Cameras have become a key part of traffic enforcement in recent decades. Red light cameras and speed cameras are now common, with new devices now hunting for drivers using mobile phones, too. However, one Australian police force has figured it can go one better by crowdsourcing surveillance to the broader public.
As covered by The Canberra Times, Australian Capital Territory police have created a new online portal to help crack down on traffic crimes. The department has called for the public to share dashcam videos of driving offences in order to dob in (i,e to snitch on) their fellow motorists.
The move has already netted significant results. Since the portal opened in May, police have received 132 reports and issued 25 traffic infringements in turn. ACT police have produced a compilation video, noting that over $7,000 in fines have been issued under the scheme. A further 35 drivers have received caution notices, while six matters are pending investigation.
The compilation includes a number of obvious offences. Drivers can be seen ignoring red lights and pedestrian crossings, cutting off cyclists, and watching videos on their mobile phones. Other offences are on the lesser scale, such as a $316 fine issued for “driving without due care” to an alleged tailgater. With video footage including visible numberplates on hand, it’s easy enough for police to go ahead and issue fine notices to offending drivers.
For now, the measure is being undertaken by police in one of Australia’s smallest territories. The Australian Capital Territory has a population of just 430,000, out of a total of 26 million nationwide. However, other state police forces may follow in the footsteps of ACT Police before long.
Australia has long been an enthusiastic user of traditional camera enforcement technologies. In 2020, the country was ranked 14th in the world for speed camera use, or 10th per capita when adjusted for population. Phone detection cameras have also become an increasingly popular tool for police in recent years.
However, directly soliciting public dash cam submissions marks a new age. Drivers in the ACT must now contend with the fact that any fellow road user could be capturing their mistakes and misdeeds for potential prosecution.
“By using modern technology, and public support to send in footage of driving offences they observe on our roads, police are now able to utilize this footage to ensure drivers are held to account at all times,” officer Mark Richardson told The Canberra Times. “While police are happy to see so many people are already using the online portal, we are very disappointed to see the volume of poor driving behavior occurring daily.”
In some ways, this is a similar doctrine that Australian police have used to enforce other road rules. Unmarked camera cars and surprise random breath tests have long been used as a scare tactic to remind drivers to follow the law at all times. Now, the fear that a fellow road user may be filming is being used to do the same.
If you’ve never been to Australia, you might find the scheme at odds with the country’s laid-back, casual, larrikin nature. In reality, though, Australia is a very rules-heavy society. Fines are heavy for those that break the law, and enforcement is, increasingly, everywhere.
Whether the measure has a serious impact on road safety will be difficult to prove. Police and government will be watching the road toll statistics closely in the coming year in hunt of that evidence. Meanwhile, for road users, getting away with breaking the rules will be harder than ever. It’s difficult, nigh impossible, to argue against video evidence that shows you doing the wrong thing.
Image credits: ACTPolicing via YouTube
Or…. hear me out. Sit around catching violations on camera. Casually follow the culprit to their destination. Tell them for $100 you’ll delete the video instead of submitting it to the police for a $3-500 fine. It’s the most a-hole move, but could be a nice side hustle, lol.
If I don’t like my neighbour very much, I AI-modify a video of some dickhead driver to show their car instead? Handy.
I’m surprised this wasn’t brought up in the article.
In Germany, we have a very notorious snitcher by the name, Niclas Matthei, a 18-year-old hobbyist who proclaims himself as “Anzeigenhauptmeister” (a label conceived by himself and not a real word: loosely translated as “high master” who reports the violations to the police). He would dress up in the fluorscent orange or yellow work uniform and ride the bicycle all over the city, taking photos of the parking violations and sending them through the apps. Thus, the internet sensation and butt of memes in Germany.
His tactics weren’t warmly welcomed by the public (duh) who sometimes confronted him. Like possum who plays dead when confronted, Niclas would get all dramatic and collapse to the ground, sometimes requiring the medical assistance.
His bizarre “hobby” was grudingly accepted by the police departments and Ordnungsamt (code enforcement agency) due to excessive amount of “snitches” (about 4,000 per year in several cities and towns). Not to mention snitching on the police cruisers and service vehicles that don’t follow the rules.
Niclas sounds like a douche canoe.
Hmmmmm… not sure I support this.
… unless I can submit my videos of illegally parked cop cars or cop cars ignoring red lights when obviously not responding to an emergency.
Only if I get a cut of the fines
No, fuck this. If somebody is driving erratically, call the police. More surveillance is not better for society.
There’s irony in this. Where I am, I swear the worst drivers on the road are Corolla owners. A distant, but authoritative, second place (way ahead of Mercedes, Altima, and G35 drivers) are drivers with dashcams.
I’m certain people get a dashcam because they’re so convinced everyone else is the maniac when they are in fact the drivers who don’t understand right of way, how to zipper merge, what a turn indicator is, or what the posted speed limit is.
I tend to steer clear when I see a dash cam because they’re bound to do something dumb, then blame storm.
They don’t have BMWs or Audis where you are from? Best regards, Corolla driver.
Lots! They’re no where near as bad. Aggressive, sure. Bad, no.
Just this weekend I had to deal with a corolla that decided to turn left at an large intersection that I was also turning left at. Oh… this was *after* they committed to a right turn. They were in the right turn lane, and had to make a pretty abrupt change of direction and slowly cross 4 lanes of traffic. I think all the honking from other cars encouraged them to abort their left turn and turn it into a U-turn instead. I see Corolla drivers do bonkers stuff like that every time I’m out. Sample size helps, but they’re still terrifying.
I had that happen. A guy in a Subaru went around the corner through the lights while I had the green arrow and swung into the right lane as he did so. I had to swerve to miss him so used the horn.
The little dweeb then proceeded to follow me about a metre from my bumper. I didn’t matter if I sped up, changed lanes, he was glued to my car.
I finally got home and parked in the garage. He stopped outside on the road. So I picked up a lump of 2 x 4 that I had in the corner and went out to ask “What can I do for you my good fellow..?”, though I may have been a bit more blunter and cruder than that.
He said I had honked at him and he had it all on dashcam. I said; “Why yes my friend. It was because you had swung into my lane when going around the corner when I had the green arrow”. Again my language wasn’t quite as polite as that. I then showed him my lump of wood and asked if he’d like to ‘discuss’ it further.
He tried to go on about his dashcam footage and I mentioned how he’d tailgated me all the way home so yeah, I’d be happy to see that footage and later show it to the police. I then mentioned if he didn’t go away forthwith (another f word was used) I will apply my lump of wood here in my hand to his dashcam and any other part of his car I happen to reach.
He took off.
Yikes.
I must be in the minority here but as a driver and cyclist I love this. I cant how many close calls I’ve had because someone couldn’t put their phone down or decided to use the bike lane as a turning lane.
My gopro’s got gps and got your ass blasting 50 in the schoolzone at dropoff in 4k
As a former cyclist, I think it’s great that they’re actually doing something about these cases. As a driver, though, man. This is some panopticon shit. One momentary tailgate gets you a $316 fine and 3 points? That’s… stressful.
So true. Sometimes it can’t be helped being on someone’s ass for a moment. Some merge points are controlled chaos.
In general I like it, though some of it rankles me, like the one near the end of someone crossing into an intersection as the light turns red. Have a second or two of grace, there. Let the first person who hasn’t tried to push any yellow light and misjudged cast the first stone.
What happened to snitches get stitches. Good thing we have the Constitution here. My license would be revoked in about 3 days.
Perhaps consider altering your driving style.
The UK—or cities in the UK—have had some version of this for a while.
I feel like this is absolutely going to be abused by the pettiest, most awful busybodies and it will presumably be anonymous so it won’t even self-regulate by allowing retaliation in kind to garbage behavior.
I mean, who here has not broken a traffic law? Rolled through a stop sign, driven five over, that sort of thing. Someone could make your life absolutely miserable if they wanted, just by reporting “illegal” behavior that society has deemed acceptable.
I would love for more legitimately dangerous drivers to be punished, but this system seems ripe for abuse.
I guess the police will have to use discretion, like they currently do with moving violations. They probably wont prosecute every video uploaded.
People seem to forget that this was the exact reason Geheime Staatspolizei was so effective – lots of people exactly like that
Yeah this is straight up eastern bloc shit.
If a person is on the board of their HOA (is a busybody, by definition), or has ever asked to “speak to the manager”, then they should not be allowed to upload videos.
My very first thought.
I’m pretty sure “wasting police time” is an offence in Australia, so someone trying to report everything they see could potentially get in trouble themselves.
Weird tone of the article. Breaking the law is bad.
Snitching is bad.
Making it harder to get away with breaking the law is bad.
For years I’ve been assuming all people are filming everything, probably in fucking portrait, all of the time. I just hope when I’m finally caught I remember to tell them to turn their phone to landscape so it doesn’t look shit on TV.
I’ve had this same idea, for people who are blatantly driving badly. Nice to see someone implementing it.
Just yesterday on my way home from picking up the 3 year old, I was turning left into my driveway on the ebike with her in a trailer, and had a motorcycle pass and almost hit me. I’m almost wondering if I need a dashcam for the silly bike now.
For cyclists, I think it’s a good change. Historically, many police forces have completely ignored reports of dangerous drivers putting lives at risk.
But… it’s a weird precedent that seems to put surveillance everywhere, and that’s stressful.
If this were deployed in America there would be so many Altimas
Think you picked the wrong nissan… it would be all the debadged Infiniti G35/37 coupes with fart can exhaust.
Part of my job is finding gaps in processes.
-How do you verify the footage is from the date the dashcam owner states? Some cameras tag with date & time, but that’s set manually.
-How can you verify WHERE it happened unless there’s specific landmarks? Not all cams can geotag.
-Since we can’t verify a date or a time, how do we know we’re not double-fining for a previous infraction they were caught for?
-What’s to stop vindictive people from antagonizing other drivers and simply sending in curated clips to show the other driver in a bad light?
-I’m sure with enough time and effort, someone could create a false clip of an infraction via AI, to falsely incriminate a bad neighbour or an ex-lover.
This has soooo many flaws. You can’t crowdsource infractions.
You’re starting with the assumption you have all the data to analyze the process; you don’t.
To address all your “flaws”
Numbers 1-3, it’s possible that only autogenerated dates and GPS tagged data is accepted.
Number 4 Nothing, and the antagonized party can send in their footage. I’m sure that Australia also has a appeals process (like a traffic court but possibly involving Wombats)
Number 5 Overthinking this much? However see above.
How many dashcams auto-generate the date? Most aren’t connected to the cloud, so they have no means of reliably having an accurate date. It’s one thing when you’re covering your own ass to insurance, it’s another when you’re accusing others.
They’re not taking a video as de-facto evidence, it seems to be being treated as equivalent to a witness’s statement. So it’s exactly the same as someone turning up at a police station wanting to report a crime, but easier.
So, assuming the accused drive disputes the charges, the police would have to prove in court ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that the footage was of a particular time and place, and did show the accused committing an offence etc.
tl/dr They’ve just automated the ‘going to the police station to report a crime’ part of the process.
Ah, my understanding is that they were just automatically fining and/or charging people like a traffic camera.
Meanwhile, here in the USA, a young woman, pediatric oncologist, was killed while on her bicycle riding in the bike lane in PHL yesterday. A lunatic driver was in too much of a rush and decided to use the bike lane to go around other cars, at a very high rate of speed, killing the cyclist and crashing into two other vehicles as well. There is video of the entire crash, the driver still hasn’t been charged.
Drivers who kill cyclists or pedestrians rarely get charged. If you want to get away with murder in this country, do it with an automobile.
I expect nothing less from the nation that put people in camps for a flu
Never minding some of the deadliest plauges in recent history were caused by influenza.
Frown Victoria’s feelings don’t care about your facts..
‘Driving while using a mobile device’ includes looking at Waze?
I assume the fines are going against the registered owner of the vehicle? How can they prove that they were driving it at the time of the violation?
Australian here. With any camera fine, the paperwork goes to the registered owner. If you weren’t behind the wheel, it’s up to you to nominate who was (full details), otherwise you wear the ticket.
I’m going to assume the Australian government encourages civilians to video and report police and other govt employees if they are found to be remiss in their obeyance as well.
I wouldn’t report people unless it was blatantly gratuitous and dangerous.
Unless it was a police car. Then I would report every-fu^&!ng-thing! They are terrible and drive like the rules don’t apply to them.
This is a big fat NOPE for me. Feels very vigilante
365 24 hour a day camera surveillance does not make the world a better place
I disagree. You can “catch” a lot of criminals……….on camera. Isn’t that almost as good as actually catching them?
What they are catching is cars in illegal situations. I don’t know how they plan to identify the actual driver as many of those images are either blocked or unclear. So, the registered owner of the car gets fines and demerit points because his brother in law was driving illegally?
Don’t we do this with speed cameras, parking tickets, and people who don’t pay tolls?
In the Canadian Province where I live such fines are applied to the vehicle’s owner. However, no demerit points are assessed against the owner’s driving license as it cannot be demonstrated that they were operating the vehicle, with the subsequent impact on insurance etc. According to the post, the Australians are recording driver demerits, and I hold that to be unfair.
Well Canada is the nice one. I wasn’t sure what the “demerits” was, wasn’t sure if it was rear or tongue in cheek.
Do you have your own toll booth where you get to decide which drivers have to pay the toll?
I’m referring to here in the 21st century where toll booths have transponders and if you don’t have one but use the transponder lane your license plate is read by a camera and you get a fine.
Yes, but those toll taking operations charge a toll to every vehicle.
They lack the entirely arbitrary nature of the jerk with a dash camera.
Allowing traffic fines to be doled out by self-appointed citizen hall monitors makes the system entirely arbitrary, just as if you let people set up their own tolling apparatus.