. And so they say in a civil matter you cannot challenge these particular issues,” the attorney said.
He continued, “Many courts are very reluctant — including federal courts in Virginia, in Kentucky, and in Texas — these courts have denied our people’s ability to seek redress of grievances, basic issues of constitutional order because they’re unable to access the courts and the reason why they don’t have standing, they don’t have standing to challenge these things.”
Miller added, “Should we give the power to the people to decide how they want to be governed, what their standard of due process is? Because they’re screaming … saying process, the due process rights … are not being had with these photo radar tickets, these photo radar cameras. It feels unconstitutional, feels unsafe, it feels wrong.”
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Traffic Cameras” by Ben Schumin. CC BY-SA 3.0.
