Te Radar: Police come up trumps in self-flagellation

One would have thought that the police needed another public relations disaster about as much as they needed more officers deciding that group sex with young women is a first-rate way to bond before confronting criminals.

Alas, police chiefs determined this week that their organisation hadn't humiliated itself sufficiently, and that one last effort at self-ridicule was necessary to bring their profession into complete disrepute.

Thus they spent the week strenuously, and somewhat ludicrously, insisting that performance targets are not the same as quotas.

Instead of attempting to bamboozle us with semantics, they would have been better off acknowledging that what truly riles the public are speed blitzes on long straight roads, while sightings of police anywhere near accident black spots are as rare as rehabilitated criminals.

I suggest that a superior approach to lowering the road toll while increasing public support may not be more speed cameras, but rather simple video cameras.

Hidden along known death routes, they could film those who actually drive within the speed limit, but do so dangerously, so they can then be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Of course speed cameras can on occasion catch the imbecilic. One UK camera snapped a speedster engaging in an act of digital gesticulation, which wouldn't have been so bad had he not been using both hands to gesticulate, leaving neither free for driving.

So angered are Britons at the rise in the numbers of speed cameras that they have been prompted to form a citizens' group, dubbed Motorists Against Cameras, or Mad, to fight what they describe as a cancer spreading across the Western world in the name of safety.

In the spirit of true English eccentricity, they have been attempting to stop the spread of this cancer by setting cameras on fire, covering them with bags, and decapitating them.

Australians too are incensed, as seen by a rise there in the occurrence of camera versus brick incidents.

It is not surprising that the Aussies are livid, as their cameras, run by private companies, have been shockingly inaccurate, including prosecuting thousands of people after cameras were set up in the wrong speed zone.

In a twist on this, a valiant Manchester man, John Hopwood, tried to subvert his traffic fines by taking a 40 mph sign and attaching it to a convenient lamppost in the 30 mph zone where he had been twice caught by the camera. He then photographed it and sent the image in as evidence he had been wrongly charged.

Unfortunately his ruse was revealed, and rather than the small fine he had initially incurred he was sentenced to spend 28 weekends in jail, and fined $8300.

If only punishments for the truly reckless driver in New Zealand reached that level.

What our police chiefs are not saying is that speed cameras themselves undoubtedly endanger lives.

Evidence of this was seen in Perth, when one man braked for a camera, causing the following driver to swerve off the road and crash, in a moment of glorious irony, into the speed camera.