OHTA.ca

Good afternoon all!

I apologize if this was already covered. I tried my hand at a few searches and came up with nothing quite relevant (although I may have missed something). I was having a group debate the other day with a few of my buddies regarding whether or not an individual could be issued a speeding ticket from the evidence given to the police by a DashCam of someone who witnessed the speeding. Assuming that the driver didn't run a red light, run a stop sign, didn't cut people off, etc and that the driver was travelling in excess of 30-60km/h of the 60km/h speed limit.

Several different opinions:

1) It is black and white. It's like robbing a bank and being caught on video! Ofcourse you can and will be issued a ticket.

2) Possibly, however highly unlikely. Unless something more severe was caught on tape (ie: hit & run), the officer dealing with the video submission wouldn't waste their time.

3) Not possible as the video is highly admissible in court. The individual doing the taping could've been speeding 1km/h over the limit themselves. The video could've been manipulated. Figuring out the speed of the speeding vehicle could prove to be difficult/inaccurate, etc.

4) You'll likely just get a call/letter giving you a warning.

So.... Can you be issued a speeding ticket using a video submitted to the police from someones dashcam? Is there any concrete evidence supporting your opinion?

Maybe.

Police can give you a ticket for anything somebody complains about, but they need to then show up as a witness to the event at court to testify about it. Without knowing who the driver is though, the ticket would have to be issued to the OWNER of the vehicle, unless of course the person could also positively identify the driver.

Can somebody then use a video help support the speed you were going? Just showing the video would not necessarily be enough. There would have to be some way for you to calculate the speed, most probably based on the distance between objects in the video. So if the person went out and measured the distance between say two signs in the video that the vehicle passed, then they could theoretically calculate the speed of the vehicle.

So yes it is possible, but probably unlikely.

Distance alone will not get you a speed, you also need time between the objects to be able to calculate speed. Then there is the parallax effect in the video which may throw off the exact distances between objects...I would say there is not a court in the land that would convict on a straight speeding charge based on a video alone, even if you could identify the driver.

You can figure out the time based on the frames per second the video was shot at. So if the video was shot at 30 frames per second, and it took 60 frames for the object to pass between the two points you are using to measure distance, then you know it took 2 seconds for the object to pass between he two objects. However if the camera wasn't sitting 90 degrees between the two measuring points then it's not going to be accurate.

Realistically there is no chance of a speeding charge being laid based on a dashcam video alone. The big issue would be accurately determining the speed of the subject vehicle, which really isn't possible from a front facing camera. While there have certainly people who've been charged in the past after uploading videos of their own stupid driving online, I believe it's always been for careless, dangerous, etc. and not speeding.

Thank you everyone for your inputs! Interesting points, especially regarding the positioning of the camera, the parallax effect and fps.