Yup. The vast majority of what the cameras capture is safe but technically illegal (although in this case I'm not even sure of that--the law says stop, it doesn't say how long you have to remain stopped) behavior. It's only by statistical fiddling that they show any safety improvement.
1) Red light cameras tend to displace the accidents from the intersection to just before the intersection, but they don't reduce accidents or injuries.
2) Regression to the mean--put a camera in a spot with a high accident rate and see the accident rate drop. But blips tend to average out anyway, unless it's a fundamental problem with the spot you would expect the accident rate to drop back to normal.
Also, we don't have cameras here but I have observed a pattern to traffic enforcement: I have *never* seen traffic enforcement other than DUI checkpoints at a location where there wasn't a mismatch between the law and the reality on the road. Examples:
1) There used to be a *big* speed trap on the highway northeast of town. One day they finally raised the speed limit there--and I haven't seen a cop there since.
2) One mile is full of houses, narrow, legitimately 35 mph. Then there's a mile built to 45 mph standards, but it has *one* house (which I believe is not occupied) and is 35 mph, even on the southbound side which in the area near the house is isolated from it by a barrier no little kid could cross. The next mile is built to the same standards and is correctly 45 mph. One guess as to where the cop sits.
3) We used to have a stupid law prohibiting turning on red when there were multiple turn lanes. I'm thinking of a T intersection where the road widened to 4 lanes just before the T. Just after the right turn there's good shelter for the cops to hide--and they really rack up a score on people making perfectly safe turns from the rightmost lane. I believe the legislature finally fixed that. Life has changed, I haven't been though that intersection since to see if the trap went away.
4) One that used to apply right near our house. The half-main street is built to 35 mph standards, but when we moved in there was a spot 1/2 mile along it that was undeveloped and thus narrower--25 mph. That resulted in the whole mile being 25 mph. The cop sat 1/4 mile along, where it still looked like a 35 mph road even though it was 25 mph. When the narrow spot was fixed the limit was raised to 35 mph and I haven't seen a cop there since.
And the purely abusive: Crosswalk enforcement, I got nailed in a situation where continuing on was completely safe but I'm not sure I could even have made a panic stop before the line, certainly not without asking for being rear-ended. Not only that but the only place served by that crosswalk was closed.
Edit: The only legitimate traffic stops I have ever seen involve a cop driving along and witnessing a problem.