“Columbus residents deserve the greater safety that red-light cameras can bring, regardless of how Redflex won its contract to sell them” (“Innocent bystander,”Dispatch editorial, Monday).

This has to be most myopic statement ever published by a major newspaper.

Columbus residents accepted the rewriting of the law to demote traffic offenses from criminal to civil violations, at the behest of a publicly traded foreign corporation. They accepted the requirement to pay their fine in full to “appeal” their case, not to a judge but to a hearing officer. They accepted Redflex would guide the decisions regarding camera placement, trusted them to calibrate the equipment and allowed them to neatly package the violations for rubber-stamping by local police.

Every city official is now distancing himself from the Redflex contract. Not one is raising his hand, saying, “Yep, this was my baby and I’m proud of it.”

Why? Because the feds are involved? Not entirely. Because photo enforcement is extremely unpopular. When continuation of these systems is put to voters, they almost universally reject them, sometimes by wide margins. Columbus voters ironically increased the difficulty of raising such referendums in last year’s city-charter “reform.”

Do citizens care about their safety? Absolutely. But citizens have witnessed that the majority of violations are for petty infractions: a split-second go-or-stop dilemma whereby the yellow light was misjudged by tenths of a second and opposing traffic hasn’t moved yet. This is like ticketing a motorist for going 1 mph over the speed limit.

The Dispatch has pontificated about the virtues of photo enforcement for years, repeating the ancient, singular and cherry-picked “73 percent reduction in crashes” statistic. If these safety statistics are so important, why hasn’t the Columbus Division of Police bothered to update its webpage with a fresh report on the program in five years? See www.columbuspolice.org/PhotoRedLight/AReports.html

If Columbus is keen on continuing the program, officials need to follow Chicago’s lead and dump Redflex. If the program truly is about safety, adhering to the Ohio legislature’s modest reforms to keep the program cost-neutral shouldn’t deter city officials.

MICHAEL A. WELSH

Dublin

C/O The Columbus Dispatch