(Elsewhere in )Tennessee: Top Cop Luxury Vacation Paid By Speed Camera Company

[MindPilot]

The police chief in Oak Ridge, Tennessee received an all-expense paid vacation in Arizona, while collecting his on-duty salary, in return for his providing testimony that helped save Redflex Traffic Systems from paying millions in possible damages. The Australian firm came under fire after it was caught falsely claiming on customs forms that the radar units it had imported were certified by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). From 1998 to 2008, every time Redflex turned on a mobile photo radar unit, it violated federal law. When a rival firm, American Traffic Solutions (ATS), discovered this fact, it blew the whistle in a federal court case, the first round of which wrapped up in the spring.

ATS filed suit to claim that Redflex lied to about a dozen cities by offering its services without having properly certified radar units to fulfill the contracts it won. Redflex played dumb throughout the trial. Even though the United States represented the largest market for the company, Karen Finley, the head of North American operations, swore that no one at the firm had any idea that radar equipment required FCC certification to ensure that the transmitters would not, for example, create a potential safety hazard by interfering with air traffic control radar. It was all an "honest mistake," Finley insisted. The company did not know about the law and the radar they used, once certified, caused no problems with other devices in the electromagnetic spectrum.


http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/32/3282.asp