Red light camera plans face headwinds in St. Louis

Two years ago, St. Louis’ then mayor, Tishaura Jones, made a big push to bring red light cameras back to the city. The Board of Aldermen signed off on a plan. Current Mayor Cara Spencer also says she’s on board. But the effort has seemingly stalled out before the selection of a vendor, thanks to two problems: turnover at City Hall and stipulations by city officials that could alienate any potential vendors.

The stipulations may well prove the bigger problem—and they’re baked into the very legislation that enabled the cameras in the first place.

In order for cameras to be implemented legally in Missouri, there must be a mechanism by which the courts can prove the person issued the ticket was actually driving the vehicle when it was ticketed, says attorney Hugh Eastwood.

Eastwood is something of an authority on automated photo enforcement. He and fellow Clayton attorney Bevis Schock won a trio of cases in front of the Missouri Supreme Court in 2015, effectively ending red light cameras in the city and state. (One of the cases specifically challenged the city’s program.)

Thanks to those state Supreme Court victories, any automated photo enforcement system must include a way to provide probable cause that the person issued a ticket from the cameras was in fact driving the car—not just its registered owner.

“If the car is titled in one person’s name, you can look up that person’s DOR records and see if the photo on their driver’s license matches the image in the photo,” Eastwood says. “What do you do if it’s a husband or wife or a boyfriend and girlfriend? Are you going to assume, if it’s a female, that it’s a girlfriend? That’s not a proper assumption. That’s not probable cause.”

There are essentially two ways around this. The first is to employ some sort of AI-powered facial recognition software to match the face in the photo to a specific individual. However, the city’s 2024 RFP includes language banning AI’s use, specifically the sharing of images taken by the cameras with “any artificial intelligence system… including, but not limited, to facial recognition systems.”

The other way would be to have humans do the investigative work of matching the driver in the red light camera to an actual person. The RFP delegates this task to “authorized employees,” which could mean police officers or potentially employees at the company supplying the camera system. Either way, those personnel hours, unlike AI, don’t come cheap.

And Eastwood suspects that, given those stipulations, any system put in place might not pass a cost-benefit analysis, that the expense of running the system may outweigh whatever money is brought in from fines.

He adds: “It would be an odd thing for the city of St. Louis and its current fiscal circumstances to be looking to put in a system for red light camera enforcement, and have it end up actually costing the city money.”

That language banning the use of AI in the system didn’t originate in the RFP. It appears to flow directly from the 2024 bill that supposedly cleared the way for the camera’s return, which raises the question of whether the push to bring back the cameras that began nearly two years ago was doomed from the start. SLM asked Aldermanic President Megan Green’s office on Friday if the bill’s AI-related language was intentionally made so stringent as to risk killing the program in the cradle. Her spokesman did not get back to us by press time.

The other issue bedeviling the return of automated photo enforcement is one endemic to municipal government and its inevitable churn after elections. Three of the four offices with representatives on the city’s RFP committee—the mayor’s, comptroller’s and Streets—have had new leadership come in since 2024. The only consistent presence has been Green.

Green spokesman Yusuf Daneshyar that it’s his understanding that the RFP selection committee met its obligations by approving a list of red light camera vendors, with the final decision being left up to the Street Department.

The head of the RFP committee had been Streets Director Betherny Williams, whose four years at the head of the department was described by the Post-Dispatch as “chaotic” upon her leaving the job shortly after Spencer took office. The new streets director, James Jackson, who came on in November, has been primarily focused on snow removal, towing and refuse.

Says Daneshyar, “I can see how a transition in leadership might delay the decision-making process, but I’m not sure why the Street Department or the administration haven’t acted on the committee’s recommendations.”

When Eastwood and Schock won their Supreme Court cases in 2015, the cameras’ demise was not particularly mourned by St. Louisans, who generally viewed them as a revenue generating scheme, a police cheat, or some combination of the two.

But a lot has changed in 10 years. There’s now a palpable exhaustion with reckless driving in the city. Spencer, herself an avid cyclist, campaigned on curbing traffic violence—a nomenclature that was not in wide use in 2015. She has said that people who use their cars as weapons ought to have them treated as such.

And Spencer spokesman Rasmus Jorgensen tells SLM that while red light cameras are not among their top priorities for the Streets Department, they do plan to move ahead with them so long as they can find a vendor who can meet the city’s “high legal, privacy and operational standards.”

That may prove the rub. Though it’s not clear how the cameras’ return would be greeted by city residents. Noah Goldman, with the Coalition to Protect Cyclists and Pedestrians, says his group sees red light cameras as “only a part” of the solution to making streets less deadly, secondary to traffic calming measures. Eastwood, for his part, acknowledges we’re in a different moment politically than just a few years ago. But, nonetheless, he says, as far as he can tell, “In our St Louis community, people still hate red light cameras. They’re about as popular as Stan Kroenke.”