Chicago may revise its strictest-in-the-country ban on using cell phones while driving—but only because one of the city’s aldermen got caught breaking the law.

Chicago motorists who get caught talking on cell phones while driving without a hands-free device would no longer lose their driver’s licenses, under a mayoral plan that would have spared a North Side alderman political embarrassment.

Last year, Ald. Tom Tunney (44th) got pulled over and ticketed for yakking on his cell phone while driving. He was forced to hand over his license like thousands of other motorists.

Tunney then called Town Hall District Cmdr. Gary Yamashiroya and demanded to know why officers in an "understaffed police district" with serious unsolved crimes were "assigned to pull people over solely for cell phone violations."

In response, Yamashiroya ordered a police officer — not the one who wrote the $50 ticket — to hand-deliver Tunney’s driver’s license to the alderman’s ward office.

Motorists generally get licenses back only after they go to court or pay their fines.

Earlier this year, Chicago Alderman Dick Mell introduced a bill granting a grace period for Chicagoans who may have forgotten to register their guns (this would apply only to the handful of privileged Chicagoans permitted to own a gun).  The reason for Mell’s bill?  He himself had forgotten to register his guns before the deadline.

Now you see how Chicago’s aldermen could make the city one of the most paternalistic in the country.  They either don’t have to abide by the laws they pass, or they can simply pass a new law exonerating themselves should they get caught.

Seems that the city of St. Louis, like many cities, allows the police to confiscate the cars of people suspected (but not necessarily convicted) of certain crimes. They have a contract with a city towing firm, and said firm was allowing police officers and their families to "rent" confiscated cars free of charge, sometimes for months on end. Officers and their families could also sometimes purchase the confiscated cars at a fraction of the cars’ value.

All of that is pretty outrageous. But it gets better.  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch stumbled onto the story after investigating the daughter of the city’s police chief. She had been involved in a number of accidents with different cars. On several occasions she had wrecked a car, then simply gone down to the towing service to get a 60-80 percent discount on a new one. After one accident, her blood-alcohol concentration tested at .17. She wasn’t arrested or charged. The department says it has "no idea" why she was let go.

The police department hired a law firm, which concluded that the towing arrangement broke no rules or laws. The chief improbably claims he was oblivious to the deals his daughter was getting (her relationship with the towing service apparently goes back to 2002). The Post-Dispatch reports that the chief’s last public statement on the matter was that, "the absolute necessity in maintaining transparency in the eyes of the public."

He has since declined to comment.

(Via TheNewspaper.com)

Interesting story out of California, where two brothers may go to jail for setting a back fire on their own property to protect against approaching wildfires. They set the blaze in defiance of direct orders from local authorities.

As it turns out, the back fires saved the brothers’ home, as well as the homes of several people who rented from them, and potentially an entire neighborhood.

Emergencies can often call for a different set of rules (remember the post-Katrina euthanasia cases?). A little prosecutorial discretion would go a long way, here.

Terrific bit of investigative journalism from the OC Register finds that nearly one million cars in California owned by public officials are outfitted with special plates that make them immune to fines for traffic violations.

An Orange County Register investigation has found that the program, designed 30 years ago to protect police from criminals, has been expanded to cover hundreds of thousands of public employees – from police dispatchers to museum guards – who face little threat from the public. Their spouses and children can get the plates, too.

This has happened despite warnings from state officials that the safeguard is no longer needed because updated laws have made all DMV information confidential to the public.

The Register found that the confidential plate program shields these motorists in ways most of us can only dream about:

•Vehicles with protected license plates can run through dozens of intersections controlled by red light cameras and breeze along the 91 toll lanes with impunity.

•Parking citations issued to vehicles with protected plates are often dismissed because the process necessary to pierce the shield is too cumbersome.

•Some patrol officers let drivers with protected plates off with a warning because the plates signal that the drivers are “one of their own” or related to someone who is.

[...]

Some police officers confess that when they pull over someone with a confidential license plate they’re more likely to let them off with a warning. In most cases, one said, if an officer realizes a motorist has a confidential plate, the car won’t be pulled over at all.

“It’s an unwritten rule that we would extend professional courtesy,” said Ron Smith, a retired Los Angeles Police Department officer who worked patrol for 23 years. “Nine out of 10 times I would.”

Okay, they didn’t go that far. But in a study published this month in the Florida Public Health Review, University of South Florida researchers did find that red light cameras are little more than revenue generators, and actually make intersections less safe than doing nothing at all.

"The rigorous studies clearly show red-light cameras don’t work," said lead author Barbara Langland-Orban, professor and chair of health policy and management at the USF College of Public Health.

"Instead, they increase crashes and injuries as drivers attempt to abruptly stop at camera intersections. If used in Florida, cameras could potentially create even worse outcomes due to the state’s high percent of elderly who are more likely to be injured or killed when a crash occurs."

What else they found:

• The injury rate from red-light running crashes has dropped by a third in less than a decade, indicating red-light running crashes have been continually declining in Florida without the use of cameras.

• Comprehensive studies from North Carolina, Virginia, and Ontario have all reported cameras are significantly associated with increases in crashes, as well as crashes involving injuries. The study by the Virginia Transportation Research Council also found that cameras were linked to increased crash costs.

So what about those studies frequently trotted out by legislators eager to install intersection cameras?

Some studies that conclude cameras reduced crashes or injuries contained major “research design flaws,” such as incomplete data or inadequate analyses, and were conducted by researchers with links to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The IIHS, funded by automobile insurance companies, is the leading advocate for red-light cameras. Insurers can profit from red-light cameras, since their revenues will increase when higher premiums are charged due to the crash and citation increase, the researchers say.

One of those flawed studies credited red light cameras credit for downward trends in intersection injuries that began long before red light cameras were actually installed. Others lumped continuing decreases in injuries at intersections without red light cameras with actual increases in injuries at the considerably fewer intersections with cameras. They’d then come up with conclusions such as, "our intersections are safer since we installed red light cameras," taking care to use words like "since" intsead of "because."

One particularly perverse problem the study didn’t address is the temptation among some city governments to actually shorten yellow lights at camera-monitored intersections to increase revenue, despite well-documented research showing that shortening yellows is pretty much guaranteed to cause more accidents.