The sins and corruption of criminal Aussie speed camera company Redflex

The zombie apocalypse seems likely to claim another victim, only this time it’s a happy story. Put the champagne on ice and warm up the Ming Molls...

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The zombie pandemic is killing Shitsville-based corrupt, criminal and/or generally incompetent corporate dicks, and multinational speed camera operator, Redflex.

UPDATE, JULY 10 2020: Redflex has copped a multi-million-dollar US Government bailout. Details on YouTube >>

“Approximately 15% of group revenue is dependent on volume-based contracts. We anticipate our revenue from these contracts will be impacted broadly in line with the reduction in traffic volumes as well as the duration of the disruption.”

Economic immolation, such an unfortunate situation, for Talbot.

That’s from a regulatory filing in the US a few days ago. Redflex is on death’s door, thanks to complications arising from the Zombie Apocalypse. Unable to weather the storm arising from the downturn in its questionably derived income. How friggin’ tragic. 

On a call to investors a few days ago, Redflex CEO Mark Talbot warned that further zombie-related travel restrictions could delay new camera installations (heaven forbid) and further impact revenue. Terrible news indeed, I’m sure you’d agree.

To Mr Talbot I’d say. Yeah: that’s a real shame, buddy. Sorry to hear you’re on fire, but, ahhh, I’m actually rather busy, while you are ablaze in this way, unfortunately, and in line with community sentiment I’ve decided not to irrigate you in the time-honoured tradition. Thanks for your understanding.

It’s fair to say ordinary motorists are as upset in relation to Redflex’s predicament as you might expect.

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Red sense

Dear Redflex, we just want you to know ordinary people are sick of your criminal conduct, your lack of social conscience and your ongoing ambient delusions of competency.

Your company makes Australia look bad, and clearly, that is the Prime Minister’s job.

…perceptions (of automated traffic enforcement) are different on different continents and we work extremely hard to understand each client’s need, mindset and culture.

-Talbot

I disagree, Mr Talbot. Pretty much everyone in the local community - regardless of what friggin’ continent they’re on, hates your company and how it operates. You purport to be about road safety, but every single person - except maybe the cops (when they’re on the record) and a handful of your disciples - knows it’s all about grubby revenue.

It’s an inarguable fact that when cameras are in place, violations go down and dangerous or bad driving behavior changes.

-Talbot, again

Yeah , that’s bullshit too. If that were true - think about it - that would make it economically unviable to install your cameras. If you put up a camera and suddenly the revenue it generates drops off a cliff because of this affect you have, then there wouldn’t be a traffic safety problem. Your business scores off people for menial, low-level speeding during a lapse in cognitive function. Your company makes life really fucking hard for ordinary people making small errors which don’t actually have a great difference in the road toll. And it all just reaffirms to police the prevailing marketing messages demonising speed >>

Image: Jared Williams/NewsCorp

Putting the world on lockdown has some pretty unexpected positive side effects, therefore.

Oil prices have fallen to a 30-year low, thanks to plummeting demand. And frankly it’s hard to be unhappy when circumstances hand those fine, upstanding cartel-chaps at OPEC a sandpaper dildo. 40-grit this time, too. (The most memorable kind.)

We’re driving less, too, and therefore getting injured (and dead) a lot less on the road. So that’s kinda nice. And fewer traffic offences are thus being caught on camera. Which has me all choked up on behalf of Redflex’s plight.

This is a really terrible turn of events if you’re in the speed camera business, like those roaches at Redflex. Redflex shares are in freefall - down 46 per cent this year, which I find kinda hilarious. 

Mainly because only a bunch of epically incompetent tools could take a business that is essentially a licence to print money in four allegedly advanced western democracies, and yet be looking down the barrel of financial Armageddon after just a few slow weeks on lockdown.

This has to be because everything at Redflex is leveraged up to the balls. The eyeballs. But to be fair - Redflex was not all that good at making a profit in happier times. Redflex hasn’t turned a profit since 2014, but according to Yahoo Finance the company did compensate its CEO Mark Talbot to the tune of $1.1 million - which is more than double the median compensation of CEOs of similarly sized companies…

...and Redflex shareholders lost about 43 per cent over the past three years, before this current fiasco. So, well done there, and good job, Mr Talbot.

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Karen Finley. Image: Sherrie Buzby/The Republic

Red-handed riding hood

This report is my honest personal opinion, and I make no comment about individuals at Redflex unless I mention them specifically, such as Mr Talbot above.

And how could I forget his predecessor, the delightful former Redflex CEO and confidently criminal scumbag Karen Finley.

Cake doesn’t eat itself, just saying. Image: Chicago Tribune

Ms Finley’s special interest was bribery. With a side-serve of corruption, and perhaps conspiracy for dessert. Sounds pretty tasty. The lovely Karen memorably conspired to bribe a highly-placed Chicago traffic official named John Bills: clearly a carnivore. Or pastry enthusiast. It’s hard to look like Mr Bills by overdoing it on the broccoli - that’s just a harmless observation/generalisation.

The somewhat stout Mr Bills accepted more than $2 million (US dollars) in bribes from Redflex, via a middleman contractor type, in exchange for awarding Redflex lucrative camera contracts in the Windy City. It was all very ‘paper bag, under the table’.

Predictably enough, reports emerged that Mr Bills used some of the cash to install a hottie with all the usual enhancements, a ‘hottie on the side’ (I think that’s the ‘PC’ term, these days). And Hottie-on-the-side was installed in an upmarket - let’s call it a ‘cabin’ - in Arizona.

Hotties-on-the-side are notoriously resource-intensive. Self-affirming and uplifting, certainly, for the sponsor, but somewhat pricey, and hard to dispose of responsibly.

In exchange for catching all of Redflex’s dirty money, Mr Bills ultimately went on, ahhhh, let’s call it a ‘mandatory holiday’ in Club Fed for a decade, where I’m tipping he enjoyed a somewhat different lifestyle; no hottie on the side, somewhat worse cuisine, but interesting company. That’s pretty certain.

And the delightful Ms Finley from Redflex, she was fined $2 million for her seemingly sociopathic mis-deeds, and she went inside for two-and-a-half years. Of course, it’s hardly as confronting in the ‘big house’ if you don’t have a penis. (That’s what I’ve heard.)

Happily (for her) the lovely Karen served that sentence concurrently with the 14-month prison term she was also handed for a carbon-copy bribery conspiracy, of which she was also convicted, in Ohio. So, she’s nothing if not diligent, as well as an A-grade multi-tasker. 

Karen Finley, a beacon of moral ambiguity, was the CEO of Redflex, let’s not forget. The former figurehead of a company doing business then, and still doing business now, with law and order institutions on three friggin’ continents.

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License to bill

Redflex is in the business of outsourced police work, effectively. At the coalface of the interaction between citizens in their cars and the mechanics of law and order. Powering up the printing presses on a licence to print money by catching motorists on camera.

Like cops, only with a ‘per arrest’ bonus. But at the same time, metaphorically, agreeably passing envelopes full of cash under the table. It’s perversely poetic.

“...there’s no sense of corporate social responsibility there.”

- US District Court Judge Virginia Kendall

No - there’s not. No sense at all.

Criminality aside, Redflex’s incompetence is also world-class: The company was forced to admit it ran its cameras from 1997 to 2008 without proper FCC certification, calling thousands of fines into question. Oops a daisy.

Redflex spent the first six months of 2013 removing more dodgy cameras than it actually installed. In three jurisdictions in California its camera systems were found to be in violation of state law.

Here in Australia several thousand fines were handed back when Redflex’s cameras detected a woman travelling at over 160 km/h, in a car incapable of going that fast.

And a fired Redflex national sales ‘executive’ in Retardistan, Aaron Rosenberg, went on the warpath in court, alleging lavish gifts and bribes from the company to officials in 13 states: California, Washington, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Florida, New Jersey, Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia.

But this is not my main beef with Redflex. Criminal incompetence. They’re just the Volkswagen of speed cameras. Same pinheads, different specialisation. Nor is it personal - I haven’t had a speed camera fine in more than 20 years, and the one I did get, in the 1990s, in friggin’ Darwin, that was a fair cop. So I just paid it.

What shits me about these Redflex dudes is (firstly) they don’t make the roads any safer. They take photographs of the occasional dangerous driver - certainly - but that doesn’t stop the dangerous driver. That just mails the dangerous driver a fine in coming days to weeks.

To stop a dangerous driver, and thereby actually increase public safety, you need a sworn police officer in a real cop car, at the roadside. And I’m all in favour of that.

Average point-to-point speed cameras don’t encourage safe driving, They create dangerous morons who brake in overtaking lanes in front of B-doubles.

Redflex is not about safety. It’s about money. They’re even incentivised by volume-based contracts to catch ever more and more drivers. More fines equals more income for Redflex - so that’s not a system that’s, like, totally susceptible to corruption, operated by a company with a cabinet full of Olympic gold medals for criminal misconduct. 

Many people detected by cameras are only technically breaching the law, as opposed to being properly dangerous, and (if history repeats) many of those photographed by Redflex will actually be innocent. Because Redflex’s tech often does not work properly.

And the regulators - who are equally addicted to this revenue - they make it very difficult to dispute any fine. The whole system is morally bankrupt.

So here’s my main problem with these camera regimes: It erodes the faith that ordinary, honest people should have in a functional justice system. Because it’s institutionally corrupt, yet officially supported. Everyone knows it. Anyone who denies it is simply bullshitting you on an epic scale. And that’s a real problem, for society. 

Here’s why: Let’s say you convene a jury, in a criminal trial, to put some properly evil criminal scumbag away. Where he deserves to be. Because he did something unforgivable.

And let’s say the cops and the prosecutors are absolutely on target and this is the guy who did it, and he deserves punishment. Who do you want on the jury? I want a bunch of people who consider only the evidence impartially and make the right call. Where the evidence alone is the determining factor.

The same rationale applies to the disgraceful NSW pursuit policy, which leaves a filthy taste in the public’s mouth, sentimentally, even today.

I don’t want a bunch of people whose default position is that the whole system is bent, and therefore, despite compelling evidence, maybe the accused deserves the benefit of additional doubt.

I know who I want on the jury, and I know the effect scumbag organisations like Redflex, colluding with various cash-addicted governments, have on the public trust.

Redflex is an unmitigated social disgrace.

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