SEPTEMBER 2019 • LONGISLANDPRESS.COM 9
MOVE-OVER CAMERAS
EYES ON THE ROAD
Cars pass a police cruiser during a traffic stop. (Getty Images)
BY TIMOTHY BOLGER
Now that school bus stop-arm cameras
have begun catching drivers
illegally passing stopped busses this
fall, a similar system aimed at recording
motorists improperly passing
stopped police vehicles could be next.
That’s because New York State lawmakers
are considering a bill that
would authorize law enforcement to
install photo equipment on police cars
to generate summonses that get mailed
home to drivers who violate the law
against not moving over or slowing
down for stopped emergency vehicles.
It’s essentially a red-light camera program
for the Move Over Law.
“The only way to correct dangerous
driving behavior is making people
understand that there are consequences,”
says Charlie Degliomini,
executive vice president of government
relations and corporate communications
for Rekor Systems Inc.,
a company that makes the move-over
cameras.
Rekor has been shopping the system
around to police departments nationwide.
Besides New York, Maryland is
the only other state where such a proposal
is under consideration, although
the idea has been informally discussed
elsewhere, Degliomini says.
As for the need, he cites a study that
found 70 percent of drivers nationally
were unaware of the move-over
laws. New York State’s law went into
effect in 2012 and was designed to
protect officers from being fatally
struck by cars while performing
roadside traffic stops. When Rekor
equipped two police cars with their
devices in Suffolk County for two
weeks in a study last winter, they
found 2.3 violations per minute
— significantly higher than the national
average of one violation per
minute, the company says.
“The findings pretty much confirmed
what we’ve seen in many other studies,”
says Rod Hillman, president and
chief operating officer of Rekor.
Should move-over cameras pass in
Albany after the state legislative session
resumes in January, the measure
would be an expansion of the photo
enforcement trend that includes
red-light cameras, school zone speed
cameras — repealed on Long Island,
but still used in New York City — and
bus lane cameras, also in use in the
city. State lawmakers are also considering
a bill that would authorize
construction zone speed cameras.
Critics have called such traffic-enforcement
cameras intrusive and a
ploy for lawmakers to plug budget
gaps in the name of public safety.
Jason Starr, the former Nassau County
chapter director of the New York
Civil Liberties Union, has said that
such traffic-enforcement cameras
need safeguards to ensure there are
no abuses of driver data in order
to strike a balance between public
safety and privacy rights.
“You can capture all types of data
about someone that has nothing to do
with public safety,” Starr has said of
photo traffic-enforcement cameras.
“They have to have some protections
there for the data.”
Degliomini notes that without photo
enforcement, there’s no way to
enforce the move-over laws unless
there’s a second police officer monitoring
another’s traffic stop who can
chase down violators, which isn’t
always an option.
While red-light cameras, speed
cameras, and bus camera laws are
clear-cut, the move-over law has
a little more ambiguity. The law
requires that drivers change lanes
to give space to emergency and service
vehicles performing roadside
operations, but if drivers are unable
to safely change lanes due to traffic,
they’re required to slow down. So
the move-over camera takes video
footage of both lanes of traffic to see
if drivers followed the law, and also
tracks their speed.
“If there’s a wide-open lane and you
couldn’t move over, then it’s a violation,”
says Hillman. “Any one of these violations
has to be reviewed and ultimately
signed off on by a sworn officer.”
Unlike the speeders and lawbreakers
they’re trying to stop, Hillman and
Degliomini aren’t in a rush to get the
move-over camera laws passed.
“As we see with the school bus stoparm
cameras, even though it took
many years, we hope that it will be
a much more prominent thing,” Hillman
says.
NEWS
“The only way to correct dangerous driving
behavior is making people understand that there
are consequences,” says Charlie Degliomini.
/LONGISLANDPRESS.COM
