Camera Locations..........
Fines & Points.........
Source
If you receive ticket a notice in the mail issued to you by a
police department or even an out of state camera company
what you shouldn’t do is freely give them information
requested of you. Often times these notices are sent out to fish
for information like your driver’s license number and to get you
to tell on yourself (or someone else) for a red light violation.
These are known as snitch tickets.
Technicians reviewing the photos will check to see if the
pictured driver is obviously not the registered owner (male /
female mismatch, age difference, or a rental car). Sometimes
the photo is too blurry to identify who it is and will send the
registered owner an official-looking notice telling him that he
must identify the driver. About 40 California police departments
will mail out Snitch Tickets to fool the registered owner into
identifying the actual driver of the car.
Snitch Tickets have not been filed with the court, so are
recognizable because they don't say "Notice to Appear," don't
have the court's address, and say (on the back, in small
letters), "Do not contact the court." Since they have NOT been
filed with the court, they have no legal weight. You can ignore
a Snitch Ticket. Snitch Tickets are designed to look like a real
ticket but are legally very different. Real tickets and Snitch
Tickets both ask the registered owner to turn-in or identify the
person who was driving the car. Despite all that, there are
some differences that you can rely on. One of the best ways to
identify a Snitch Ticket is the small print on the back of the
page, "Do not contact the court about this notice." Snitch
Tickets will 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.
A real ticket will ask you to contact ("Respond to") the court
and you should. If your ticket says this it's likely a real one and
you should look it up on the court's website. If it's not on their
site, it still could be real. Make sure you are looking on the
court's website, not the website of the camera operator Redflex
(PhotoNotice) or ATS's. Your ticket is real if you have received
a Courtesy Notice and it asks you to contact the court. Please
note that your ticket could be real even if the court's phone
number is missing and its address is incomplete. This is often
the case because some cities are leaving this information off
their real tickets, to make it harder for defendants to fight their
ticket in court.
