John Roughan: Police are just pests as human speed cameras

Driving down the long, straight inland roads of Waikato one morning last month I saw in the rear-view mirror a police car pull out of the grass, do a u-turn and come in my direction. There was no other car between me and the horizon - no doubting his prey.

I stopped and watched him pull in behind. He made some jottings, put on his cap and came to my window.

"Any idea how fast you were going?"

"About 120, I think."

"Actually it was 113. Any reason for that?"

Excuse, he meant, but I was glad he'd said reason.

"Well, it's a long, flat, clear stretch of road, no traffic about ... "

He didn't argue. That was the very reason he lay in wait there; it was not a reason he could accept. The ritual had to be followed.

He returned to his car to write the ticket. Petty policing always takes longer. Cows that had come to the fence began to drift back to their grazing. The morning was sunny, the country silent. It had been a pleasant start to a summer holiday.

Figures released this week reveal the number of speeding tickets written by police, as distinct from those triggered by roadside cameras, has trebled in the life of this Government. Officers personally handed out 395,912 tickets last year, compared with 137,427 in 2000.

It was that year, 2000, that traffic control policy was changed to target every vehicle travelling more than 10km/h over the legal speed rather than, as previously, to catch those going faster than the flow. The cameras were recalibrated at that time but the department's manager of road policing, Inspector John Kelly, says "it took a while to reprogramme police to do the same".

I have no doubt it has taken this long. It cannot have been easy to get self-respecting professionals to lurk for long hours in lonely places just to catch someone driving at more than 10km/h over the limit. Law enforcement is a fine art, requiring a sure sense of proportion and considerable public goodwill. Both qualities are being sacrificed to this Clark-era regulatory puritanism on the roads.

It is sad to see fully trained police having to make pests of themselves to people driving well within reasonable bounds of caution and safety, if not strictly by the book - who are driving much as the officer knows he would probably drive in similar circumstances.

When the police first took over traffic control from the Ministry of Transport it was as though an age of reason had arrived. Instead of patrol cars prowling the highways like miserable monitors with not much to do, and scolding transgressors with the officiousness of people who could never be given authority over anything important, we got cameras.

It was such a simple, sensible, obvious method of speed control, you wondered why the traffic cops hadn't done it. Cameras could catch all idiots, not just the random few that could be picked off from the herd by the most zealous cop in a car.

Even better, the cameras were designed to imitate human discretion. They were calibrated, back then, on the principle that traffic, left alone, will generally move at the maximum speed at which most feel safe on that particular stretch of road. The cameras could adjust to the flow and catch only the truly reckless.

Cameras could be hidden or seen; the police didn't care, as long as they discouraged dangerous driving. That was the objective; it didn't depend on the number of drivers fined. It was too sensible to last.

The reason the cameras have been recalibrated and highway patrols reintroduced is probably not to raise revenue, as many suppose. It is, I am sure, a typical fickle committee-think response to a rise in the road toll. That and the fact that when transport bureaucrats lost traffic control they were allowed to retain a watching brief on road safety.

Bureaucracy needs activities it can measure. It took to "buying" traffic patrols from the police. The contract specifies two million hours of it.

The same impulse probably explains the obsession with speed. There will be many factors besides speed in most collisions but speed is measurable so they have a campaign against that. Now they credit the campaign with reducing the road toll, as any campaign might, but at what cost to public faith in the police?

"Road safety is core police business, as is the 111 system," said Mr Kelly this week, which called to mind the response of Commissioner Rob Robinson when traffic patrols were said to be immune to calls to criminal emergencies.

Mr Robinson, I'll wager, is one of those corporate managers who likes to assemble his senior people around a table and encourage them to think critically about what the organisation is doing. You can imagine the discussion when the subject turns to traffic.

Someone would have said, "It seems to me we have got our priorities around the wrong way. We know road accidents pose a greater risk than crime to the ordinary citizen. Yet what do we do every time there is a call to a crime? We divert cars from traffic control".

At that, there would have been much nodding of heads and noises of assent. The point would have been written on a whiteboard and invoked with ever more conviction. Like most ideas that get written on a whiteboard, it is daft.

All sorts of activities present a greater risk than crime. The difference is that we choose to face risks of sun damage, or drowning, or accidents at work, at play, in travel by any means. We don't want the police recalibrating their priorities on the basis of accident risk.

Driving carries a risk we choose to accept. Violent crime is not an accident and not a risk we willingly run. May the police regain their good sense, leave speed to cameras and stop wasting their time and mine.

* John Roughan is a Herald assistant editor.