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UK Launches National Dashcam Database For Snitching On Bad Drivers (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Drivers in England and Wales now have a direct line to police for ratting on their fellow motorists, thanks to a new national dash cam database. The National Dash Cam Safety Portal, run by UK dashcam manufacturer Nextbase, lets drivers upload footage from their dashcam to a single database and send it directly to police, the BBC reports. Drivers can choose their region of England or Wales and send footage of accidents or illegal behavior on the road directly to local police, as well as sending a witness statement that can then be used in court.
I'm not in the UK, but I'm all for ratting out drivers who have no concern for my or my family's safety. If I had access to such a facility, I don't believe I would be bothered to submit footage of everyday misdemeanours that all drivers make, but blatant reckless and life endangering driving should be reported and I'd be happy to assist in that.
I'm not in the UK, but I'm all for ratting out drivers who have no concern for my or my family's safety.
If I had access to such a facility, I don't believe I would be bothered to submit footage of everyday misdemeanours that all drivers make, but blatant reckless and life endangering driving should be reported and I'd be happy to assist in that.
I have mixed opinions on this.
Yeah, sure, there have been times I wish a cop had been around to witness someone doing something egregiously bad. However, everyone has done something stupid whilst driving at some point. Everyone has done something illegal, either on purpose or by accident.
Never misread a sign? Gone the wrong way down a one way street - or driven at 70mph in a 60mph zone?
I guarantee what is going to happen here is every Spurs fan is going to start trying to catch Arsenal football players making a mistake whilst driving. United fans are going to try to catch and force Liverpool players into making mistakes. People are going to target their rivals, enemies, and people they don't like... and people will get caught making silly mistakes.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
You know, with the stupid shit I see on a daily basis while driving, I've begun thinking about buying a dashcam ... because if any of those idiots causes an accident I want some proof of their stupidity.
If citizens can send in "holy shit, look what this guy just did", then maybe the police can find the idiots responsible and ticket them (or charge them depending on what they've done).
I see an unbelievable amount of scary and dangerous stuff on the roads .. the ability to report that to the police seems natural.
I don't see this as a police state, but as a way for the information to be crowd-sourced because the police can't be everywhere.
Because when you see someone swoop across 4 lanes, cut 3 other drivers off, and then swoop back across two lanes because you have no idea where you're going ... someone is going to get killed if people drive like that.
Hell, open up the ability for me to take a picture of people talking on their cell phones and submit that. I can't tell you how many times I see people texting and driving -- I've even seen people with both thumbs on their fucking phone. I fail to see how a police officer can't stand at an intersection and just pick of dozens of people texting because they're so blatant about it.
Sorry, if you drive badly enough that someone wants to submit their dashcam footage to law enforcement, you deserve it.
The UK continuing in its steady descent toward a police state.
Uh, unlike a true police state, this system is voluntary.
This "police state", is whatever the citizens make it.
Well, we can't have that. You must allow a minority of citizens to engage in any sort of dangerous driving so long as they are wise enough to avoid doing it in front of marked police. You also must ban other citizens from collecting evidence that might be used to punish an offender. Because police state...
Yep. Other citizens = secret police, traffic enforcement = arbitrary exercise of power, traffic court = star chamber acting in place of judicial organs exercising publicly known legal procedures.
It totally matches, by which I mean that you're simply butthurt that other users of the road can collect and now submit objective evidence of your asshattery so that you just might have to drive in a civilized manner.
How will you feel when someone uploads a carefully edited clip that makes it look like you are a bad driver, when in fact you were avoiding an accident with someone else?
As ever, the problem with vigilante justice is the lack of due process and fairness.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
*Gasp* Complaints might be false and evidence might be incomplete or false? Why, no court system anywhere at anytime has had to deal with such insurmountable problems!
*Double gasp* Traffic court is run by vigilantes, and lack due process and fairness? Damn... and here I thought that they were run by appointed judges that were supposed to at least pay lip service to such concepts.
Time to set up my own traffic court. With a guillotine. Because I can.
Did you even think about what you wrote before you clicked "submit"?
The solution to the fact that everyone makes mistakes driving is not to let everyone get away with it. It's to reduce the fines to the point where people who rarely make mistakes can afford it but people who make them constantly can't afford it (this also really requires adjusting fines to the driver's income, but that's a different matter).
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No, it doesn't get rid of bad laws at all because the law enforcers will investigate themselves and find that they did nothing wrong, plus it is very difficult to have a law repealed once it's been passed. In a strict sense, you're correct: if the enforcers got ticketed for breaking laws and couldn't get out of it, you'd see some action, but that ain't happening anywhere. For the photo/video thing, I would hope some forensic analysis went into it (editing of real images is not generally hard to detect unless someone's a freaking wizard at it and can reproduce the exact noise and artifacts and file specs and metadata with great accuracy) but laziness is also a hallmark of nearly every law enforcement organization due to constantly being understaffed and under-funded.
I see an unbelievable amount of scary and dangerous stuff on the roads .. the ability to report that to the police seems natural.
Agreed. If I saw somebody committing an assault or breaking into a building I'd snap something on my camera and call the police. It would feel ludicrous to let the incident go unreported because I'd be snitching on somebody and promoting a police state.
Do you have any idea how prosecution of driving offences works in the UK?
The police are regulated because they have been found do abuse traffic laws. The equipment they can use is regulated, the places they can operate are regulated, the way they can detect offences is regulated. And still there is abuse.
There is heavy pressure for you to settle the matter out of court. Pay your fine, go on an "awareness" course, don't fight it in court. If you do fight it, you need to pay for your own defence, and if you lose also the court fees.
Defending yourself can be very tricky. The courts are corrupt and tend to side with the police unless you have extremely powerful evidence of your innocence.
Examples of abuse include the misuse of speed guns and CCTV cameras positioned to give a misleading impression, e.g. due to perspective effects making vehicles appear closer than they really are.
And now they want to get the public in on an already very unfair and unbalanced system. No doubt they will produce some very clear cut, extreme examples to gain support. But I have do doubt that there will be a huge number of innocent people accused and railroaded by the system.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Any of you who lived in communist Poland or Ukraine will agree: A population that informs on itself to the police stops being a civilization and becomes simply a population, living in a culture of suspicion and fear, or passive aggressive seething anger.
Its starts with reporting bad behavior on the road.. it ends with people who express out loud in a pub their empathy for the peaceful majority of Muslims being dragged from their families in the middle of the night, and never seen again.
Who'se actually "safe" in that world? And please don't say the honest law abiding people with nothing to hide. That is naive and not supported by fact.