Head cams are about protection, not vigilantism

We've all had those moments where we've seen - or been on the receiving end of - something on the road, and wished we'd been filming it.

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Whether someone has passed you within millimetres, or even threatened you with a motor vehicle, there are moments when we have all wanted to report a particularly dangerous piece of driving to the police - whether we end up doing it through or not - and video evidence would come in very handy.

For most of us it's not out of some sense of self-righteousness or vigilante justice that we might wish to do this, as was claimed recently by the Telegraph's Andrew Critchlow, as well as others before him.

As Jonathan Reid, personal injury specialist at law firm Slater & Gordon, puts it the roads create an uneven playing field where "a minor crash from a driver's point of view could have devastating consequences for a cyclist".

He says: “I’ve seen numerous cases in which cyclists have been seriously injured and unable to give an account of what happened. In many cases, a contemporaneous visual account of what happened would have been crucial to balance the version of events given by the motorist.

“Cyclists are not being ‘vigilantes’ when they wear cameras they are trying to add another layer of protection.

“As a keen cyclist myself I'm thinking of getting one because it’s not often that a day goes by without someone pulling out in front of me on my commute to work.”

I'd argue if a person goes to the trouble of wearing a camera to record their journeys by bike - or car - and takes the time to upload incidents to YouTube, it's because they feel something is badly wrong on the road. Derisory sentencing and fines for those that maim and kill cyclists don't help people on bikes feel protected, but that doesn't amount to taking the law into one's own hands.

With police resources - and with them roads policing - stretched, a recording can make the difference between punishment of a genuinely dangerous driver - and them getting away scot-free to potentially strike again.

One man, who posts helmet camera footage on YouTube as SW19cam, says many headcam cyclists also use the footage they gather to review and improve their own riding.

"When something repeatedly happens you try to think of ways to try to review it and you consider what you can do about it," he said.

"What we [helmet cam cyclists] do is for the small minority of worst cases. Everybody has a different reason for wearing one. A number of years ago I saw a pretty nasty accident; a guy had gone over a bonnet. The driver insisted he hadn't put his nose over the give way line, I could see he had. I thought: "In the future, if I have evidence this will be clear cut"."

He adds that some helmet cam cyclists do chase down drivers, including the oft-quoted Dave Sherry, and is keen to point out that tactic is contentious in the headcam community and not something he does.

Martin Stockdale, Chairman of Police Witness, a private company that collects video evidence to pass on to police, says: "With a stretched police resource having the ability to assist the police means safer roads for us all. Only those who flout the law should have anything to worry about."

"[Police] use it in exactly the same way as they would if they themselves had been present. Video provides unequivocal third party evidence. Force dependent we need to apply a degree of 'encouragement' from time to time but that's a result of limited resources."

"Assisting the police is a civic duty of us all. A dash or helmet cam merely empowers us, giving us the genuine ability to hold dangerous drivers to account."

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