"Old Detroit has a cancer. That cancer is crime."

I got something in the mail today entitled a "Notice of Violation" from the Tucson Police Photo Enforcement Program. This bit of mail informed me that a vehicle registered to me has been recorded by photo enforcement as failing to stop at a red light and included a couple of camera shots showing a vehicle turning left at an intersection while the light is red (although the car seems to already be reasonably far into the intersection in the first photo).

Funny thing is, this "Notice of Violation" doesn't carry a fine or a court date. In fact, it says "This is not a Summons to Appear. There is no fine associated with this Notice." in plain English twice on the document. Instead, it asks me politely to identify the driver of my vehicle at the time of the violation and mail the paper back to a PO Box in Phoenix identified as the contact for the "Violation Processing Center."

Interesting, right? I do some cursory Googling and discover that this is part of the standard operating procedure for photo enforcement; when a potential violation is recorded and the driver can't be definitively identified for whatever reason, this notice (which looks like an official ticket on first glance, save for the disclaimer about not being a summons) gets sent out to the registered owner of the vehicle asking him or her to ID whoever it was behind the wheel. However, this isn't a legally binding order; it comes from the private company that operates the cameras, not the court. Hence the return address being some PO Box rather than the court or a law enforcement office.

That's right: phishing is now a law enforcement tactic. You can read about this phenomenon at this site dedicated to parsing photo enforcement (note: the site is geared toward California; my notice was slightly different but appears to be technically identical in terms of the legal language contained and omitted, and another section of the site devoted to Arizona confirms that what I got is equivalent). Since the notice isn't legally binding in any way, I don't personally feel comfortable making the decision about whether it was me in that picture or just somebody driving my car who looks like me and was driving the route I take home from work at approximately the time I come home in the evening.

In doing my research on this thing, I came across some interesting facts about photo enforcement of traffic laws, courtesy of this extensive review of the subject published by the Phoenix New Times. The most interesting tidbit contained within it is that vehicles registered to corporations or legal trusts are essentially immune from photo enforcement; they will always get the same, non-binding "please identify the driver" mailing I got, while private citizens will get actual citations with fines, provided that law enforcement can reasonably establish from the photo and the vehicle registration information that they were behind the wheel at the time of the violation. Another interesting fact is that even when a real citation is issued, it doesn't legally count in Arizona unless a process server tracks you down and delivers it personally to you within four months of the original complaint.

As far as I can tell, Arizona and California are the only states that have these systems deployed extensively, but I wouldn't be surprised if other states or metropolitan areas have started or are planning to start rolling similar things out more aggressively. I'd advise anyone in such areas to pay close attention to the laws and the fine print on any notices they receive, lest they be tricked into snitching on themselves.