Do more speed cameras mean more danger?

The wreckage of a mangled car lies strewn across a major road, the flashing blue lights of emergency vehicles reflected eerily inside its disembowelled remains in a sea of shattered glass, metal and leaking oil.

The chug of the compressors and cutting gear which freed the drivers from their ruptured cars are drowned out by the wail of ambulances taking the dead and injured to hospital.

In the background, a police accident investigator sets about gathering the emotionless measurements and data which may point to the cause of the accident. He’s already noted that a quarter of a mile down the road there’s a Gatso.

It is a sickening scene, one which traffic police fear above all others and the one which motivates them to do their job. We may subconsciously roll our eyes when the officer who pulls you over tells you how many fatal accidents he’s attended, but the fact is, he’s only telling you the cold, hard truth. Few jobs can leave you feeling so helpless, or strangely at times so satisfied, as being in the country’s specialist traffic units. They don’t believe they are there to hand out tickets, they believe they are there to save lives.

But now, as we ” celebrate ” the 10th anniversary of the appearance of the first Gatso speed camera on British soil, a cloud hangs over the future of our roads. Here, a top policeman outlines his nightmare vision of what lies around the corner if, he says, the Government maintains its policy of relying on cameras to keep the highways safe.

Officer ” L ” , who is a senior serving traffic officer in the south-east of England and refuses to be named for fear of ” ending my career ” , says alarm bells are ringing in police control centres around the UK as a result of what he says is ” the insane belief that machines make better policemen than policemen ” .

A 17-year veteran of the force, with 11 spent in the traffic unit, ” L ” says: ” It would be wrong to say the police blindly think cameras improve safety. Of course, they had a really positive effect when they were first deployed in known accident areas and at traffic lights, which is exactly what everyone hoped for.

” But the result was that the policy-makers thought ‘hold on, what do we need all these expensive cars for?’ and decided to put their money into cameras instead.

” The problem is that there is a law of decreasing returns with speed cameras, and the fact is the Government has made a huge mistake listening to the safety lobby in believing cameras are the cure-all to accidents.

” You have to take the safety lobby at face value. They truly believe the cameras are good for road safety, and frankly if that were the case you couldn’t argue with them. The experience of my colleagues and I doesn’t bear that out, however. If anything I would say that the standard of driving on British roads is worse than it has been for years, and it is getting worse.

” I truly believe that an over-reliance on cameras is the reason for that, because they don’t address the problem, only punish it. Imagine a doctor who wouldn’t give you advice on healthy living and waited until you were ill before he’d see you, or a teacher who didn’t educate the children and only gave them detention when they failed their exams. That’s what cameras do when they are used as a substitute for real policing.

” In my force – where fatalities are up, by the way – the traffic unit has been cut back by about half in the last decade, and the worrying thing is that the remaining officers are all veterans.

” There isn’t any new blood coming in as many serving officers think it won’t be long before the traffic unit is axed entirely, so they see it as a career dead end.

” It doesn’t take a genius to see that unless there is a major policy shift there will come a time where the level of experience in policing traffic and dealing with accidents in our area will drop through the floor. ”

And it’s not just accident victims who ” L ” is worried about. He said: ” I’m also very concerned about the social damage Gatsos are having, the effect of making the public ‘unbelievers’ in what we are trying to do. I believe the experience in Canada is of great interest with regards to that. They experienced a social backlash, much as we are now, and Canadian police said they saw a marked downturn in co-operation from the average citizen.

” The politicians were clever enough to listen and realise what this could mean overall, so they cut right back on camera usage. They were seen as having a use and a positive effect at a certain level of deployment, but at a cost to society that in time incrementally outweighed their gain as more and more were erected. An optimist would say the Government in Canada appreciated the role of police in society better than the Government here, which appears to want policing by headlines, numbers and statistics, not by end effect or public consent. ” It is a damning indictment from a serving officer, but do his claims add up?

Government figures show that while the number of cameras on our roads nears 10,000 (and is rising at around 40 per cent per year), the numbers of people injured on the roads has actually risen since 1992.

Moreover, as we reported in MCN, July 17, the number of people being convicted for dangerous and careless driving have fallen by 24 per cent and 36 per cent.

Worryingly, not only are more and more police authorities being advised by their accountants to join the ” cash for speeders ” revenue return scheme, which lets them keep money from camera fines, but Home Secretary David Blunkett’s announcement last week that league tables for forces are on the way will merely enforce the belief that the police will be made to focus even more on ” easy ” targets like motorists to hit numerical targets.

The number of cameras on the roads is predicted by some to hit the 30,000 mark within two years, while in a disturbing reflection of Officer L’s fears, the number of serving specialist road traffic officers has dropped by an estimated 1300 since 1997, disproportionately so in the areas which pioneered the ” cash for speeders ” initiative.

If the trend is reflected across the other authorities, there has never been a better time for society’s idiots to get drunk and get in a car…

We may not like traffic police when they curb our fun by overzealous enforcement of visor laws or noise regulations, but as one of the most vulnerable groups of road users it is us who stand to lose the most from the downward spiral in the standard of British drivers, and from the lazy law enforcement methods being pursued by the Government.

With blame for most bike crashes laid squarely at the foot of drivers, we should demand the halt in the placement of Gatsos when they come at the expense of experienced officers who have spent years learning to spot a good driver from a bad one.

And it is short-sighted to believe that all a traffic unit does is influence errant motorists, with criminal psychologists agreeing that high-visibility policing has an effect on society as a whole, and opposition politicians saying it is the lack of this visibility which is to blame for recent rises in crime figures.

For an insight into the fears expressed by Officer L, we need only divert our gaze from the roads to the pavements alongside them. As a scenario unfolds which we hope can be prevented from being mirrored on the roads, towns and city centres which have replaced bobbies on the beat for CCTV set-ups are seeing a shocking rise in violent and serious crime.

So why hasn’t CCTV stopped street crime? For the same reasons that Gatso cameras haven’t stopped bad driving.

Officer L’s fears would be easier for the Government to dismiss if they were only his own… but they aren’t.

A senior officer within the Metropolitan Police, one who specialises in traffic policing and has first-hand knowledge of the police driver training schools, told MCN: ” Your source is absolutely correct. Some of the levels of traffic policing are derisory now, and they are getting worse. It used to be a rule of thumb that each force put 10 per cent of its manpower into traffic work, but that has dropped to about two per cent for most forces.

” Of course more speeders are being caught, but look at the death rates among the two most vulnerable groups – pedestrians and motorcyclists – to see what’s really going on. I think it will get worse.

” The policymakers are always on the look-out for ‘sexy’ offences that can be clamped down on in a high-profile way, and frankly roads aren’t sexy. We know that high visibility policing works, but we aren’t able to do that, except for short-term blitzes. ”

We asked the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) if they could comment on Officer L’s fears, but they say they didn’t know figures of traffic units across individual forces. A spokesman said: ” It is up to each Chief Constable to deploy his officers as he sees best, given that he will have areas identified by the Home Office as ‘core areas’ of crime, and a budget to work within. However, I don’t believe that the Home Office defines traffic policing as a core area. ”