The New Miami Traffic Cameras: Sending over $1 million dollars to Optotraffic LLC of Lanham, Md.

And to think that I actually wondered–even after extensive research on my new novel Tail of the Dragon, that exposing the police as unjustified tax collectors with money grabbing traffic citations was fair, or even right. I worried that exposing the practice of “citation quotas” among the Tennessee Highway Patrol was responsible, as I did in my fictional novel so to make people aware that the tickets were not issued under the guise of safety but strictly as a revenue generating mechanism. I wondered about it until stories began breaking in Ohio of small community police departments that have been caught issuing tickets in order to supplement their police operating budgets, so they could avoid tax levies that obviously wouldn’t pass under such harsh economic conditions. Police have turned to traffic citations in order to tax citizens to pay their own salaries and pensions. Police have been caught in a big way in Arlington Heights and other Ohio communities, but now the cops aren’t even doing the work of pulling over residents. In New Miami they are simply setting up speed cameras, taking a picture of license plates; an out-of-state company processes the citation report and sends them back to the police to issue out as mailed citations that require the vehicle owner to pay a $95 dollar offense per citation. This practice is without question taxation without representation.

In the period between October 1st and October 12th 2012 New Miami, Ohio collected over 1000 speeding violations generating more than $101,000 dollars. The village of New Miami then splits the take with the company who owns the equipment. New Miami kept $57,000, while the remaining 40 percent, or $38, goes to Optotraffic LLC of Lanham, Md., who administers the program. Optotraffic gets to sit back in the faraway land of Maryland and collect 40% of every ticket their machines generate without even having a cop on the ground to do the work. The business is extremely lucrative for the thieving natures of politicians who of course set many of the speed limits unnecessarily low all over the state and country so to provide the F.O.P offices as a means to fund themselves with supplemental income at their discretion.

It was only a few months ago that I received a ticket along that same road, RT 127 about 25 miles north of this New Miami location in the town of Camden. An officer gave me a ticket for going a minuscule 88 miles per hour at 12:30 in the morning as I was coming back from an event up in Greenville. The snot nosed kid was about as old as my own kids and had about as much worldly wisdom as a potato, as he attempted to lecture me on the dangers of driving so fast until he saw how pissed off I was. He being still young and idealistic believed he was actually saving lives by issuing tickets. What he has yet to realize is that his F.O.P brothers who were playing cards at their union hall were using the lad to do their dirty work and make the money to pay their salaries so Camden could avoid going to tax payers for a police levy to cover their extraordinary salaries and lucrative retirements. The older cops hadn’t told the wet nurse cop that most of the laws created at the state level were made under lobby pressure from the Fraternal Order of Police to create means for raising money. The stretch of road I was on could easily afford to have a car traveling 100 MPH, yet the speed was set at the turtle crawl pace of 55 MPH, and like the Sammy Hagar song of the 80’s says, “I can’t drive, 55.” I never have been, and I never will. This has put me into courtrooms so many times to face judges and clerk of courts that could equate each instance to all the years of my life times four. I’ve been to court more times over the years than I have sat at my own dinner table—so I know up close and personal what a racket the whole process is. I write about my experiences in fictional stories to let people know what goes on behind the political scenes so that they can know that it is taxation and not safety that are the real concerns over traffic citations. Knowing that, I refuse to slow down out of my own personal rebellion against a system that is foolishly corrupt. Traffic laws are simply a blanket thrown over a bed where a massive orgy is taking place. Under the sheets are insurance companies, politicians, law enforcement contractors, and many government employees—most notably cops.

Ironically one of these camera set ups mentioned above is in the town of Seven Mile where some might recognize as the fictional town of Fort Seven Mile from another one of my novels, The Symposium of Justice. I used the name of that town because I had always liked it, and needed to have a good name for a small Ohio town to serve as a backdrop for my storyline. In that book police allowed a known rapist out of jail and inserted him into the general population hoping to scare the citizens into voting for the support of more police officers. The rapist in my book Symposium was assaulting young women and scaring the female population into a froth of desiring more police presence at any cost. Now with these new cameras, a cop isn’t even needed in a car. The camera runs 24 hours a day all days of the week and doesn’t get paid to even do a job. Instead all the people involved in the scam get to sit back and let the machine do all the work. In many ways, as extreme as my scenario in Symposium seemed at the time of 2004 America, these speed cameras are far worse. At the rate of citations in just 12 days of operation the new speed cameras of New Miami, and Seven Mile are projected to generate $ 3,041,666.67. Of that money $ 1,216,666.67 is projected for the company in Maryland who makes the cameras, and that is just off three cameras. There is a plan to put these cameras all over the state and nation, which is a plot so sinister, it moves beyond the belief of any novel plotline. In fact, I wouldn’t have even considered such a thing in one of my stories, because I would have never thought anyone would believe it—yet here it is in reality.

Like the school levies designed to pay members of the teachers unions enormous sums of money for their government work, police and fire fighters also look for tax money to supplement their incomes while they sit around their union halls playing video games and cards waiting for something to happen. Their traditional reason for asking tax payers to approve levy requests was to make their communities safer. It has taken a long time for the mask to be pulled off the traffic cops and what their real intentions have been, of course under the guise of “safety.” Now, the traffic cameras prevent even the staffing of trolls in patrol cars. Now a traffic ticket is mailed to the violator without any interaction at all while the police on staff have even less to do, and an out-of-state company makes millions off the backs of tax payers who didn’t even know that their taxes have went up without their approval. Of course portions of that money will find its way into the lobbyists of state and federal governments and will pay for the lap dances of more than a few comb over politicians in favor of lowering speed limits to generate more of these citations and pay for more illicit behavior on their end, and more lap dances and prostitutes while the cameras do all the work. (Firsthand knowledge)

Police and politicians will declare, “If you don’t want to get a ticket, then slow down to the speed limit.” But such statements are of course ridiculous. The world is getting faster, not slower, and the automatic panic reaction to every accident or social complaint by a politician is to put up a new stop sign, stop light, or lower the speed limit to show the public that they are looking out for the concern of their constituents. What they don’t declare is that they like to pass laws to give work to sign manufacturers, traffic light contractors, and now Optotraffic LLC of Lanham, Md., and that the law has nothing to do with safety, but about revenue generation. These relationships are an unholy alliance who protect the labor unions of law enforcement with their radical benefits packages while appeasing power hungry politicians using radar cameras like the ones built by Optotraffic LLC to make boatloads of cash from small towns all over America for doing nothing but exploiting the stupidity of everyone involved, and the never-ending cries for more safety by society’s most docile, and pathetic squeaky wheels.

 

Rich Hoffman

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