11/6/2010
Indiana, Italy: Bogus Photo Enforcement Tickets IssuedIllegal and inaccurate photo enforcement citations are issued in Italy and Indiana.
A motorist received automated tickets from two towns in Calabria, Italy for a single simultaneous offense. According to the notices, the vehicle was photographed on the same day, in the same town, on the same road, at the same speed by the same speed camera operator. Yet one of the tickets was issued by the police in Rocca Imperiale, the other by the police fifteen miles away in Amendolara, Alla Guida reported.
On the island of Sardinia, the prefect of Cagliari canceled 450 bogus speed camera tickets issued by a camera in Monastir. The prefect ruled October 4 that based on an usually high number of tickets issued that something was wrong. The camera was installed without the legally required warning signs in place and the photo ticketing company was being paid on a per-citation basis, Omni Moto reported.
Vehicle owners in Indiana are at risk of receiving bogus speed camera, red light camera and toll road tickets because of the way in which the state issues license plate numbers. WHTR-TV reported that dump truck owner Alan Whitaker was billed $725.25 and $680 by the Illinois Toll authority for an offense committed by a rollback recovery wrecker. The license plates on each of these commercial vehicles are of a different type, but the plate numbers are identical. Photo enforcement system operators make no attempt to verify that the correct vehicle has been identified before mailing a ticket. Indiana will now resequence its license plates to reduce the possibility of this error in the future.