Posted on 08/25/2002 2:36:06 AM PDT by glc1173@aol.com
LONDON - Vigilante motorists, angry because so many speed cameras are being put up on roads all over Britain, are destroying hundreds of the devices each week.
The drivers, operating surreptitiously at night, are spraying black paint over the lens or putting the cameras out of commission with blow lamps or setting them on fire after dousing them with petrol.
Over the past week alone, 30 cameras - each costing £7,000 (S$19,000) to buy and install - have been damaged beyond use on the busy North Circular Road around London.
Police are taking advantage of a new government scheme which allows them to keep part of the fines obtained from motorists caught going over the speed limit by cameras.
The money has to be spent on buying more cameras - and the result is an ever increasing number of flashing, electronic speed traps.
Fines average £80 and drivers are given a number of demerit points, depending on the speed they were travelling at.
If too many points are accumulated, the driver is banned from driving for three months or more.
Motorists' organisations have pinpointed several stretches of straight and level roads where up to five speed cameras have been installed over a distance of 10 km.
There are 325 cameras in central London and hundreds more on suburban roads.
This week, anonymous letters were sent to national newspapers by an organisation calling itself Motorists Against Detection (Mad), claiming responsibility for the acts of vandalism against the cameras.
The growing number of attacks on cameras in recent weeks signalled the start of a British-wide assault on the devices, Mad warned.
Although thousands of cameras have been damaged, police have not received a single message from any passing driver reporting a vandalism. As a result, no one so far has been caught damaging a camera.
But a Department of Transport spokesman said: 'Research has shown that the number of people killed or seriously injured on some dangerous stretches of road has fallen by 47 per cent after the installation of speed cameras.
'There has been an alarming increase in the number of cameras being vandalised and this could lead to deaths on the road, through speeding.'
Do you know what U.S. spy cameras and stoplight cameras look like? See photos!
they must have caught the Freedom Bug from the USA!!!
Loss of freedom is no joke!!
Not to make it a Society where no one can shoot the President!!
Besides, it ain't the Presidents fault, it's the DemonRats in the Senate!!!
P.S. I am not a threat!!
Then they'll find out that it would have been cheaper to hire more police than to buy (and repair/replace) cameras.
Henry Bowman's right hand tightened around the walnut grip of the Solothurn S18-1000. The weapon had been a present from his Father, given to him on his fourteenth birthday in 1967. Cost $189.50 back in the sixties Henry thought irrelevantly. I thought that was a steal. Dad's friends thought it was astronomical. Wonder what they'd think now. --UC
if you are trying to show the evil of guns, I say you fail...
this kid was an accident waiting to happen...
and don't try and sell me on a bad childhood...
we all have bad childhoods...
that's what childhood is for...
that is when you discover that life sucks out loud...
and there is no "FAIR" in life!!!
You can buy Insurance for when shit happens, but you can't buy Insurance to keep shit from happening!!!
Henry Bowman's right hand tightened around the walnut grip of the Solothurn S18-1000. The weapon had been a present from his Father, given to him on his fourteenth birthday in 1967. Cost $189.50 back in the sixties Henry thought irrelevantly. I thought that was a steal. Dad's friends thought it was astronomical. Wonder what they'd think now. --UC
That's because they all stopped or slowed down to disable the cameras.
I just grew up without "YOU" in the guise of Uncle Sam breathing down my neck...
we used to play what we called 'roller derby', but it was just 5 or 6 kids with the really crappy kind of roller skates, you know the ones that would fall off if you didn't have a skate key and shoes, not sneakers...
knocking the shit out of each other on a side street in Brooklyn!!
We didn't have helmets or kneepads and any kid that did would have been mocked to death!!!
All you will ever succeed in doing is turning boy children into girls and girl children into wrestlers...
I am sure you will be welcome in hell for your duty!!!
Don't question authority EVER!
You must realize that public safety justifies it all.
It's for the children.
With 1 spy camera on the streets per 25 Brits - not counting traffic cameras - they already have that! And the ratio is undoubtably far higher in Britain's crime-plagued urban areas than in rural areas. But it's not keeping the cameras from being destroyed at will by the hundreds weekly!
Yet spy cameras aren't reducing serious crime in Britain; instead, serious crime has steadily climbed there as their street spy camera network increased. In fact, within the past month, two girls were kidnapped and murdered there and taken 17 miles - but none of it was caught by any spy camera.
Yes, many U.S. traffic cameras have had "cameras to watch cameras" put in - but none could stop what an Associated Press article a couple months ago reported was happening already: the traffic cameras were simply shot, possibly from hundreds of yards away. (The Brits - lacking guns - can't do that, but the weak point of U.S. spy camera and traffic camera systems is a large ground-level metal box at each containing over $10,000 worth of control electronics.)
And don't forget, spy cameras don't work well at night - let alone in fog. Street spy cameras here in Burlington, North Carolina are up about twice the height of local utility poles - or "in the clouds" many nights!
Growing up in Colorado, I didn't do too much rollerskating (Hard to skate in the snow). But I did have those old, rusty, noisy steel things that you were referring to. We mostly had, "Rock Wars." Basically, one group stood on the top of a gulley and tried to hit the group at the bottom with rocks, while the ones on bottom tried to get the ones on top. Real fun! The worst I ever got was a hit about an inch from my right eye, but that was the fun of being a kid. Nowadays, kids can't even play soldiers or have snowball fights because, "It's too traumatic to MY kid! I'll SUE!!!!"
Sad...
--Henry Bowman's right hand tightened around the walnut grip of the Solothurn S18-1000. The weapon had been a present from his Father, given to him on his fourteenth birthday in 1967. Cost $189.50 back in the sixties Henry thought irrelevantly. I thought that was a steal. Dad's friends thought it was astronomical. Wonder what they'd think now. --UC
Too bad you guys can't shoot them from afar like we can. But hey, I guess you have to work with what you have.
Anti-tyranny bump.
--Henry Bowman's right hand tightened around the walnut grip of the Solothurn S18-1000. The weapon had been a present from his Father, given to him on his fourteenth birthday in 1967. Cost $189.50 back in the sixties Henry thought irrelevantly. I thought that was a steal. Dad's friends thought it was astronomical. Wonder what they'd think now. --UC
The sad part is that those with the power will never understand why. In their minds, the public has just sunk lower into deprevity, so they'll look for a way to tighten their control even more...
Ain't it the truth! We had rock, dirtclod, snowball, and bottle-rocket battles. We played army, jumped our banana seat (no BMX back then) bikes over trash cans with no helmets or wussy pads, and shot BB guns, bow and arrows, wrist rocket slingshots and .22 rifles. We chased girls and tried to get them to kiss us and we played 'smear the queer' football. We had lawndarts. We built bombs from jars of gasoline and sometimes gunpowder from our firecrackers.
Guess what? None of us are in counselling, none of us are in prison, none of us (or our kids) are on anti-depressants or some mind-numbing crap.
Fast forward 25-30 years to the present and ask yourselves how possible any of what I just described is now. The pussification of American men continues.
but we did use July 4th to have a little fun...
we mostly used Roman Candles and that was fine till a friend of mine, Jeff, tore a wing of of a whirley-bird and threw it up where we were hiding, usually it goes way up, this time it went everywhere but up, so we came out firing Roman Candles and throwing M-80's...
we won but only cause we had more stuff and we knew where the beer was!!
Please loose the kid, any idiot that chooses death is not any ones fault except his own!!
check out my post #7 et al!!
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