Red-light, speed cameras likely to return to Kansas City

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Red-light cameras are coming back to Kansas City, Missouri.

That’s the word from Mayor Quinton Lucas, who sponsored an ordinance that passed out of the City Council Thursday dealing with both types of cameras.

One of the first questions the mayor was asked about was where the red-light cameras could go up. The first intersection he named was 71 Highway and Gregory, but he also mentioned other intersections along that highway.

“55th Street, 59th Street. We have a number of incidents often on Independence Avenue,” Lucas said Friday. “We have incidents and speeding on Ward Parkway and certainly up north on 152.”

One of the drivers FOX4 talked to Friday was actually hit at 71 Highway and Gregory.

“I got T-Boned,” resident Luci Oliveira said when asked if she got rear ended. “He ran the light like you said. Yeah.”

The driver that hit Oliveira conceivably could have been fined if red light cameras were in effect at the time of her crash, and they were at that intersection.

Lucas says there are even ways to address people who are in masks in their car or a person who’s driving a vehicle that’s not registered to them.

“This will be the sort of thing where it’s more about the identity of the individual who is driving rather than actually looking at the license plate itself,” Lucas said. “That’s something that’s going to be a key change from perhaps from what existed previously.”

The city had to disconnect its red-light cameras in 2013 following a lawsuit in eastern Missouri.

Two drivers claimed someone else was driving their cars when they went through red lights. The case ended up in the Missouri Supreme Court. It was decided then, red light camera technology wasn’t good enough.

Now though, the new cameras are designed to take pictures of both the driver and the car.

They’ll only send tickets to drivers accused of running a red light if the system is able to match the photo of the driver to the owner of the car.

“With the crime rate in Kansas City, if that’ll help that as well, that might be beneficial,” Oliveira said of the red light cameras.

Lucas says temporary tags will not make this imitative harder to deal with.

“Facial identification is going to be a heavy part of what we are trying to do in connection with the speeding,” Lucas said. “That’s what the Missouri Appellate Court had said previously.”

Lucas’ ordinance still needs the support of the Board of Police Commissioners, but if that group approves it, the cameras could be operating again in the beginning of 2025. Lucas says the BoPC could talk about this at their October board meeting.

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