Within weeks of moving to Washington, D.C., I received not one but two notices of speeding violations in the mail. I was flummoxed, having never been pulled over speeding in the city. It turns out that both speeding violations were on the same stretch of road — the 1400 block of Bladensburg Road in northeast DC — and they were for rather minor infractions. I allegedly was driving 44 mph in a 30 mph zone the first time and 41 mph in a 30 mph zone the second time. I paid the first infraction — a preposterous $100 — without asking questions. But when I got the second speeding ticket, I balked. I didn’t recall seeing a miles per hour sign on either occasion and I wondered: was the District of Columbia targeting me because of my out of state plates? (I hadn’t had time to change my plates at that point). After the first ticket, I distinctly remember going slower on Bladensburg Road and watching other cars whiz by me. Were they also ticketed for speeding?

I decided to return to the scene of the crime and do a little reconnaissance. Sure enough, there was an automated camera with a built-in radar device on the 1400 block of Bladensburg Road. But the device. along with a 30 miles per hour sign. was obscured by several leafy trees, which may have explained why I didn’t notice it. So I did some research on the district’s automated traffic enforcement system (which by the way is run by ACS, a private company) and discovered this interesting fact: after a vehicle is caught on radar or camera, a draft ticket is prepared by ACS personnel, “which is then reviewed by the Metropolitan Police Department, who determines whether the ticket should be prosecuted.” Here is where the out of state bias may come in.

To find out if my hunch was correct, I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) with the District of Columbia’s Department of Motor Vehicles (which monitors speeding infractions and collects the fines), requesting records on how many cars were prosecuted for speeding in the month of September, and what states or locales they were from. I knew better than to ask for individual drivers’ information; that would be an infraction of privacy, but any automated computer system should be able to be programmed to collect the license plate information I was requesting. Within two weeks, I received a response from Pamela Washington, the DMV’s assistant general counsel and FOIA officer. Washington made it clear the DMV wasn’t going to honor my FOIA request. She provided two arguments, both of which I consider specious. Her first argument was that “the Department of Motor Vehicles is not required to create a record, which this request will require; nor is it required to answer questions.” Huh? The whole point of FOIA is to require public agencies to create public records and answer questions about dubious government activities.

Her second argument was that my “request would entail significant interference with the operation of the Department of Motor Vehicle’s automated information system and [expend] well in excess of eight hours of personnel time to reprogram and reformat records. There is indeed an exemption in the District of Columbia’s FOIA law for requests that take in excess of eight hours to complete. But somehow I doubt that it would take more than eight hours for ACS to write a software program to record the license plates of cars ticketed in the month of September on that one stretch of road — the 1400 block of Bladensburg. A smart software developer could probably write that code in less than a hour and then it would just take a few minutes to run the program and maybe an hour or two for DMV staff to retrieve and send me the records I requested.

Under FOIA law, I do have the option of appealing this decision and am planning to do so, if only to shine a light on the District of Columbia’s hubris in ignoring the spirit, if not the law, of its Freedom of Information Act. In the meantime, I have appealed my second ticket, arguing that the miles per hour sign was obscured by foliage and that I was actually driving slower than the cars around me and should not have been singled out. I’ll keep you posted on what happens. And if anyone has had a similar FOIA experience, I’d love to hear about it.