Mention AI to any author, including this one, and you will likely bring them out in hives.
In the literary world, artificial intelligence is usually synonymous with big tech companies scraping our work to create datasets for training machine learning models or for those without the time, skill, or inclination to be creative themselves, using AI to hoodwink people into believing the opposite is true.
However, I was delighted when I heard that Sussex Police are rolling out AI road enforcement cameras targeting drivers using their handheld mobile phones or refusing to wear seatbelts, despite decades-old legislation banning such behaviour.
If you’ve ever been in or witnessed a road collision, or its aftermath, or had a family member or close friend involved in one, you do not need me to tell you the emotional cost of crashes. There is of course a financial cost too. According to government figures, the cost of each collision in 2024 ranged from £3,000 for those resulting in just damage rising to £324k for those causing serious injury and £2.83m for fatal crashes. Given there are on average forty-five fatalities and around 1,000 people seriously injured on the roads in Sussex per annum, anything that can be done to save those lives, reduce the devastation and cut costs must be in the public interest.
Having a police officer on every corner was never actually a thing and is nothing more than an impossible dream. So, now we live in a world where we rely on technology for everything and our every move and transaction is digitally recorded anyway, using artificial intelligence to dissuade and catch people who selfishly flout the law should be a cause for celebration.
If the mere concept of using an efficient and modern system for enforcing road safety doesn’t convince you, perhaps knowing that over the last three years eighty-two people in Sussex have been involved in a collision caused by mobile phone use and two hundred and fourteen have been injured due to not wearing a seatbelt might do the trick. Add to that the staggering figure that Sussex’s week-long 2024 National Highways trial detected three hundred and thirty people not wearing a seatbelt, a hundred and eighteen drivers using a mobile phone and ten doing both should be depressing and persuasive.
Of course, technology alone will not eliminate crashes and casualties and traditional policing will always play its part but so should peer pressure. In my early days in the police, the attitudes around drink driving were such that some people were almost impressed if their mates had evaded the police driving home having consumed a skinful at the local pub. As time went on, those same law breakers were treated as pariahs and we would often get direct reports or calls through Crimestoppers reporting habitual drink drivers. We should aim for the same attitude towards those who deliberately distract themselves and, rather than encourage or even just raise our eyebrows at drivers who persist in their mobile phone use, we should both shame and report them.
There will always be naysayers around any technological solution to law enforcement but a basic understanding of how this system will work should satisfy even the most sceptical that this is a fair and necessary tactic. The AI merely triages those who may be breaking the law by using high resolution cameras and algorithms to suggest offences may have been committed. The anonymised images then go to two people for interpretation before being sent to the police for consideration as to whether offences are made out, then whether a prosecution is proportionate. Any data prior to the police making this assessment is impossible to identify an individual from and, by definition, most images will be destroyed before even reaching a human being.
This is not Big Brother state nor is it diverting funding from other traditional forms of policing. It’s certainly not funded from the cessation of the Street Marshall scheme, which is stopping only because its ring-fenced funding has been withdrawn. This is a 21st century innovative and effective way of saving lives and preventing the devastation that serious road crashes, borne out of people’s selfishness and ignorance, and we should welcome it with open arms.
Former Brighton and Hove police chief Graham Bartlett writes the Brighton-based Jo Howe crime novels and advises authors and TV companies on writing authentic crime and policing.
