Red light cameras could come back to Kansas City
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KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas City leaders are coming up with what will have to be a new plan to bring back an old enforcement tool.
“The St. Louis Board of Alderman has passed a new board bill, the [St. Louis] Mayor is likely to sign in connection with reinstituting red light cameras,” said Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas this week. “We will go through that conversation, looking at people’s civil rights, making sure we go through a long process with it.”
That long process could be part of the new legal strategy needed to let the cameras stay up this time around.
In 2015, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the ordinance for red light cameras in St. Louis was unconstitutional after two drivers claimed someone else was driving their vehicles when they went through the red lights.
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That’s not surprising to lawyers like Howard Lotven, who was part of the push to get the cameras banned back then.
“They’re problematic for drivers because they can wrongly accuse someone of running a red light,” Lotven said.
Lotven says that’s because most camera systems had just one camera to capture the licence plate, not the driver. That, coupled with a uniqely restrictive statute in Missouri State law over determinining what can be a moving violation made it legally possible to shut down the cameras.
“Other states, the way their laws are set up, these [red light cameras] are allowed,” Lotven said. “The way Missouri’s law is set up, these are not allowed.”
Right now, Lotven says only Hannibal, Missouri has a red light camera system up and running. He says two-camera systems will overcome some of the one-camera system shortcomings, but not all of them.
Two cameras could capture the license plate of an offending vehicle and a picture of the driver.
“Many times, they don’t get a good photo,” Lotven said. “And if they try to use a photo and it’s not very good, then how can you really identify the person.”
He says poor image quality could be the reason tickets either get dismissed or never get sent in the first place.
Lucas told FOX4 traffic fatality data showing more deaths through March in 2024 compared to 2023 is at least part of the reason for revisiting red light cameras.
“Something that we saw in this morning’s meeting of the Board of Police Commissioners was that we have traffic fatalities up,” Lucas said. “The cause of many of those traffic fatalities relates to those who are driving at excessive speeds and not wearing seatbelts.”
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In the same meeting, he suggested red light cameras would help enforcement while freeing up officers to do other work and KCPD representatives seemed open to the idea of exploring how technology could help.
But Lotven says there are other traffic calming measures that he thinks would be more effective to make streets safer but that the cameras bring in revenue.
“[Elected leaders] say [revenue’s] not the purpose, but it’s at least a major byproduct of doing that,” Lotven said.
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The process is still working through the Kansas City Council but even in St. Louis, officials told our affiliate FOX2, it will take at least a year to get the red light cameras back out on the street.
