CARLTON FLETCHER: Flaw in school zone ticket system leaves room for doubt

They say two wrongs don’t make it right.

— Wyclef Jean

It may not happen — I hope for this person’s sake that it doesn’t — but when the company that’s administering and overseeing the Albany Police Department’s school zone cameras figures out its screw-up, someone is going to get one hell of a bill for school zone speeding tickets.

I offer the following not as an attempt to try and “snitch” on a fellow citizen — although anyone who speeds as regularly as this person obviously does in school zones probably should be exposed — but as a cautionary tale that, I think, shows that the school camera system is flawed.

A few months back, we were told that we couldn’t get a tag for our car because we had a lien out on our vehicle for a pair of unpaid school zone speeding tickets. It was frustrating, to say the least, because neither Tara nor I could recall driving in the area cited on the tickets. In frustration, I reached out to Albany Police Chief Michael Persley (sorry, Chief) because I didn’t know where to turn.

Tara, it turns out, did the right thing. She called the RedSpeed company that administers the program (their number’s on the tickets), and their representative ended up working with Tara to straighten out the ticket issue.

Of course, it helped that we had right on our side. We took the tickets, initially, at face value and assumed they were legit. But before calling the RedSpeed rep, Tara took a closer look at the tickets we’d received. She noticed a few discrepancies, not the least of which was that the tickets were sent to our address but to a person with a different name.

Other discrepancies included:

— The person for whom the tickets were intended got the tickets driving in locations neither of us had driven in for quite some time;

— The photograph of the vehicle being ticketed is one we used to own but hadn’t owned in several months;

— The vehicle in question photographed by the speed camera displayed a temporary tag. At the time of the first two tickets, we had photographs of our vehicle going through toll booths in New York showing that we had a permanent tag on our vehicle at the time of the violations that led to the tickets. (I should note here that the vehicle that is being ticketed is very similar to the one we own now; same color and make but a different model.);

— Even after passing this information on to APD and to the company that administers the school zone cameras, the tickets have kept coming: same (wrong) name to the same (wrong address) with the photo of the same (wrong) car.

We have done what the representative of the RedSpeed camera company told us to do each time we’ve received a new ticket notice: Place the ticket back in the mailbox with a notice that no one with the name on the ticket lives at this address.

And yet the tickets keep coming … the latest one on Thursday of this week.

And while this may just be one of those oddities that sometime occurs, I can’t help but wonder if the continuing circumstances, to which this company has been alerted, point to a flaw in the system. if my wife hadn’t noticed the discrepancies with all these tickets coming to our house for a car that’s not ours and a person who definitely does not live with us, we would have paid maybe a thousand or more bucks by now … with no end in sight.

This, along with tales of people I know “challenging” the tickets and having them dismissed by a friendly judge in court, makes me think that a review of this system is in order. I can’t believe, given the thousands of tickets that are being mailed out, that there aren’t other issues with this program.