For eight months, traffic cameras designed to
catch motorists running red lights, were used in Minneapolis. Twenty-two thousand tickets were issued and the fines totaled
three quarters of a million dollars.
But a court decision earlier this year forced city officials to turn off
the cameras.
"What
it does is hyper-expose the picture," Cooke explains. "If there's no picture, there's no ticket. There is no $140
dollars coming out of your pocket. The photo comes out blurred and you've got every chance of escaping a hefty fine."
"Could you pick that out on the road?" asks Lt.
Mark Peterson of the Minnesota State Patrol. "It would be hard. I can look at it close and it looks like you changed
the reflectivity, but it would be hard for us to see this."
We shot the plate from three different angles outside during the day. We used available
light and did not use a flash on the camera. Not once, was it ever obscured.
So, to best simulate a camera mounted
on a pole along the side of a street, we had KARE photographer Brett Akagi take flash pictures from a ladder. While
many times you could still make out the plate once, there was still confusion.
"Can you see the whole license plate though," reporter Bernie
Grace asks?
A couple of pictures
were taken at night with a flash. In those instances, the plate was unreadable. The picture was over-exposed and the plate
was blurred.
So under just the right conditions, this spray
may obscure your license plate
