APRIL 14, 1997 ALASKA CITY THROWS OUT PHOTO RADAR, BC SYSTEM PUT INTO DOUBT BY EVIDENCE REVEALED IN THEIR COURT CASES VANCOUVER -- The city of Anchorage voted Tuesday, April 8th to end their controversial year-old photo radar program. This came on the heels of a decision in the District Court for the State of Alaska which rendered tickets unenforceable because of the "questionable reliability" of both the photo radar system and the testimony provided by American Traffic Systems' (ATS) experts. Anchorage city council member Bob Bell said "this has cut such a bloody slash in the community that it wasn't worth it." Nearly 10,000 tickets remain outstanding pending a Court of Appeal decision on the validity of the tickets. SENSE has obtained copies of the decision under appeal, Municipality of Anchorage v. Baxley et. al. The decision is based on the fact that photo radar as used in Alaska (and in B.C.) "fails to adhere to generally accepted techniques" of gathering speeding violations -- where equipment is used in corroboration with a visual speed estimate, and that there was no proof that the equipment operated reliably at all times. In fact court testimony reveals that on several occasions the ATS units have taken photographs showing a speed with no vehicle in the picture. What makes this decision important to B.C. is that it deals with universal issues of credibility and the gathering of evidence, not specific laws. Photo radar fundamentally changes the way that speeding charges are gathered. In conventional enforcement, radar is used to corroborate a trained police officers visual estimation of a vehicle's speed. In B.C., like Alaska, photo radar operators do not observe or make notes of each speeding vehicle, but merely act as watchdogs for the equipment. Trust that this equipment functions accurately at all times is the cornerstone of photo radar in BC, as it was in Anchorage. The fact that B.C. uses police officers in the vans, unlike Anchorage which used ATS employees, is irrelevant -- in both cases the operators do not observe all violators or make notes. "An attentive and disinterested police observer is all that stands between a still photo of a vehicle with an erroneous assigned speed and the innocent motorist driving it," said the three-magistrate court. "Both [ATS experts] would have this court believe that an error could never occur when you have a car physically present in the photograph." The court further cited inconsistent, contradictory testimony from ATS technical experts whose obvious interests would call into question their testimony. "The above examples of the conflicts in the testimony of the prosecution witnesses presents an overall picture of individuals who have a great deal at stake financially and who will testify to whatever it takes to convince the court in a given case." As to the photographic evidence the court said: "this is not the sort of testimony that persuades this court to find the PR100 evidence of speeding admissible. Moreover, were we to find this evidence admissible, the questionable reliability of the testimony renders it insufficient to sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt..." "The technology and implementing legislation is at fundamental odds with our common law legal system -- primarily the rules of evidence," said SENSE Director of Research Michael Cain. "Some judges in BC have shown little faith in the photo radar program, instead handing out suspended sentences or $25 fines for drivers close to the threshold speed." SENSE Executive Director Ian Tootill added "while the BC government and ICBC continue to ignore photo radar's spotted history, we have yet another disenchanted former user. Anchorage joins the ranks of those that now know the truth about photo radar; places like Peoria, Arizona; Sandy City, Utah; and Batavia, Illinois. It is amazing to me that with much less than one per cent of jurisdictions in North America using this system, and such obvious problems, that our government could move forward with the largest and likely most costly photo radar system in the world! -- a system that might be ticketing innocent drivers right now." Given the failure of the ATS system to achieve wide-spread judicial acceptance on the reliability of the photographic evidence, SENSE calls for the government to cease photo radar ticketing until a fully independent professional engineering company can evaluate this equipment. Neither the courts nor SENSE have been provided with an independent (i.e. non-ATS, non- government/police) evaluation of the accuracy of the ATS equipment. The media and public can obtain additional information including the full judgement and Anchorage news articles on the "NEWS PAGES" of the SENSE web- site at http://www.sense.bc.ca ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SENSE is a not-for-profit society dedicated to improving road safety and the elimination of the photo radar tax-grab disguised as a safety initiative. It urges a comprehensive approach to traffic safety including tough, European- style licensing requirements as a means of making the province's roads safe to drive on.