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Surely Mayor Marty's task force on the dreaded red-light cameras hadn't meant its official name to be a snide indication of its unfortunate rubber-stamping function.

On the cover of its underwhelming report made public this week, the task force was labeled "Mayor's Automated Enforcement Study Group."

The report certainly seemed automated, essentially echoing what Mayor Marty had already been hinting at, at least since his brief candidacy for the U.S. Senate reminded him just how unpopular he had become over his affections for the much maligned cameras.

In short, the task force recommended keeping the cameras but lowering the fines, doing even more reviews, yadda yadda.

It concluded that, alas, the slew of statistics collected in the two years the cameras have been clicking was not enough to determine whether they had made the city a safer place in which to drive — the purpose for installing these Big Brother boxes, or so we were told.

"Despite the planning and evaluation problems and omissions, not to mention the polarization of the public and widespread lack of understanding regarding automated enforcement as implemented in Albuquerque, the study group still finds that automated enforcement is a traffic safety technique that should be allowed more time to demonstrate positive outcomes for the city," the report stated.

Which is to say, blah blah blah blah blah we're not sure yet but we might as well keep collecting those fines, even at a discount rate.

It's not entirely the task force's fault for not making a more definitive statement on whether the cameras are saving ourselves from ourselves. The data needed to make such a determination is so mangled and poorly managed by the Albuquerque Police Department that it would take an army of number crunchers several months to make sense of them.

"Given the number of published, peer reviewed research and state of the practice guidebooks, which include case studies and documented lessons learned from highly credible sources, APD should have anticipated the challenges arising from the implementation of this technology," the report states.

The task force also criticizes Redflex Traffic Systems, the purveyor of these cameras, for not guiding the police department more effectively. Redflex, it says, provides only the most basic data, not bothering to include trend analysis or explanations for variances in the data.

But then, what can you expect of a company that knows how angry motorists are with them that it doesn't even post its name outside its Scottsdale, Ariz., headquarters out of concern for its employees.

"Combined with APD's lack of traffic analysis resources, the city is limited in its ability to assess the . . . program," the report states.

Oh, great. We reporters, who have tried to make sense of the data for months, could have told the task force that, and far more quickly.

Consider, though, that just a month ago the task forcers were reporting more emphatically that crashes at the four oldest red-light intersections — the only ones examined in the study — were down slightly but that rear-end collisions were up significantly.

Hmm. Isn't an increase in rear-enders what camera naysayers had predicted?

And consider this: A 2005 analysis of red-light cameras in Washington, D.C., conducted by the Washington Post and vetted by three outside traffic specialists showed that the district's cameras had not slowed the rate of crashes at those intersections but increased it by 61 percent.

That analysis covered six years of data that was, presumably, manageable.

Of course, the district's own review found that the cameras had reduced traffic offenses by 71 percent and supposed that such lower numbers should translate into lower crash and injury rates, though it could show no data to back up that assumption.

The cameras in D.C. are still flashing, despite the Post analysis, despite the community outcry, despite anything but the almighty dollar and the unproven promise of public safety.

I expect the same will be true in Albuquerque for years to come.