Drivers caught most often by speed and red light cameras are at the receiving end of comparatively little NYPD enforcement, newly available NYPD data reveal, highlighting an enforcement gap for the city’s most-dangerous drivers.
Recidivist speeders, red light violators and unlicensed drivers are responsible for a large percentage of serious injuries and fatalities in New York City. Vehicles with 16 or more speed camera violations per year are twice as likely to be involved in a “KSI” – a crash where someone is killed or seriously injured. This number rises quickly; those with 30 or more speeding violations are 50 times more likely. Similarly, drivers with more than three red light violations are five times more at risk of a KSI.
Yet new public data shows that the vehicles most often caught speeding and running red lights by automated cameras make up a much smaller percentage of vehicles ticketed by the NYPD. This is concerning because while cameras are extremely effective at identifying vehicles with scofflaw drivers that are most likely to kill, state law severely limits the penalties associated with automated enforcement. Fines are a minor $50 slap on the wrist and do not result in points. And state legislators specifically wrote into the law that insurers cannot set higher rates for vehicles with numerous camera violations, even though they are known to be a far greater liability. (Both insurance and camera violations are tied to the vehicle, not the driver.) NYPD tickets, on the other hand, do have all these consequences.
Camera speed tickets are highly effective at reining in most drivers – 86 percent of vehicles that received between one and three violations in 2025 did not get more. Similarly for red light violators, over 95 percent of vehicles received just one or two violations.
However, a fraction of vehicles — 14,707, less than 1 percent of all violators — received 16 or more speed camera violations last year. And 23,192 red light violators — 4.9 percent of the total — got three or more camera tickets. The low fines and lack of other consequences keep drivers of these vehicles from being deterred by camera violations. In fact, many extreme recidivists don’t even pay their fines. Half of Super Speeders – 7,425 vehicles – have unpaid fines in judgment, owing nearly $23 million for all violations. Sixty-nine percent of the 2,542 vehicles with 30 or more speeding violations have fines in judgment, owing over $5,500 each. And 81 percent of the 102 vehicles with 100 or more speeding violations owe an average of over $18,000.
It is these vehicles for which NYPD enforcement is essential. Unfortunately, vehicles with high numbers of speed and red light camera tickets receive a significantly smaller portion of NYPD-issued tickets than they do camera violations.
In 2025, NYPD started publishing license plate data of vehicles whose drivers were ticketed by NYPD officers. Matching this with the Department of Finance dataset of automated speeding and red light camera violations reveals a mismatch. For example, Super Speeders with 16 or more camera tickets received 8.2 percent of all camera speeding tickets issued last year. One would thus expect the NYPD to give around 8.2 percent of speeding tickets to these vehicles. However, these vehicles received only 1.8 percent of all NYPD tickets. This disparity is not explained by speed cameras being limited to school zones, as the same pattern holds for red light violations: Vehicles with three or more red light camera violations received 14 percent of all red light camera violations, but only 3.2 percent of all NYPD tickets, also 22 percent of what would be expected.
Vehicles with the most camera tickets are even less likely to get NYPD tickets. Those 2,830 vehicles with 30 or more speed camera violations received 2.9 percent of camera tickets, yet only 0.5 percent of NYPD tickets. And the 102 extreme speeders with 100 or more speed camera violations got a total of 14,352 camera tickets, 0.3 percent of all camera tickets. Yet only 10 of these 88 vehicles got a total of 14 NYPD speeding tickets – .02 percent of all NYPD tickets.
Vehicles with large numbers of speed and red light camera violations were far more likely to have been ticketed by the NYPD for having an unlicensed driver. Comparing the NYPD and DOF databases shows that vehicles with 16 or more speed camera violations and 3 or more red light camera violations were 43 percent and 48 percent more likely to have been ticketed for having an unlicensed driver respectively. This is especially important as a recent DOT report found that an astonishing 28 percent of all crashes with fatalities from 2020 and 2021 involved unlicensed drivers, and shows that it is even more important for NYPD to target and stop vehicles with large numbers of camera violations.
Analyzing the data leads to two major conclusions:
First, if we want to save lives (and lower insurance premiums for law-abiding drivers), we need state laws to change to give real teeth to automated enforcement. Traditional police enforcement is extremely difficult in New York City – cameras gave nearly 65 tickets for every one speeding ticket and nearly 20 tickets for every red light ticket issued by the NYPD from January through September of last year — the latest available. This requires meaningful fines, insurance consequences, and no limits to the number or location of automated cameras in New York City. State law currently limits speed cameras to a total of 750 zones within a quarter-mile of a school.
Second, camera enforcement and officer enforcement need to be integrated, with cameras identifying the most dangerous repeat offenders, and NYPD focusing enforcement on drivers of these vehicles.
Technology makes it possible for the NYPD to target the vehicles we know to be most dangerous. Mayor Mamdani and Commissioner Tisch should ensure that NYPD adopts license plate readers tied to DOF records to proactively identify and stop the deadliest drivers before they injure or kill.
