Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s speed camera program improperly issued more than $2.4 million in fines to Chicago drivers, ticketing them when cameras were supposed to be off and when the required warning signs were confusing, obscured or missing, a Tribune investigation has found.
At the same time, City Hall has systematically ticketed drivers near schools without the legally required evidence of a schoolchild in sight. A Tribune random-sample analysis puts the number of those questionable tickets at about 110,000.
And while it was pitched by the mayor as a way to protect youngsters walking near parks and schools, the most prolific cameras in the 2-year-old “Children’s Safety Zone” initiative can be found along major roadways, where crash data show child pedestrians are least likely to be struck by speeders.
Even as city officials refused for months to discuss the problems with the Tribune, the Emanuel administration was quietly moving to get out in front of the issues. Since the newspaper first began asking city officials about the program in July, the administration has altered guidelines for ticketing and begun to vacate nearly $1 million in tickets.
Emanuel has said his goal was simple — to prevent speeding drivers from hurting children near schools and parks. But skepticism about the aims of the program and concerns about overreaching gave rise to a complicated set of rules that govern when, where and how drivers can be tagged by the automated cameras now in place at 63 schools and parks throughout the city.
In its six-month examination, the Tribune found those rules were both broadly interpreted and repeatedly ignored since the program issued its first fine in October 2013. Among the findings:
*More than 22,000 tickets were sent to owners of cars tagged by cameras near parks that were closed for construction for months, in apparent violation of the speed camera ordinance.
*More than 11,000 tickets were issued at hours after parks were closed for the night, according to the posted times on Chicago Park District signs or its website.
*More than 28,000 tickets were issued at cameras plagued by problems with warning signs that did not meet the minimum legal requirements. The required signs were either missing entirely, obscured by trees and construction, or so confusing that drivers could not figure out which speed limit was being enforced.
*A ticket-by-ticket review of 1,500 randomly chosen citations from school zones found no children were present in the photographic evidence for nearly a third of the cases, even though a child’s presence was required. That review suggests that about 110,000 tickets may have been issued without legal justification.
*More than 62,000 school zone tickets were issued over the summer months when school activity is often so limited that drivers are left to guess whether school is in session or not. The law says tickets can be issued only “on school days,” typically defined as during the regular school year. A class-action lawsuit challenging the practice was dismissed by a Cook County judge but is on appeal.
After Tribune inquiries, the Emanuel administration says it is moving to issue refunds for nearly 23,000 tickets City Hall now admits should never have been mailed in the first place.
“That’s great, but why did it take the Chicago Tribune to figure this out?” said Tim Moyer, 46, who earlier this year unsuccessfully appealed five speeding tickets near one tiny neighborhood playground on the Northwest Side on grounds the park was closed. He received an error notice from the city after the Tribune inquiries.
“Of course it was closed, you could see the dump trucks lined up outside,” Moyer said. “I knew it was closed, but it didn’t do me any good. This is amazing to me.”
City officials have in recent weeks acknowledged mistakes and said they are working to fix any issues in what industry experts describe as one of the most complex automated speed-enforcement programs in the country. Administration officials declined repeated requests to explain the program until nearly the eve of publication, when the mayor’s top transportation officials sat down at City Hall for a 90-minute meeting with Tribune reporters.
Transportation Commissioner Rebekah Scheinfeld said the speed camera program is a needed safety measure to slow drivers down near parks and schools where children are most likely to congregate.
“Speeding is a serious problem in this city,” she said. “It’s responsible for about a quarter of crashes resulting in injury or fatality every year. So we take that very seriously.
“We believe the system is working,” Scheinfeld added. “The system is only 2 years old, barely, and we already see positive results in changing driver behavior.”
Administration officials say the speed cameras are placed where crash statistics show the biggest safety problems. The data posted on the city’s website to justify the camera placement show more than 47,700 accidents from 2009 through 2012 with a connection to speed but that include a broad definition of when speed is a factor and count all types of crashes, involving not just pedestrians and involving people of all ages.
The Tribune examination of Chicago Police Department crash data from 2004 through 2014 revealed 108 children on foot or on bicycle were injured in accidents where the police cited “exceeding the authorized speed limit” as a contributing factor. The majority of those accidents happened on side streets, not on the major streets where speed cameras are typically placed.
“We have looked carefully at the crash data, and we are not going to wait for a kid to be killed before putting the cameras up somewhere where we see a high risk and significant evidence of traffic crashes and speeding problems,” Scheinfeld said.
Young sibling to red light program
From his earliest days in office, Emanuel was pushing to expand the city’s red light camera program, the largest in the country, to include speed cameras, telling lawmakers and reporters alike: “My goal is only one thing, the safety of our kids.”
At the time, Chicago’s red light camera program was held up as the model for how automated traffic enforcement programs should be run. The city’s longtime vendor, Redflex Traffic Systems, was a front-runner to win the new contract and helped in the mayor’s push for expansion. The company even hired a longtime Emanuel political ally as a national consultant.
Despite skepticism from some, Emanuel quickly won approval from state lawmakers and Chicago aldermen.
But the Redflex speed-camera bid was doomed amid a series of Tribune reports that revealed the company won its red-light camera business in Chicago with the help of a $2 million bribery scheme, the city used overblown safety claims to sell the program to the public, and tens of thousands of drivers were unfairly ticketed because of widespread malfunction and failed oversight that the city’s inspector general called “fundamentally deficient.”
The Tribune reporting led to a federal bribery investigation and a guilty plea from Redflex’s former CEO, who admitted her role in a conspiracy to pay a former city manager $1,500 for each of the nearly 400 cameras that peppered the city. The ex-manager’s trial is set for January.
Emanuel has since ordered the removal of 80 red light cameras and promised reforms to improve oversight and management of the program.
Amid the controversy and questions about the reach of automated traffic cameras, Emanuel scaled back his speed camera plans. The cameras were limited by state law to within one-eighth of a mile of schools and parks, so-called Children’s Safety Zones. City ordinance caps the number of safety zones at 300, and so far the city has activated 150 cameras, including four that came online Nov. 9.
Emanuel has refused requests for an interview, and for years he has fought Tribune efforts to get a look at city records on the camera programs — including his own emails, texts and memos on the topic. Administration officials also have declined requests for a tour of the facilities where speed violation evidence is reviewed.
The speed camera program has doled out more than 2.1 million tickets, most of them warnings, along with more than $81 million in fines. Scheinfeld said the administration has been judicious and forgiving in rolling out the program. The city issues no fines to anyone going less than 10 mph over the speed limit even though the law provides for fines at 6 mph over the limit, she noted, and everyone gets a “mulligan” for their first ticket, with no fine.
In its six-month examination, the Tribune pored over thousands of tickets and appeals, visited more than 30 parks and schools, interviewed dozens of drivers and talked with leading traffic safety experts. The examination did not include four cameras in two safety zones that came online this month.
As part of its investigation, the Tribune created an interactive Web database that profiles every speed camera in the system, highlights those with a history of improper ticketing and allows readers to plug in their license plate to see whether they were tagged at problem spots.
Deborah Lowery, 51, a nurse who lives on the South Side, has been ticketed several times. She successfully appealed two tickets, including one for going 35 mph in a school zone, where the 30 mph limit drops to 20 mph when a child is present. A hearing officer ruled there was no child present and threw out the ticket.
“I wish the mayor would listen to us and stop targeting the working people because we are not doing anything wrong,” Lowery said. “We’re just driving from day to day going back and forth to work and it’s not fair.
“They are giving out all these tickets in the middle of the day when the kids are in classes,” she said. “There were not kids out there. They are robbing people and it’s just not fair.”
Twitter @davidkidwell1
