Will Hi-tech Cars Become Tomorrows Police?

Imagine the car of the future. For safety's sake it is fitted with a wide spectrum of new "compliance technologies" like an "Alcolock", intelligent speed adaptor, event data recorder (black box), licence and insurance interlocks, a fatigue and impairment warning system, and seatbelt reminders. Would such a car not just cut the road toll but prompt a major reduction in the number of police needed to patrol the road?

The question is raised in a research paper by Britain's Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety. But the purpose of the document is not to provide answers to such questions, but alert lawmakers to the fact that new technologies are dramatically changing the way in which road safety is managed.

The council says some of the real questions that should be asked are whether the technologies are producing unintended consequences.

It says the new tools and technologies - which also include everything from speed cameras, to CCTV, automatic numberplate recognition, and sophisticated and interlinked databases - are both extending police capacities and radically reshaping their role and the nature of enforcement.

"For many years, enforcement has been considered a key part of the road safety triumvirate of 'education, engineering and enforcement' (which sometimes also includes evaluation and encouragement)," says the paper.

"However, in this 'brave new world' of policing, have we stepped back to ask whether these distinctions still apply? Have we got the balance between them right? When we talk about enforcement, do we mean the same thing that we meant 10, 20 or 30 years ago? What do these changes mean for road safety and for the activities of road safety professionals?"

In today's society there was growing emphasis on risk and risk management. It was reflected in road safety with policing moving away from law enforcement for the law's sake, towards controlling risks and reducing casualties - and the new technologies are accelerating this approach.

At the same time police technologies and strategies not strictly designed to improve road safety, are having an impact in reducing UK road incidents.

The paper said a good example of this was ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition). It was a system designed to take pictures of numberplates and scan them against databases to check whether the vehicle was taxed, licensed or in any other way of interest to the police. If the scanning computer spotted a vehicle of interest, then a police interception team would stop the vehicle.

"It is a simple concept, but ANPR has proven remarkably effective not only at prosecuting vehicle registration offences but also interrupting other forms of criminality," said the research paper. "ANPR squads have ten times the arrest rate of the average police officer, and ANPR trials have led to the seizure of significant quantities of drugs and stolen goods, as well as proving effective in prosecuting vehicle registration and licensing offences. However, ANPR is only indirectly a safety technology. Tax and insurance evasion is not a dangerous activity in itself, but drivers without tax or insurance are more likely to engage in dangerous behaviour.

"Research consistently shows that groups engaging in minor criminality are more likely to engage in major criminality and be involved in road crashes. ANPR is therefore a strategy of identifying high-risk groups and targeting resources towards those groups to control the risk that they present."

The Advisory Council says its research paper is only a preliminary document. It intends to further research the impact of the new technologies and in the meantime is inviting comments and suggestions.