What is a "Snitch Ticket"?

This post is about a scam coming from a place you would never expect it, your local police department. They send out fake red light camera "tickets."They call them Nominations. I call them Snitch Tickets.
If the document you received does not give the name of the Court and its street address and phone number, or if it says, "Do not contact the Court," it may not be a real ticket. It could be a fake - a Snitch Ticket - generated by the police.

A real ticket will tell you to contact ("Respond to") the court . . .and you should.Your ticket is a real one if you can look it up on the court's website. But please note -(a) If it's not on their site, it still could be real! Or, it could be a fake, a Snitch Ticket.(b) Make sure you are looking on the court's website, not the one where you go to look at the ticket pictures (which is operated by the camera company).Your ticket is real if you've received a Courtesy Notice from the court. But please note -(a) You could still have a real ticket even if you haven't received a Courtesy Notice.(b) A Courtesy Notice will never tell you to contact anyone but the court.Your ticket could be real even if the court's phone number is missing and its address is incomplete. That's because some cities are leaving that info off their real tickets, to make it harder for defendants to fight their ticket in court.

Snitch Tickets are designed to look very much like a real ticket - but are legally very different. To add to the confusion caused by the similar looks, real tickets and Snitch Tickets both ask the registered owner to turn-in (or snitch on) the person who was driving the car. Despite all that, there are some differences that you can rely on. One of the best "tells" is that most Snitch Tickets will say, in small print on the back of the page, "Do not contact the court about this notice." Snitch Tickets also lack any wording directing you to contact or "Respond to" the court. In fact, on a typical Snitch Ticket there is no phone number for the court, and the court's address usually is missing or incomplete. (Please note, however, that in some towns the real tickets carry an incomplete address.

The police are going to great lengths to get registered owners to identify who was driving their car. In those towns, if the technicians reviewing the photos see that the pictured driver is obviously not the registered owner (gender mismatch, great difference in age, or a rental car) or that the photo is too blurry to be sure of who it is, one tactic they use is to send the registered owner an official-looking notice telling him that he must identify the driver.

Many cities use RedFlex as their camera vendor and have contract terms which give either the city or RedFlex (or both) a big monetary incentive to issue more tickets. When the police are first processing the photos and they see that the face photo is obviously** not the registered owner, or that it is of such poor quality that it would probably not be accepted by a judge as proof of who the driver was, they sometimes send the registered owner a notice ("Snitch Ticket") - which the City doesn't have to pay RedFlex for. Sending you the Snitch Ticket is the police's attempt to get you to identify the driver, thus providing the proof they need. Once you have filled-out the blanks on the Snitch Ticket form, the police can be pretty sure that a ticket will stick and that they will be able to recoup the $90 it will cost them to have a real one issued. So they go ahead and have RedFlex issue (print up and mail) one.Contracts signed after Jan. 1, 2004 cannot, by law, provide for a per-ticket payment to the vendor. It has to be "flat-rate." A typical flat-rate contract requires the city to pay the vendor a rent of $6070 per month per camera. Even though the city is not paying for each ticket issued, their need to recoup the rent gives them a big incentive to issue more tickets that will stick.

Probably the biggest reason Snitch Tickets work so well is that they take advantage of your trust and confidence in the police. "Confidence" is the first word in "con man."From an Internet newsgroup discussion:Post-er # 1: "BS. It is self-evident that any so-called citation which doesn't tell you when and where to challenge it in court, is not a legal ticket."Post-er # 2: " 'Self-evident' only to those of us who have been pulled over by a cop and given a regular ('good old fashioned') ticket a few times. I admit that that describes me. I suspect it describes you, too. You and I know what a real ticket says and what it orders you to do. But there are at least two groups of people who don't have that knowledge.1. Your auntie, who never has had a ticket in her life, until now she gets one in the mail. (Cameras with too-short yellows tend to catch mature people, who drive at moderate speeds. The young lead-foots are going fast enough to make it through on a short yellow.)2. People here from another country where tickets are handled in another fashion, such as by payment directly to the officer who pulled you over. That's not just Mexico, by the way."The Media Cover-upSnitch Tickets are working because the Mainstream Media (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines) is afraid to write about them; doing so would get the police mad at them, and the media gets many of its story "leads" from the police.