| This is the heart-stopping
moment every motorist dreads. As you drive along the road, a police
office points a laser speed gun towards you. Glancing at the
dashboard, you breathe a sigh of relief: the speedometer reveals that your
car is travelling below the 30mph limit. But a month later, a letter
drops through your door. You face a fine for speeding and penalty
points on your licence. It is claimed that you were driving at 41mph
- not 28mph. Can that high speed really be true? Staggeringly,
the answer may be no. |
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| Motorists accused of driving
to fast on Britain's roads insist the real culprit is a laser speed gun
officially approved by the Home Office and used by almost every police
authority in the country. For the Mail has discovered that the LTI
20.20 gun is seriously flawed. |
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| In our tests, it wrongly
recorded a wall as travelling at 44mph, an empty road scored 33mph, a
parked car was clocked as doing 22mph and a bicycle [in reality being
ridden at 5mph] rocketed along at an impossible 66mph. Imported from
America, the LTI 20.20 is used in nearly 3,500 mobile speed units hidden
in police vans or cars and mounted on motorbikes. |
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| Speed traps - nearly half of
which now use laser gun technology - reap more than £100 million each
year in fines. This is shared between the police, the Highways
Agency, the courts, the Home Office and local authorities.
Ironically, some of the huge sum is used to pay for even more police speed
reinforcement teams relying on exactly the same laser speed gun at the
centre of the Mail's investigation. |
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| We subjected the speed gun to
rigorous tests. Alarmingly, we discover it was prone to wildly
wide-of-the-mark readings, even when we set up according to the police's
own guidelines and the manufacturers handbook. In other tests, we
found the equipment was measuring the speed of overtaking cars instead of
the one being targeted. |
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| Today, the Mail can
expose the scandal of a speed enforcement industry in which the collection
of fines is considered paramount - whatever the consequences for innocent
drivers caught in police traps by faulty readings. In the past nine
years, an extraordinary one-in-five drivers has been fined for speeding,
despite many protesting their innocence. |
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| Lawyers we spoke to say motorists
are now rebelling by refusing to pay fines and fighting their cases
through the courts. One voicing concern is Barry Culshaw a
Southampton solicitor currently acting for 15 drivers nationwide.
'They complain of huge errors,' he says. 'Drivers say they were
within the speed limit and yet the LTI 20.20 recorded them doing excessive
speed.' |
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Vital
video film is withheld by the prosecution |
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| Another disquieting discovery
is that vital video film, often taken at a speed-trap site for use as
secondary evidence - is often mysteriously withheld from motorists by the
Crown Prosecution Service. On at least 10 occasions the Crown has
suddenly dropped the case against a motorist when ordered by a judge to
hand over the telling footage. |
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| Michael Morgan, who runs a
British website collating complaints against laser speed guns, said: 'The
authorities often wriggle rather than release the video, which would
expose the laser gun to scrutiny in a court of law. No doubt they
fear the enormous consequences, including a clamour for the fine refunds
and compensation over the lose of licences or even livelihoods. |
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| Alarmingly, the Mail can
reveal, too, that the main expert witness used by the CPS to convict
motorists in such cases - a former police officer named Frank Garratt -
also makes his living as boss of the company importing the devices into
Britain. Perhaps not surprisingly, Mr Garratt, a millionaire, told
the Mail the LTI 20.20 works perfectly well. |
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| One of the guns toughest
critics is Dr Michael Clark, Europe's leading
expert on laser technology. He is a former company directory of a
British firm making laser detection equipment for traffic lights and car
parks. Dr Clark was clocked, apparently speeding, by a laser gun
three years ago. He fought his case through the courts, proving he
was travelling below the limit. He has acted as an expert witness on
behalf of many motorists since. |
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| 'I was drawn into this
controversy because I know about laser science. I do not rely on my
court appearances or the speed enforcement industry to make a living,' he
told the Mail when we asked him to help - without payment - in our
experiments. Dr Clark says that
the gun is defective because its wide beam can easily pick up the wrong
vehicle. Furthermore, if the device is not held firmly on the target
- and this is a difficult task - it can produce an erroneous speed result
by "slippage". |
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| Reflections from road signs
and from other cars - even one stationary on the kerbside - can also make
the laser gun misinterpret the truth. Several types of laser guns
are used in Britain but all are built on precisely the same
principle. Among the most popular is the LTI 20.20 Ultralyte, which
is the model we tested. |
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| It is made by Laser
Technology Inc and imported here by Tele-Traffic, whose managing director
is Mr Garratt. Ninety-seven per cent of police forces use speed
enforcement systems supplied by his company. |
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| This is how it works... |
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| The police officer - or
increasingly, a civilian operator - spots a vehicle suspected of
speeding. Then, using the laser gun [normally mounted on a tripod
and swung around manually in order to track the vehicle,] he triggers a
button to send out an infra-red beam. |
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| To do this accurately, he
looks through the sights on top of the gun and sees a red dot. He
aims this dot at the target and squeezes the trigger. This releases
the invisible beam which, in a fraction of a second, is sent back to the
gun when it reaches the speeding vehicle. It does this again and
again. By measuring the amount of time it takes for the beam to
bounce back, the device can determine the distance to the target and, in
turn, the vehicle's speed towards or away from the gun. |
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| Significantly, the Association
of Chief Police Officers' [ACPO] own code of practice says that the users
of the LTI 20.20 must check the sights and readings of the gun every time
they set up a speed trap. Critically, the beam must be held firmly
on the vehicle, preferably on the number plate. But if 'slippage'
occurs and the beam moves up or along the car, the gun can be tricked into
a false reading. |
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| For instance, tests in the
U.S. have shown that if the beam slips from the windscreen of the car down
to the grille of the bonnet, this can add on 8mph. Astonishingly, if
the beam slips along the entire length of the car - as is possible when a
vehicle comes around a corner into the speed gun's sights - an erroneous
30mph can be added to the reading. |
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| The BBC programme Inside Out
recently revealed a whole series of discrepancies with the LTI
20.20. Worryingly, one leading British engineer told the BBC that
errors are provoked if the operator lets the gun in his hands move even
'the thickness of a human hair'. |
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| The BBC's findings were
dismissed by Tele-Traffic and the police. Mr Garratt said it was
impossible for the gun to make an error when it tracked a moving
car because technology corrected the fault. ACPO added that the BBC
experiment was misleading because the U.S. version of the gun was used
with less reliable software than the British version. |
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| But the Mail's investigation
has proved beyond doubt that the laser gun is unreliable. We
tested the British version of the gun - an LTI 20.20 Ultralyte
certificated by the Tele-Traffic headquarters in Warwick - to allay any
criticisms. We also tried the gun on both stationary and moving
vehicles: a white Transit van, a yellow Ford, a silver Corsa and a
bicycle. |
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| We conducted our tests on
Wednesday of this week on a quiet industrial estate in a British
city. First, we checked the laser gun and its sights in accordance
with the operating handbook and police guidelines. As we mounted the
LTI 20.20 Ultralyte on a tripod, Dr Clark pointed out: the laser used is a
multi-mode laser. |
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Reflections and
hand-shaking distort readings |
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| 'If it was projected on to a
nearby surface it would reveal three beams, not one. Over a long
distance, the beams widen. If the laser is targeted at one vehicle,
it can - unwittingly - hit another nearby vehicle by mistake. A
policeman can't tell from 400 metres away - or an even longer distance in
many cases - exactly which car he is marking.' |
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| To demonstrate his point, we
parked the Corsa at the side of the road and drove the white van past it
at just 3mph. The laser gun was being targeted at the Corsa from
371.7 metres away, which - according to the handbook for the gun - is
easily within its capabilities. But the minute the white van
overtook, the laser gun beam picked up the moving van. |
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| It was impossible to keep it
registered only on the parked Corsa which, as a result, was wrongly
recorded as moving at 3mph. We repeated the experiment at 26mph and
the gun showed the stationary Corsa moving at 26mph. One big problem
is the reflection from other cars. We pointed the gun at the Ford
which was parked on the roadside and slowly drove the white van
past. Bizarrely, the gun recorded the motionless Ford as moving at
22mph. |
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| 'The reason is that the gun's
technology presumes that there is always a direct line between the
police operator and the speeding vehicle,' explained Dr Clark. 'But
the beam sometimes catches the reflection of a nearby car. It
zig-zags to this car before carrying on to the target vehicle and returns
by the same route.' And it is this zig-zag from point A [the gun] to
B [the white van] via C [the reflection on the side panel of the Ford]
that distorts the speed reading. |
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| Finally, we targeted the red
dot of the LTI 20.20 Ultralyte at a wall on a trading estate. There
were no moving cars in the vicinity. We moved the beam along the
wall instead of holding it completely steady on a single point, so
creating 'slippage'. The gun was confused into giving a reading of
44mph. 'This shows how a traffic officer can mistakenly pick up a
reading from a wall by the side of a motorway or even an empty road if he
does not target a vehicle properly,' said Dr Clark. |
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| There is another problem
concerning the LTI 29.20 Ultralyte. ACPO says that ideally equipment
should not be used over more than 500 metres, although according to Dr
Clark, some vehicles are being targeted at double that distance.
However, the shortcomings of this gun were first discovered nearly a
decade ago. |
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| In 1996, the State of New
Jersey in America temporarily barred the LTI 20.20 after a case involving
a motorist accused of speeding. The man's Lawyer, Joe Maccarone,
said: 'During a break, the LTI 20.20 was sitting on a desk. One of
our experts turned it on and pointed it to the corner of the room.
Then, as he pulled the trigger, he moved the gun sharply. It showed
the wall was travelling at 4mph. |
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| Maccarone also summoned a
NASA laser scientist who said: 'that over just 300 metres, there was only
a 60 per cent chance of a human operator hitting a 12ft-wide target with a
laser gun. Yet cars are only 6ft wide. So the chances of
hitting something other than the targeted car are very high indeed.' |
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| We put our findings to Mr
Garratt. He told the Mail: 'The equipment is Home Office Type
Approved and, when used in accordance with manufacturer's instructions and
ACPO's Code of Practice, presents no problems. When we asked about
the ethics of him being called as an expert witness for the prosecution
when he also markets the gun, he refused to comment. |
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| The Home Office said it was
normal to ask a supplier of public service equipment to give evidence in
court on behalf of the Government. Meredydd Hughes, ACPO
spokesperson on road policing enforcement technology and Chief Constable
of South Yorkshire, had 'full confidence in the device.' |
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| But the doubters refuse to be
silenced. Paul Smith, founder of Safe Speed - one of the leading
road awareness campaigns - has demanded that the Home Office suspends
approval of the laser gun pending an independent investigation.
Ironically, the failings of the gun, which can read to low as well as to
high, means that thousands of motorists who should have been caught
for speeding have not been punished. |
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| Meanwhile, there are plenty
of people waiting to challenge the gun's accuracy. Last December,
Alistair Slade, a 37-year-old London accountant, was driving down the A306
in Wiltshire towards Portsmouth. He claims his speed was within the
70mph limit. But he was clocked by the LTI 20.20 at 78mph. |
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| He has requested the video of
his 'crime' from police six times. But to date they have failed to
give it to his Lawyers. 'I have been accused of speeding, but I am
being denied the opportunity of defending myself because i cannot see the
video which could clear me. I am going to court to ask for this film
evidence next week. |
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| He is following in the
footsteps of Michael Hall, who was clocked in Southampton by the laser
gun. 'I'm convinced I was doing under 30mph, because I checked my
speed,' he insists. 'The police said I was travelling at
41mph. Mr Hall managed to get video footage of the incident, which
he says proved there were errors. He was planning to use this
footage to fight the speeding claim, yet without warning, the case against
him was suddenly discontinued. |
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| Of course, this won't
surprise the enormous number of motorists caught speeding by the now
infamous LTI 20.20 laser gun who insist they have done nothing
wrong. They, and their Lawyers, say such a travesty will end only
when this dubious piece of equipment is banned from roadsides. |
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