Lawyer on Crusade Over Red-Light Cameras

Paul Kubosh is a leading attorney, organizing the battle over Houston’s 70 red-light cameras. He, along with another attorney, sued the city in 2008 over the program and collected 30,000 signatures from citizens in order to put a referendum on the matter on November’s ballot. (They could receive an answer from the city’s secretary as early as Friday on if it will, in fact, appear before voters in November.) There are several different players in this battle, and each seems to have a “dog in the hunt.” The city of Houston issued 796,000 tickets from the cameras, bringing in more than $44 million. The Houston Police Department (HPD) kept $16 million of that, and American Traffic Solutions (ATS) received around $9 million. Kubosh, a 44 year old defense attorney makes his living defending ticketed drivers. He claims that photo-enforcement is simply an “intrusive government program aimed at balancing the city’s budget under the guise of safety.” To back his argument, Kubosh points to a 2008 email from the Rice University professor who “conducted the city’s study on the effects of Houston’s cameras.” In the email, the professor writes that although weak studies are likely to report a reduction in side-impact crashes, “more rigorous and appropriate research designs fail to detect this reduction after the installation of red light cameras.” Says, Kubosh, “To me, this email here means HPD knows, HPD doesn’t care, HPD just wants the money.”