Miami Beach drivers who make rolling right turns at red lights will no longer face camera-generated citations — at least for the turning movement itself — after the City Commission voted 5–2 Wednesday to immediately halt that category of enforcement across the city, leaving straight-through red-light enforcement fully intact.
What Was Decided
The action, taken by motion rather than ordinance under agenda item R9 AI, carries no waiting period: Police Chief Wayne Jones confirmed enforcement stops at once, responding "Consider it done" when asked whether the suspension was effective immediately. City Clerk Rafael Granado noted that a formalizing resolution will be brought back after the fact.
The vote exempts one intersection: the westbound-17th-Street-to-northbound-Alton-Road right turn, where the Florida Department of Transportation had already prohibited the maneuver years ago based on crash data, sight-distance concerns, and high pedestrian volumes. Transportation Director Jose Gonzalez explained that Alton Road is a state road and that FDOT's restriction predates the camera program — the camera there enforces a preexisting no-right-on-red prohibition, not a general rolling-stop rule.
Commissioner Alex Fernandez, who co-sponsored the item with Mayor Steven Meiner and made the motion, said the volume of resident complaints had become impossible to ignore. "I am getting an overwhelming amount of complaints from our residents who are getting tickets," he said, describing citations where brake lights were clearly visible in the footage. Fernandez had originally sought to suspend or cancel the city's entire red-light camera contract, but after consulting the city attorney and police, concluded the right-turn issue could be addressed without terminating the program. He subsequently withdrew a companion referral item that would have studied full program termination, saying Wednesday's action addressed his core concern.
The Debate Over Rolling Stops
Chief Jones defended the program's underlying rationale — reducing intersection crashes — while acknowledging the behavior at issue: drivers who decelerate sharply but don't come to a full stop, what he described as a "California roll." The cameras are currently calibrated to trigger at roughly 7 mph; any vehicle moving at that speed or faster through a red light generates a citation. Jones said every citation is reviewed by a police officer before issuance, and that the contracted vendor, not the city, handles camera calibration.
Commissioner David Suarez added a legal dimension, citing a March 2026 Broward County ruling in which a judge found the red-light-camera citation process unconstitutional on due-process grounds — specifically, the presumption that the registered vehicle owner was the driver, placing the burden on the owner to prove otherwise. Suarez said the program may not survive legal scrutiny long-term regardless of what the Commission does.
The two dissenting votes came from Commissioners Tanya Bhatt and Monica Matteo-Salinas. Bhatt proposed a six-month pilot program to raise the camera trigger threshold before scrapping enforcement altogether, and argued the cameras protect cyclists and pedestrians. Matteo-Salinas was more direct, saying the city "is dangerous a lot of times for pedestrians" and that "people just need to slow down and stop and chill out and just stop."
What's Next
Straight-through red-light enforcement continues unaffected. Staff will return with an after-the-fact resolution to formalize Wednesday's action. The broader question of whether to terminate the city's red-light camera contract entirely — the subject of the now-withdrawn C4S referral — remains unresolved and would require a separate future action if any commissioner chooses to revisit it.
