This week, the Bend City Council approved a vendor for its new red light camera system, giving authorities another way to enforce speeding violations and other infractions in the city. With Bend growing and pedestrian deaths continuing to climb in the United States, it seems like a helpful tool for law enforcement — but that doesn’t mean there are not areas of concern. Among them are questions about costs, erroneous ticketing and of course, the rise in the surveillance state.
The new vendor, American Traffic Solutions — rebranded as Verra Mobility in 2018 — will install three camera systems at heavily trafficked areas around Bend, including NE 27th and Neff, Reed Market and Third Street and SE Powers and Highway 97. Following more traffic studies, a total of 10 cameras are planned. The cost of operating the system with 10 cameras is expected to be $780,000 per year — costs that the City of Bend estimates will be completely covered by the tickets issued through the program.
In other cities, the exact cost of the tickets issued have varied based on the severity of the infraction, but if we use some simple math to say that a ticket is an average of $100, that’s a need to issue at least 7,800 tickets — and actually see those tickets paid — in order to pay for the cost of the system. In a city of just over 100,000 people (plus tourists,) that’s a lot of tickets.
And, as the City’s Issue Summary points out, that income doesn’t yet factor in the additional costs that will come up within the municipal court system. City officials assume right now that they’ll need at least one more full-time person at the court, as well as more judge and bailiff time to account for those thousands of more tickets the system requires in order to pay for itself. Those are just estimates, and the City assumes it will be able to cover those costs with “revenue generation.” We’ll see.
And then there’s the concern around the tickets themselves. In most parts of our legal system, a person is innocent until proven guilty. With red light systems, that is flipped on its head. It’s up to the person to whom the car is registered — which may or may not be the actual driver — to prove that they did not do what they are accused of doing. When doing so involves missing work or school to show up to court, some drivers just lay down and pay the fee. It’s too much work to fight it. In the case of fleet vehicles or shared cars, it’s a whole other headache.
Perhaps the biggest concern is the surveillance. We are told these cameras will be used to catch speeders and those running red lights — but pardon us if we insert just a small measure of skepticism about how they may be used in other capacities. We are assured by some in state government and local law enforcement that, for example, our sanctuary laws bar local law enforcement from cooperating in immigration activities. But we also live in a time when certain actors in government, even at the highest level, seem to have no respect for the rule of law. In the same vein as our concern about Bend Police’s invitation to connect local security cameras to a police database, we are concerned about misuse of the system for enforcement of other kinds. What’s more, this is yet another path for handing our personal information off to a private company — and we think it would be naïve to assume that can’t also be abused.
With the costs of the new camera program and the rise in costs at the court, will all of this result in making our streets safer? Bend’s police chief thinks so. But it’s going to be up to the City Council that ordered this new program be put in place — and the locals who will have to live under its regime — to ensure accountability.
This article appears in the Source September 25, 2025.
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The general drift of the story I agree with: will the cameras generate sufficient revenue to cover all the related expenses (not just the installing and monitoring contractor costs).
However, the story seems to drift into privacy issues, and that has me mystified. There are so many surveillance cameras already watching us in Bend that I can’t see how a few more is going to tip any scales.
In fact, I’d love to see a follow-up story by The Source on just how many public cameras (forget about private and/or business cameras) are already monitoring the general public. It shouldn’t be too hard to put that question to the relevant federal, state, and local authorities, and my guess would be a disturbing “wake-up” call.