Mechanical Law Enforcement: Speeding and Camera Technology
| DOI | 10.1350/jcla.2010.74.5.656 |
| Date | 01 October 2010 |
| Author | Simon Cooper |
| Published date | 01 October 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Comment |
COMMENT
Mechanical Law Enforcement: Speeding and
Camera Technology
Simon Cooper*
Keywords Excessive speed; Robotic detection; Objective enforcement;
Inadequate context; Unjust
Excessive and inappropriate speeding is—according to the ACPO1Road
Policing Strategy—one of the four key behaviours which contribute to
avoidable deaths and injury by making collisions more likely, and by
making the resultant injuries worse.2Although the imposition of a
specific speed limit is a matter for legislation3(either primary or in
regulations and orders), the enforcement of those limits is an opera-
tional matter for the police force involved. Since the Road Traffic Act
1991, increasing reliance has been placed on the use of automatic
devices for detecting speeding offences.4One of these devices, the speed
camera, does not enjoy universal popularity; its use tends to evoke
strong emotive feelings whether they are of support or condemnation.
The camera detects and gathers the initial evidence which is then used to
initiate the process of prosecution and punishment.
A fixed penalty ticket procedure is available for offences of speeding
detected by a camera, and it is common for the alleged offender never to
experience any form of real human interaction with the prosecuting
authorities from the moment of offending through to the conclusion,
whatever that may be.5The details of the offence are provided by the
output of the machine and it is the machine that proves the facts of
the offence. The system is unarguably administratively efficient and
cost-effective, but are there any other costs or consequences that follow
from relying on an almost totally mechanised and robotic system of law
enforcement?
* Senior Lecturer, Salford Law School; e-mail: s.cooper@salford.ac.uk. Thanks are due
to Neil MacEwan for comments on an earlier draft. The contents remain my sole
responsibility.
1 Association of Chief Police Officers.
2 See ‘Policing of Roads’, available at http://www.acpo.police.uk/asp/policies/Data/Policing_
of_Roads.pdf, accessed 24 July 2010.
3 See, e.g., Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984, s. 89(1).
4 Section 23 of the Road Traffic Act 1991 inserted a new s. 20 into the Road Traffic
Offenders Act 1988 and now provides for the admissibility into evidence of images
and information produced by a camera installed for the purpose of detecting
speeding and other offences.
5 The fixed penalty system is a procedure that permits a motorist who has committed
a specified offence to pay a fixed sum of money and, in the case of an endorsable
offence such as speeding, accept a set number of penalty points to be attributed to
his or her driver record (Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988, ss 51–74 and ss 78–90).
Under this system, no formal prosecution in court takes place.
409The Journal of Criminal Law (2010) 74 JCL 409–414
doi:10.1350/jcla.2010.74.5.656
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