Drafting criminal laws is done with an intention to ensure order in society, which is necessary for its members to perform the functions necessary for its survival.
Laws by themselves are not enough, however, because some people may chose not to abide by them. Laws, therefore, need a system to ensure that violators are identified, apprehended and punished.
Punishment and the credible threat of punishment is intended to deter, sometimes to incapacitate and also to ensure violators get, and are seen to get, their just desert for the harm or the risk that their behaviour has posed to their society.
Without a credible threat of punishment there is no deterrent, apart that is from an internalised moral code. And while each person’s moral code may have similarities they also have differences. For example, a group of people may all agree that murder is wrong but may differ on the circumstances when it is acceptable to kill their speed to comply with the law.
Since research shows that speeding is a majority activity (Corbett 2003) there would never be enough police officers to go around all of the roads to ensure that there was a credible threat that law violators would be caught and punished. However, developments in electronic, radar, laser and digital technology – combined with a new drive for managerial cost-effective practices in police services following huge leaps in salaries – and a new emphasis on risk management in society (Beck 1992) changed that.
Speed limit enforcement cameras can be placed by the side of the road in place of a patrol car, in places where patrol cars cannot park and in more places than there are patrol cars to go around. Police officers, or police civilian employees, can use hand held devices to identify individual offenders without the need to go chasing after them on the roads in order to bring them to book.
New technology then, provides for the first time, a credible threat to speeding motorists. And police forces in the UK have embraced it wholeheartedly. Not only is the law being enforced now, but it is being enforced very cost-effectively. Today, speeding tickets raise almost £120 million a year in Britain (Kirkup and Millward 2007)
The crackdown on speedingAccording to US criminologist Lawrence Sherman (1990) , police crackdowns involve ‘…sudden increases in officer presence, sanctions and threats of apprehension either for specific offences or for all offences in specific places.’
In fact with the use of fixed speed cameras, officers do not need to be present at the crime scene for a crackdown to be happening. And, arguably, crackdowns do not have to be
sudden if they constitute a (1) a longer term
seismic shift and (2) a significant growth in focus on a particular type of offending. The fact that there has been a significant growth in the number of speed enforcement cameras in the UK, and the rise in the number of people fined for speeding over the past 10 years, can certainly be construed as a 10 year-long and very widespread national police crackdown on speeding motorists.
Yesterday’s post explained Professor Nick Tilley’s Realist evaluation approach. This same approach has been used by Tilley (2004) to explain how crackdowns work to reduce crime.
Applying Tilley’s
context – mechanism – outcome configuration to speed cameras we can propose the following model for understanding the complex ways in which speed cameras might reduce speeding:
Context = Circumstances in which the cameras operate - e.g. location, political climate, temporary or permanent, accident hot spot or site of frequent speed limit violations.
Mechanism=Reasoning behind how the speed camera works to reduce crime/harm and how this interacts with the resources available to offenders and their decisions to offend or not to offend. Offender resources might include such things as: fast cars, local knowledge, in-car camera detectors/locators, radar, laser, flash photography blockers.
Outcome=Initial deterrence, deterrence decay, offender’s reasoning and adaptation.
The initial and continuing effectiveness of crackdowns to reduce crime has to be understood in terms of how they are perceived by potential offenders and how offenders react to them initially and over time. Sometimes crackdowns work initially to reduce crime but then become less effective as offenders adapt or become adept at calculating the real risk of detection. Sometimes crackdowns create a diffusion of benefits beyond their immediate area and goals and so reduce crimes over a wider area and reduce a wider range of offending than originally anticipated.
Sometimes crackdowns make things worse – by increasing the level of offending, displacing the offending elsewhere in terms of place, victim or crime type or by increasing the seriousness of offending.
Adapting Tilley’s examination, of the general effect of crackdowns, we can look more closely at the likely effects of the specific crackdown upon speeding in the UK by the use of speed cameras. We could do worse than begin by examining Tilley's six main context-mechanism-outcome examples:
Offender adaptation/innovation. Offenders may invest in detection and electronic and chemical blocking equipment to protect them from the ‘risk’ they face from speed cameras.
Sense of threat/tetchiness – in the same way that cracking down on organised criminals may make them twitchy and increasingly prone to shoot each other, speed cameras may cause drivers to brake or switch lanes suddenly and so increase accidents rather than reduce them.
Sensitivity to public shame. Those that have been criminalised may feel unfairly victimised. While traffic law enforcement might work for drunk drivers – who do feel shameful because of the public reaction to their offending – it may not work for speeders because even those who prosecute them regularly break the same law.
Initial shock and loss of confidence. Cracking down on speed limit violators may have a short term effect on their behaviour - or else its impact may take a while to decay. The imposition of penalty points that remain on a speeders licence for 3 years creates a greater degree of uncertainty in their lives as they may well receive a driving ban in addition to a fine.
Market pressures/need for revenue. Banned drivers who face a consequential loss of income or rise in outgoings from having to pay other drivers to ferry them about and increased insurance premiums, may cheat on their tax returns in order to restore equity. They may even become increasingly involved in other crimes to generate revenue, save money, or otherwise get back at the state for subjecting them to a perceived injustice.
Available alternative options. Hypothetically at least, offenders, particularly those that have paid a premium to drive high performance vehicles, may choose to speed elsewhere – perhaps in areas that pose more risk to the public. They may, for example, invest in environmentally and pedestrian unfriendly high performance 4x4 vehicles in order to speed in residential areas that are otherwise protected by speed humps without damaging their new more robust vehicles. They may go abroad more often in order to drive very fast. They may choose to drive recreationally in more remote rural areas in order to enjoy their vehicles in ways they would prefer to enjoy them, but cannot, on wider roads and motorways. They may engage in speeding over shorter distances but at even higher speeds in order to feel they have justified the purchase, use and ability to enjoy their high performance vehicle. And they may also justify all of their speeding in these new ways in terms of their need to keep-up-to-speed by continuing to practice and improve their fast driving skills in the face of the risk they face from speed cameras.
Sherman’s (1990) research into police crackdowns found that if the police wish to deter offenders from offending, rather than simply to increase the number of prosecutions, then they need to employ publicity by using broadcast and print mass media and road signs. The problem with this, in terms of speeding in the UK, is that our roads often have speed camera signs in areas where there are no cameras and they often site mobile units without the use of signs. Consequently the use of signs as a deterrent has, perhaps, been rendered redundant.
Sherman (1990) found also that long-term crackdowns were most likely to lead to deterrence decay. Arguably, the use of fixed speed cameras and the routine use of mobile units on certain roads represent one of the longest and most widespread crackdowns on crime in UK history and consequently its deterrent effect may have turned to dust years ago. This might explain why it appears to be so successful in raising revenue through fines.
In his website
http://www.safespeed.org.uk/ the engineer Paul Smith informs us that he has spent over 5000 hours researching the true impact of speed cameras in Britain. Smith’s interpretation of various Department for Transport reports is that in many cases speed cameras have caused more accidents than they have prevented.
In terms of the use of crackdowns for other types of crime reduction Tilley (2004) writes:
‘The potential for crackdowns to produce disastrous side effects speaks in favour of their application only with great caution. …The availability of many alternative ways of addressing specific problems, including tactics that do not turn on enforcement at all, suggests that crackdowns, even if potentially effective, may not comprise the only option and the best option (Goldstein 1990).’
Cracking down on speeding as a serious harm-reduction strategy
Despite his reservations about the use of police crackdowns, Tilley (2004) goes on to write that:
‘…crackdowns may still have their place within crime reduction strategies, where problems are serious and the context suggests likely beneficial effects, the absence of countervailing, unwanted side effects and no plausible, preferable alternative strategies.’
And here is the crux of the current big debate about speed cameras.
The current big debate about speed cameras is not about philosophical questions regarding the strict liability focus of criminal justice agencies upon those who exceed speed limits. Rather, it is about whether the use of speed cameras has caused more accidents in some circumstances and whether the focus of resources on technology rather than police officer discretion has actually led to the deaths of more people.
The big question currently is: Does speeding per se kill more people, or has the focus on speeding per se in fact led to more deaths?
Tomorrow’s post on Bent Society will examine the accident reduction argument for the use of speed cameras in the current long-term, strict liability, nationwide crackdown on speeding.
Preview of tomorrow’s post on Bent Society
In a society that is successfully maintaining order, it is the more serious crimes such as murder, burglary, robbery and rape, which tend to occur less predictably than minor crimes. Speeding occurs predictably in certain places on certain roads – and it is here that speed enforcement cameras tend to be sited. The big question, however, is whether the technologically enabled long-term crack down on speeding can be justified on the basis that it is not a minor crime but is actually a serious crime because of the serious risk it carries for other members of society. This is currently a major area of contention.
Bent Society readers may wish to visit engineer Paul Smith’s website
http://www.safespeed.org.uk/ to experience the sheer power of the compelling evidence for the counter argument that speeding does not pose a serious risk for society and that the wide scale reliance upon speed enforcement technology in the UK has in fact caused more deaths than would otherwise have occurred on our roads.
References
Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London. Sage.
Corbett, C. (2003) Car Crime. Willan Press. Collumpton. Devon.
Goldstein, H. (1990) Problem Oriented Policing. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Kirkup, J. and Millward, D. (2007) Anger as fines from speed cameras soar. Daily Telegraph. December 4.
Sherman, L. (1990) Police Crackdowns: Initial and Residual Deterrence. In M. Tonry and N. Morris (eds) Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, Vol. 12. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tilley, N. (2004) Using Crackdowns Constructively. In R. Hopkins Burke (ed) Hard Cop, Soft Cop: Dilemmas and Debates in Contemporary Policing. Willan Press. Collumpton. Devon.
