NEW ORLEANS — Following a report by the New Orleans Inspector General which found the City of New Orleans wrongly ticketed or collected money from almost 6,000 thousand drivers, the Cantrell administration says it will make changes to the city's traffic camera program. But will that be enough maintain the public's trust in the traffic cameras?
Among the inspector general’s findings: Some drivers got tickets for speeding in school zones when school was actually out of session. In other cases, officers reviewing traffic camera video, didn't watch the video long enough to see if the driver was speeding.
"The review process was so fast as to raise questions as to whether they were accurately identifying those people that actually should be ticketed," Inspector General Derry Harper said.
From 2008 to January of 2019, the city collected more than $700,000 in wrongful or inaccurate tickets. Instead of refunding that money, the city kept it.
The inspector general summed it up like this: "It's simply got to be corrected, because it's not fair."
To be clear, all of this happened under the Landrieu and Cantrell administrations. But as a candidate, Cantrell said she would suspend traffic cameras. After getting into office though, she pushed to lower the speed threshold in school zones without notifying the public.
"If you're going to go from you know the old school of having a live police officer have to catch you speeding to the new way of doing things using cameras, you have to have public buy in and people have to trust in the inherent fairness of the system," Eyewitness News political analyst Clancy Dubos said.
Some drivers have seen traffic cameras as a money grab by the city. Dubos, who supports the use of traffic cameras, said the latest IG report likely deepens their skepticism.
"That takes away public trust and public faith, in the system in the way that it should," he said.
City leaders here, and across the country have argued traffic cameras can increase public safety, but when not run properly they may lower public trust.
In a statement, city leaders for the most part accepted the report’s findings. It stated that drivers who are owed money will be able to reclaim it through the State Treasurer's office. To improve the traffic camera program, the IG recommended, among other things, that one single city agency should oversee it.
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