ACT speed cameras - Wet paper bag?

It is what happens in between that interests me

In between what? You are obviously under the impression they’re sitting on their blurters doing very little. Apart from the 12+ active jobs a GDs member will have, in a typical shift they’ll have to attend disturbances, suspicious person jobs, check welfare jobs, assaults, shoplifting etc. They also have follow up enquiries for the other dozen jobs they’re trying to keep on top of (follow up statements, tracking down offenders, tracking down uncooperative witnesses).

And of course, they are expected to contribute to traffic enforcement, visiting schools, proactive patrols of trouble spots, patrols of shopping centres, keeping an eye on known crooks based on intel.

Bigred, there is very little “in between” for a typical copper.

bigred said :

BenMac said :

bundah said :

bigred said :

I guess the marked police vehicles on our roads are taking up the slack.

Ha oh yes they’re everywhere. You’d be lucky to see a handful during daylight hours!

Just to get an idea of your actual knowlegde, how many Police vehicles do you think are on patrol during a shift, in each district (Gungahlin, Belconnen, City, Woden and Tuggeranong), not including Traffic vehicles?

Also, how long do you think those vehicles are off the road if someone is arrested?

Then, how long do you think it takes to conduct further enquiries (evidence collection, taking and writing statement), again taking vehicles off the road, in order to put together a brief of evidence?

irrelevant posting. The real question is where are our 700 coppers during the course of a day? How many are allocated to any particular task, including traffic. From my observations, the time out to put together evidence etc is probably about the same as the other jurisdictions I am familiar with. It is what happens in between that interests me.

How is it irrelevant? He’s explaining why marked cars aren’t – as you put it – picking up the slack. In short, they’re generally doing police work. How familiar are you with evidence gathering? It varies greatly depending on the incident type.

In answer to your question of what 700 police officers are doing:

Two thirds are probably off duty. Many are in non-operational areas (Judicial operations, Communications, Crime prevention areas, intel etc). Many are response only areas (criminal investigations teams etc).

General duties police do the bulk of the frontline policing. Let’s look at a patrol zone on a typical day. For example, we’ll use Monday. Let’s take Tuggeranong, although staffing issues would be the same at every patrol zone.

Typical staffing for around 90,000 residents would be:

One Sergeant (one vehicle)
Two constables for front office duties
Four constables on patrol (two vehicles)

If Sgt Plod is lucky, he’ll be able to put out three patrols, but that would be a bit of a luxury because he’ll have a member seconded to another area to cover shortfalls there, and he’ll have one on leave (rec or sick). So we’ll stick with the minimum required which is 1 (Sgt) and 6 (Const). That equates to a Sgt car and two patrols. For about 18 suburbs and 90k people. Sound good? And people wonder why they rarely see a marked car.

Patrol 1 gets a hospital death fairly early on in the shift, so there’s at least 4 or 5 hours work, if not more.

Patrol 2 attends a family violence assault. There’s them off the road for the same amount of time. Sgt Plod is the only person now patrolling Tuggeranong, unless an urgent job comes up and they manage to get some back up from Woden or City or Gungahlin.

Traffic operations may be rostered on that day, maybe not. If they are, there will be maybe half a dozen vehicles for the entire ACT. Spread pretty thin.

VYBerlinaV8_is_back said :

watto23 said :

I’d rather have cameras at intersections and if someone drives like a idiot, you can let the police know the time and date of the incident and they can look at the video and issue a fine.

The current cameras detect speed or red light change and take a still image. If someone isn’t speeding and doesn’t get caught in the still image they get away scott free. There is no video.

I believe the speed/red light cameras at Antill St/Northbourne and Canberra Ave/Hindmarsh Drive are fitted with video cameras as well as speed/red light systems.

BenMac said :

bundah said :

bigred said :

I guess the marked police vehicles on our roads are taking up the slack.

Ha oh yes they’re everywhere. You’d be lucky to see a handful during daylight hours!

Just to get an idea of your actual knowlegde, how many Police vehicles do you think are on patrol during a shift, in each district (Gungahlin, Belconnen, City, Woden and Tuggeranong), not including Traffic vehicles?

Also, how long do you think those vehicles are off the road if someone is arrested?

Then, how long do you think it takes to conduct further enquiries (evidence collection, taking and writing statement), again taking vehicles off the road, in order to put together a brief of evidence?

irrelevant posting. The real question is where are our 700 coppers during the course of a day? How many are allocated to any particular task, including traffic. From my observations, the time out to put together evidence etc is probably about the same as the other jurisdictions I am familiar with. It is what happens in between that interests me.

bundah said :

bigred said :

I guess the marked police vehicles on our roads are taking up the slack.

Ha oh yes they’re everywhere. You’d be lucky to see a handful during daylight hours!

Just to get an idea of your actual knowlegde, how many Police vehicles do you think are on patrol during a shift, in each district (Gungahlin, Belconnen, City, Woden and Tuggeranong), not including Traffic vehicles?

Also, how long do you think those vehicles are off the road if someone is arrested?

Then, how long do you think it takes to conduct further enquiries (evidence collection, taking and writing statement), again taking vehicles off the road, in order to put together a brief of evidence?

bundah said :

bigred said :

I guess the marked police vehicles on our roads are taking up the slack.

Ha oh yes they’re everywhere. You’d be lucky to see a handful during daylight hours!

And if you do happen to see one, the chances of them actually enforcing any road rules are even lower – unless it’s now legal to stop in a “No Stopping” zone to take a phonecall?

watto23 said :

I’d rather have cameras at intersections and if someone drives like a idiot, you can let the police know the time and date of the incident and they can look at the video and issue a fine.

The current cameras detect speed or red light change and take a still image. If someone isn’t speeding and doesn’t get caught in the still image they get away scott free. There is no video.

The issue with speed cameras, is they can’t catch bad drivers, or at least bad driving decisions.

Saturday morning it had started raining and right turn at lights in Fyshwick onto Monaro had some road works going on. I was at the front of the lights when they turned green, only to have someone in the straight ahead lane decide he was turning right and basically went around me to get in front. The car behind me honked the horn, at the time I assumed due to the guy going around the outside, but he then drove past me well above the speed limit as I was doing 100, giving me the finger, all because I slowed to avoid the idiot who would have caused an accident. The guy behind me is just a dickhead the other guy though could have killed someone, my only guess is there was still a long line of cars to turn right, still doesn’t excuse that kind of driving.

Doing something like that IMO is worthy of immediate loss of license, but there will never be a police officer around. I’d rather have cameras at intersections and if someone drives like a idiot, you can let the police know the time and date of the incident and they can look at the video and issue a fine.

Roudabouts are the other one, especially when people don’t realise its not giveway to the right, but giveway to vehicles on the roundabout, so you actually need to slow down when approaching the roundabout and not just assume you have right of way because you are on the right.

JC said :

milkman said :

Just another example of how the ACT government drops ideas once they’re past the initial media frenzy. People know where the cameras are and slow down anyway. They don’t achieve a thing.

So people slow down hey? Isn’t that the whole idea. More so on those at intersections. What would you rather people continue to speed through and cop a fine?

Huh? Not what I meant at all. I was referring to speed cameras on places like the Monaro Highway, which are straight, wide and have more than one lane.

I’m a definite fan of red light cameras, but having speed cameras at intersections just makes people slow down first, then hurry though right on the limit, which is not conducive to either safety or good traffic flow. It would be better for people to observe their surrounding at intersections rather than stare at the speedo.

JC said :

milkman said :

Just another example of how the ACT government drops ideas once they’re past the initial media frenzy. People know where the cameras are and slow down anyway. They don’t achieve a thing.

So people slow down hey? Isn’t that the whole idea. More so on those at intersections. What would you rather people continue to speed through and cop a fine?

Yes peeps do slow down at intersections where there’s speed/red light cameras and then immediately speed up. There is no greater deterrence than high vis policing which the geniuses in the assembly aren’t interested in implementing because that means more police and they hate that concept.

milkman said :

Just another example of how the ACT government drops ideas once they’re past the initial media frenzy. People know where the cameras are and slow down anyway. They don’t achieve a thing.

So people slow down hey? Isn’t that the whole idea. More so on those at intersections. What would you rather people continue to speed through and cop a fine?

Just another example of how the ACT government drops ideas once they’re past the initial media frenzy. People know where the cameras are and slow down anyway. They don’t achieve a thing.

Garfield said :

bigred said :

I guess the marked police vehicles on our roads are taking up the slack.

That’s got to be sarcasm right? I hardly ever see police cars on ACT roads. If they were out there they could pick up every second vehicle for speeding and/or tail gating.

You haven’t been here long I take it. Bigred is the resident anti police troll. The reason you don’t see marked police cars is because there’s bugger all of them. The ones that are there are dealing with more important stuff than traffic, like assaults, property damage, theft, breach of orders etc etc.

We’re also getting 11 new camera’s (Not sure if these mean the replacement cameras or new ones).

I don’t agree with speed cameras, they do nothing but increase the number of accidents around them.

However, we’re spending money on these and spending money on new ones. We’re just throwing money away which could otherwise be spend on more active police.

Police road patrols would be offices going to or from other obligations. Now we have speed camera’s those officers are replaced with machines that just do traffic duties and the other obligations are told sorry, we don’t come out anymore.

So if these are truly “safety cameras” then how come the road toll hasn’t dramatically increased while the cameras have been out of order? Maybe it’s because they are there for revenue raising and not safety.

They’re working on it. I noticed the other day when returning from the gym in Fyshwick three men working in the pouring rain installing a new cam at the Hindmarsh/Yamba intersection. It’s taking a while because they were still at it two days later.

This is the one example of the ACT Government’s incompetence that doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

They use these cameras purely to add revenue to the budget. They don’t make roads safer and they don’t alter driver behaviour, and yet time and again we are lied to and told that those two reasons are why the cameras are used. It’s a flat out lie. Looking through the statistics from pre and post speed camera introduction in the ACT, it’s clear that the type of speeding that causes fatalities continues to take place regardless of cameras (ie, greater than 40 or 50km/h over the limit – and often in stolen vehicles). If the government wanted to make the roads safer, they could do so by targeting the sorts of behaviour that poses a real threat – running red lights, drink driving, stolen vehicles, etc. That would require a greater police presence on the road though, and would probably result in less money being contributed towards the budget, so there’s little chance that will ever happen.

Why is it damning of the government? Please give a good answer, not some rant, and do you think if the Liberals were in power it would be any different?

I mean to say the cameras are old and parts hard to come by. If the government decided to upgrade them I reckon you would be one of the first jumping up and down saying how it is a waste of money and fairly damning of the government. Never mind of course reality.

bigred said :

I guess the marked police vehicles on our roads are taking up the slack.

That’s got to be sarcasm right? I hardly ever see police cars on ACT roads. If they were out there they could pick up every second vehicle for speeding and/or tail gating.

bigred said :

I guess the marked police vehicles on our roads are taking up the slack.

Ha oh yes they’re everywhere. You’d be lucky to see a handful during daylight hours!

I guess the marked police vehicles on our roads are taking up the slack.