What would it take to make this dashcam traffic ticket scheme legal?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Oh, and what do you think of the idea in general? I appreciate there are IMO some ethical questions involved, but right now I’d prefer to discuss the practical questions.

I got a dashcam last week and took a couple of long drives to see how it works and how good the pictures are. I also found RegistratorViewer, a piece of shareware that really spawned the idea as I was watching the footage.

I was doing a whole bunch of testing – how well did my speedometer agree with the gps speed calculation and the mile markers on the road? Could I blow up a part of a frame and read license plates from passing and oncoming traffic? I found out that the microphone in it easily picked up my voice clearly, as well as the sound of the turn signal, that is unless the music drowned it out. I was looking for how much evidence the thing might provide should I get in an accident.

And after watching a car fly by me, I thought to myself, “Jeebus, if I could send the footage of this to the local cops, and get a cut of the speeding ticket, I could make a fucking fortune!”

The dashcam recording is stamped with date&time, speed, direction, and gps coordinates. During playback it maps directly onto Google Maps using the gps stamps, so as you watch the video in one window you see another window tracking your icon on a moving map, and a third window with a readout of the meta data.

And it struck me that this should constitute pretty strong evidence for issuing a citation. The most glaring omission is that there’s no direct evidence of the speeder’s … speed. However, I can record myself driving at the speed limit and video of a car passing me seems certainly solid evidence of actual speeding, just not how much of it.

And then another thought, what if EVERYONE with a dashcam that met certain data gathering criteria, could send clips to law enforcement and collect a reward (let’s ballpark it at 25% of the ticket)?

I’m pretty sure that the issues making this possible are virtually all political and legal, mostly some form of evidence verification, and I would guess some kind of signed statement from me (or whoever else records the vid) avowing to the accuracy of the recording.

So aside from the questions of turning us into a nation Stassi informers, how practical an idea is it?

2

There are numerous lawsuits going on around the country about the validity of tickets from red light and speed cameras. They are put up by cities - and cities keep losing the lawsuits. I can’t imagine how getting a ticket from a citizen’s dash cam could stand up in court.

3

That’s a good point, but in these cases a whole lot more data is collected and there’s a statement from an actual live witness. In fact, I could record contemporaneous verbal remarks such as the plate number if I could pick it up.

4

And what would prevent people from making a living driving around recording speeders and adjusting the displayed speed to make it seem like everyone else on the road was speeding?
And since the accused has he right to confront witnesses against him are you prepared to spend the day in a courtroom every time a defendant appeals (or get no money)?
And what are you going to do when the city figures out they can plea bargain every one of these down to a non-moving violation and set the fine at 80% of speeding fine and keep all the money?

5

If you are using a dashcam, at least the ones I’ve seen, you can’t actually make out the identity of the driver. You have the plate, but Junior could be the one speeding in Mom’s minivan.

I’ve never heard of a speeding ticket being issued to the owner of the car, without proof of who was actually driving.

6

Why would you think that? Your equipment hasn’t been calibrated, it’s not certified for use, and you’re a nobody who has a financial interest in the outcome.

7

My first thought about this is – what’s to calibrate? The dashcam is an entirely passive sensor. I’m not sending out signals that need to be periodically recalibrated. I am receiving visual data through the lens and gps data through a receiver. The GPS data can be verified by Google Maps or Google Earth to be in a particular location and traveling a particular course. My car’s speed is calculated the same way – not by a speedometer that may need calibration, but by a continuing stream of gps signals, and math. If I moved the cam to see my own car’s dashboard, I would then have two independent sources of my own speed date. In fact, I could have three, because I use a navigation system with a completely different gps that will track within a few feet of the dashcam gps. That’s assuming I can point the cam to capture all this stuff including the navigation monitor, which might not be possible without adding a fair amount more technology.

Of course, I could be wrong about this. I have no idea if courts consider Google Map Tracks as reliable evidence. I’d guess though that it would be quite tough to spoof all that data in a way that the falsified output wouldn’t be pretty obvious to someone reviewing it.

8

What? You’ve never heard of camera tickets? There are a whole lot of them. Despite what’s said above about lawsuits, such tickets continue to be issued every day.

9

Perhaps we will see with this BikeCam video.

10

Yeah, that ain’t happening. Doesn’t hurt to dream, I guess.

11

My understanding is that they lose the lawsuits because the courts say it’s unconstitutional, since there is no accuser in the form of a person, like a cop who has witnessed an infraction.

So, technically, the doubt facing the OP’s suggestion really has nothing to do with the dashcam. What he’s suggesting essentially is that citizens report each other for driving infractions. That a dashcam is involved is not really relevant, from the legal standpoint, as the court cases referred to above seem to indicate.

12

If we’re going this far, we might as well go the whole hog and automate the whole thing. It wouldn’t be difficult for a dash cam to know the prevailing speed limit at any given time (sat navs alldo this). All you need is some logic to detect if your car has been overtaken, and the system could automatically upload the footage to the relevant authorities (if mobile data signal is available) or cache it to upload later, for an automatic credit when the speeding fine goes through
:slight_smile:

Essentially, we could turn all vehicles which had the system fitted (and if we’ve gone this far, we might as well it mandatory) into a mobile, automatic speed camera. And the whole thing would be funded by the massive leap in fine revenues.

I don’t think this SHOULD happen, but I don’t think there’s any technical reason why it couldn’t.

13

You could go to a nearly deserted stretch of highway (so there will be no other cars on the road) and drive 20 mph under the limit. Wait until someone passes you, then go home, speed up the video, and edit the metadata to show your car going at the speed limit.

If it could be done, the person defending against the ticket can argue that it was done.

14

As always I can’t speak for all 50 states but I will say this is how it is here and you can decide if it is generally true around the country.

Police are not allowed to write tickets for minor infractions they did not witness (with a few exceptions).
An officer will not write a ticket based on you telling him it happened.
Your video will not be taken as proof without your testimony to back it up.
You always have the right to come in and sign a complaint against another citizen.
How can you be sure of the identity of the driver?
The law would have to be changed in order to give you a “reward.”

Now the big flaw in your plan. In my state a speeding ticket 15-19 mph over the speed limit would be $101. You would get $25. You would be subpoenaed. You will have to wait in court until the prosecutor handles this and many other cases. Maybe you can go home quickly if there is a plea. With a weak case like yours with shaky ID there will probably be a trial. If you are lucky the trial will happen at the end of the court day. More likely you will have to come back another day. And wait several more hours. In the end when you break down your hourly wage you would be better off delivering newspapers.

15

I can think of several ways to alter or distort that data and meta data. Unless your commercial GPS unit has been verified and sealed from tampering I can’t see how a court would accept this. I can create a stream of data to say anything I want - this isn’t rocket science. You can fake data like this very easily by simply changing the the time stamps.

16

I hope that you enjoy spending a lot of time in court at your own expense. I’d have you subpoenaed in a heart beat (if such a thing is allowed for traffic tickets in your jurisdiction).

17

Right. I also highly doubt a judge would be willing to waste their time. For minor violations like speeding (without a reckless charge), they tend to just reduce the ticket, throw out points, or assign probation to keep things moving. Sad as it is to say, the city is more interested in reliable volume from a credible officer, not this.

With the OP’s method, it might sound like a good idea on paper, until other people start doing it, burdening the court system. With such shaky evidence, more people would demand a trial, and that would most definitely burn up everyone’s time (and money).

Plus, there is also the fact that around here, we have automated speed cameras. They legally allow for speeds up to 11 miles above the limit, before they snap your plates. They are calibrated on a regular basis, at least in the school zones where I live (I see them doing so, weekly). With the OP being unable to accurately judge the speed of other cars, they’d have next to no chance of this working. I don’t think any city would allow it.

Finally, while technically going 1 mph over the limit can earn you a ticket from an actual officer, discretion also comes into play. You don’t want citizens making judgement calls on other citizens like this, because that can also get messy. I can imagine numerous accusations which would have to be dug through and verified.

I also have a dash cam, but I wouldn’t use it for offensive purposes. If anything, it reminds me to drive more defensively. Personally, I say if you want to play traffic cop, just become an actual traffic cop.

18

It’s the wrong direction, we need to help each other, not punish each other. No doubt your problem will also stem from you exceeding the speed limit at times, perhaps by even 1mph, at the time that person passes you, so you are guilty too. We have to overcome this notion of punishment based societies, it does not work (don’t throw stones in a glass house., pot, kettle stuff, we all do ‘wrong’ things at times - everyone is equally guilty - tart is normal and human ).

Such things as this coming technology however have the ability to help in that effort to get away from punishment and topple long standing ways that we’ve been acting towards each other, and I do look forward to that.

19

How well could you accurately measure the speed of someone going by you just with your dashcam? I was curious, and found a page on how speed cameras work. Speed cameras on the side of the road work by using detectors built into the road and measuring how fast a car goes between them and taking a picture of the plate. Obviously that’s not relevant for a dashcam. Mobile cameras on police vehicles have radars that send light beams towards vehicles to check the speed, and I don’t believe most standard consumer dashcams have radars included for this.

I’m not quite sure how you’d measure the speed of a car that speeds past you with just a dashcam. Even assuming that your speedometer is absolutely correct, all you have is a few second video of the car going past you. To get his speed, you’d need some way to measure the distance he traveled, and I don’t see how you would do that accurately. You could do some fair estimations, based on your location, and maybe based on landmarks the speeder is passing, but without military grade GPS and a super precise clock, the numbers still could be off, and then be easily be thrown out. And this is assuming that both of you are traveling at steady speeds; if either of you is accelerating or decelerating that makes things even more difficult.

Maybe I’m missing something and your car does have radar, in which case ignore my post. But if it doesn’t, I don’t see how this would work.

20

From a practical perspective, while I horribly detest the idea of stoplight and speeding cameras, precisely because of the aforementioned constitutionality issue of the right to face your accuser and it being tied to the car and not the driver, I think a dash cam would be different. The reason I would think it is different would be that the accuser would be the person operating the dash cam. Presumably, that operator wouldn’t just upload everything and let a system sort it out, but rather he would be identifying someone he knew was speeding and send in that video along with his testimony.

That is, if you’re going the speed limit and someone creeps by you, that’s not much evidence that he’s speeding, you might have slightly different calibrations on your speedometers or whatever, but if you’re going the speed limit and someone goes by much faster, that would draw your attention and you’d be more inclined to report it. So, ultimately, I personally wouldn’t see much of an issue here, provided that the operator is willing and able to testify in court.

And that’s where this becomes impractical. Maybe you could just submit a report, and maybe many people would just prepay it and it’d be fine, but what if someone challenges it? For a cop, they set up all of their tickets over a certain period to have the same court date. I have no idea what that period is, but let’s say it’s once a month. Thus, he only has to spend roughly one day a month in court, and with most people prepaying, it may not be that bad. Unless the courts also set up a similar system for these vigilante speed reporters, you might end up with court appearances constantly. Even if you get a considerable chunk of a ticket’s fine, would you be willing to spend potentially several hours for ticket? Maybe for a larger one, it might be worth it, but I think even for a moderate ticket, like a 15-19 over here in VA, probably wouldn’t be worth the effort without the cooperation of the system to coordinate potential court appearances.

And beyond all of that, there’s still the issue of the fact that this would require some significant reworking of the laws to provide for rewards and, frankly, it’s probably not worth their time to do it. Consider, a cop gets his salary which, even if he gives out just two tickets an hour (probably much lower than actual), estimating them at $100/ticket, he’d bring in $200/hr for the state, and unless he makes more than $50/hr, which I seriously doubt for any cop on patrol duty, the return on investment for the state is much better to just keep letting cops do it than giving a vigilante fee of 25%. Chances are, a cop gives out more tickets for hour and makes a fair amount less , so to make it worth the effort of the state, they’d have to give a fee much lower than 25%, at which point it’s even less worth the time and effort of the vigilantes.

Something like this MIGHT be practical if a fully automated system were in place, but then you start to run into the same sort of problem as speeding and stoplight cameras, except these systems aren’t even ostensibly owned and operated by the state or a contractor to the state. So, if that were the case, I think it’d be even harder to justify the fines than they already are for many of those.